decoded_text stringlengths 4.18k 47.6k |
|---|
"because the taxes are high enough."
Turnout was extremely low with only about 100,000 voters expected to cast ballots; an election official said a typical November election attracts about three times that number.
Republican County Executive Edward Mangano insisted the new coliseum project would generate income to overcome any initial taxpayer investment, but he was clearly rebuffed.
He also expressed disappointment with the outcome, but insisted he was not quitting on the idea of developing the 77-acre site, one of the most valuable undeveloped parcels of property in the county. "This just opens up new doors," he said.
The cost to run the referendum was estimated to be $2 million, which Wang said he would pay, but only if voters approve the project.
Wang tried to privately develop the property about eight years ago, envisioning an expansive complex of office buildings, apartments and retail stores. That proposal, called the Lighthouse Project, failed because of community opposition. Now, he is backing a publicly financed plan.
Nassau residents last year paid an average property tax bill of $11,500, nearly the highest in the country. The county portion of that tab is 16.4 percent. The rest goes to finance schools, though the county has no say over school district spending, which is decided in each local municipality.Leaf Fielding, back when he was at the centre of the UK's LSD network (Photo courtesy of Leaf Fielding)
Last month, I spoke to Stephen Bentley, one of the undercover police officers involved in the UK's biggest LSD bust. I wanted to find about the ins and outs of the operation, and the psychological impact of working undercover. I expected him to get a bit of stick, given the absolute state of the fumbling and scattershot war on drugs, but was still surprised at the level of intense, almost seething hatred in the comments.
One poster on this site described Bentley as a "total waste of existence", another as a "crazy fuck". To be honest, although I disagree with LSD being illegal, I thought Bentley seemed like a pretty decent guy who was just doing his job. At the end of the day, if you're a policeman, you can't pick and choose which laws you uphold on a day to day.
Bentley mentioned in the piece that he was wracked with guilt, and that he wondered if those he put behind bars held it against him. After reading the comments, I was also curious about this. Were the hippies who received long jail sentences as a result of the operation as angry towards him as the people in the comments section? Had they remained true to their 'peace and love' ethos and forgiven him?
I contacted Leaf Fielding, one of the key players who has written about his role in the drug ring, to find out. I also asked him about his role in the LSD network, not wanting to miss a chance to get an inside account of the UK's largest acid distribution gang.
VICE: Hi Leaf, can you tell me how you first got involved with the network?
Leaf Fielding: I was 18 when I first took LSD. I'd never taken any drugs before, and didn't have a clue what I was doing. A couple of hours later, I was convinced I'd found the elixir of life – the substance that would thaw the Cold War and bring peace and harmony to mankind. Acid changed my life forever; my world had suddenly switched from black and white to colour. I saw that all creation is a shimmering dance of energy, and at the highest level, we're all one.
That's quite the trip. What was your next step?
I dropped out of university, and became a hippy. Then a batch of liquid acid turned up in Reading, and I was one of two dealers who distributed it. When the supply dried up, I decided to go on the road, inspired by Kerouac. I took the ferry to Calais, walked and hitched to the Mediterranean, and spent a couple of years travelling, mostly in Asia. I was offered a position as the "tabletter" for the London-based wing of the LSD organisation after carrying out a successful trip to Thailand, during which I sent back several kilos of the strongest grass in the world.
What does a "tabletter" do?
I'd receive ten grams of pure acid crystal from the acid lab. My job was to turn that into 50,000 microdots of equal strength. I'd dissolve the crystal in a measured amount of water, add an inert powder and a little dye, and mix it thoroughly into a stiff paste. Wearing gloves, I'd rub the paste across 50 plastic boards, each of which had 1,000 holes drilled in them, until all the holes were filled. I'd then put them in a rack to dry.
The pills would shrink slightly, making it easier for the matching 51st board – which didn't have holes, but spikes – to push the microdots out of the board and into a small plastic bag. A run of 50,000 would usually take a couple of hours. Following an accidental massive overdose while tabletting, I ended up switching with one of my friends. He tabletted, and I became the distributor.
Did you have any suspicions that you were being infiltrated?
Not until close to the end. In fact, I was one of the last people to be identified as a member of the conspiracy. I was only caught up in the net through telephone tapping. Though the main thrust of the police operation was directed towards the Mid Wales branch of the network, it was the London group that produced the bulk of the acid.
WATCH: Meet One of Britain's Most Notorious Reformed Criminals
Do you harbour any resentment against Bentley and his pals for busting you?Bentley was one of my interrogators, and I have no complaints about him. His fundamental problem was that, by joining the police, he had handed over responsibility for his life. In the police and the military, you have to do as you're ordered, and must live with the consequences.
What do you make of the fact that he took drugs himself as part of the operation? Some people responding to his piece seem pretty angry about that.
Unsurprisingly, I think that busting people for something you yourself are doing is totally hypocritical. I understand that it was considered necessary by the people running Operation Julie, but that made them lose any moral high ground they might have thought they had. We all have to live with the consequences of our actions. Personally, I couldn't countenance acting the way they did.
People were also mad at him because there was a lot of stuff in the media about the operation kick-starting the war on drugs. What's your take on that?
The war on drugs had already begun. The operation gave it a lot of publicity, but didn't inaugurate it.
You ended up spending five years in prison. How did you find it?
It was horrible, of course, though mitigated somewhat by us being a large group of people who had been successful big-timers. That gave us status, and none of the other cons gave us a hard time, but the simple fact that we were locked away for years had an effect on us.
Leaf, hanging out nowadays
What have you been doing with your life since your release?
I came to terms with my incarceration by travelling in India for a year. This helped clean the emotional poisons from my system. I also trained as a language teacher and moved to Spain, where I ran a language school for a number of years.
After winning £8,000 on my first lottery ticket, I went on holiday to Malawi with a friend, and returned there for the new millennium. Seeing the visible deterioration in the country and the ravages of AIDS, I returned to Europe determined to build an orphanage for some of the homeless orphans. We raised over £10,000, and used it to build the Warm Heart hostel for homeless girls. It opened in 2003. Our effort was a drop in the ocean, but at least we felt we'd done something.
Do you still take psychedelics, or did your imprisonment put you off them for life?
I've eaten magic mushrooms a number of times since my release. I think I've come to the end of my long and fruitful journey with psychedelics now though, but you never know for sure.
Thanks, Leaf.
You can read about Leaf's involvement with the acid distribution network in his book To Live Outside the Law. He's also got a second book on the way, called Leaf by Leaf: Adventures on Four Continents.
@Nickchesterv
More on VICE:
I Infiltrated a Hippie Commune as an Undercover Cop in the UK's Biggest LSD Bust
A Drug Dealer Talks Us Through All the Different Types of British Clients
This Guy Has Collected the Largest Set of Weed Baggies Known to ManBefore some scout troop raffles off a new 2013 Ford Escape by having you try to guess how many ping-pong balls are stuffed inside, we'll save you the trouble. Ford says it holds "approximately" 56,778.
Strange as it may seem, Ford designers are using table tennis balls as a way of measuring interior storage spaces inside its vehicles and rivals. Forget tape measures or good ol' fashion computer-aided design. It turned out that the balls were consistently more accurate when it came to multiple people trying to come up with the same answer.
"It probably doesn't seem like it, but ping-pong balls are more accurate than using a tape measure to get the volume of odd-shaped spaces like a glove compartment," said Eric Jackson, Ford's vehicle architecture supervisor, in a statement.
Using the two dimensions of a tape measure, then doing the math to try to get three dimensions, didn't exactly get the kind of volume measure that Ford engineers wanted. With the balls, engineers can take the count then add in the known volume between them.
Ping-pong balls aren't being used the most to figure out the overall capacity of the vehicle. Rather, it's about all the little cubbies found in a modern crossover or car. For the Escape, they include a hidden storage bin in the back seat and the cup holders in front.
Wondering how many ping-pong paddles will fit into an Escape? So do we.I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t read this message of a Danish group opposed to the plan. Greens clear-cutting trees in a national park and evicting people, whoda thunk?. Seems like a case of “we had to destroy the village to save it“. Here’s the description of the park from the Danish National Parks website:
The west of Thy has been designated as the first Danish national park. The National Park, Thy stretches for an up to 12-kilometer-wide belt along the Jutland west coast from Agger Tange in the south to Hanstholm in the north. It is an enormous and unspoiled natural area totaling 244 km2 – almost the size of the Danish island of Langeland. In the National Park you can go between outstretched, wind-swept wilds and aromatic pine trees. You can also throw yourself into the sparkling waves of the North Sea or bike through cool dune plantations.
I’ve reposted the message from the opposition group below.
Dear environmentally aware citizen of the world! www.nationalttestcenter.dk
Copenhagen, December 2009
The Danish government plans to clear forests and destroy unique nature for the benefit of industry.
The Danish environment minister Troels Lund Poulsen decided, on behalf of the government, on 30th September 2009, that the clearing of 15 km2 of forest in the north west of Denmark will take place. A test centre for the development of offshore windmills is planned to take up 30 km2 of land in the Thy region, near Østerild. This deforestation will create an increase of 400,000 tonnes of CO2 emission, the equivalent of the CO2 emission of 100,000 people per year.
The government will force the local population out of their homes. The reasoning behind this is said to be for the benefit of the Danish windmill industry, which will in turn create more Danish jobs. The regulations to finalise the evictions goes against Denmark’s constitution and is therefore clearly illegal.
In current plans, the area is categorised as a recreational area, where the set up of windmills is prohibited.
The region is one of Denmark’s most beautiful areas. With its rugged landscapes and grand views, as well as many rare species of animals, birds and plants, the area is representative of authentic Danish nature. There are very few areas of Denmark left, where one can experience darkness at night and complete silence.
The windmills, which are 250 meters tall, are planned to be along a 6 km linear south/north stretch. This will prevent birds in the international Ramsar-area, Vejlerne, which is situated to the east of the test centre, from flying west to the EU-habitat area Vullum Sø and to Thy National Park just south of Hanstholm.
The Danish government has not consulted properly about the plans. The Danish citizens had little time to put forward comments of the project. The hearing has only been 11 days long, with 9 of those being a national holiday.
The environment minister has decided that a report on this projects impact on nature and the wildlife will be completed by early December 2009. The consequence of this is that it is impossible to produce a well documented scientific report, to act as the foundation for a political decision.
The local population has formed an association, “Landforeningen for Bedre Miljø” (The Association for an Improved Environment) with the aim to inform about the environmental consequences for both the society and nature, if plans for the national test centre are followed through. So far, “Landsforeningen for Bedre Miljø“ has tried, in vain, to persuade the Danish government to produce a more thorough investigation of the project’s impacts on the surroundings.
The association is discontented with the planning process so far, because they have neglected ordinary, well-known, democratic principles, which Denmark otherwise uses every opportunity to talk about across the world.
If you, as an environmentally aware citizen of the world, thinks that questions ought to be asked concerning this unjust conduct towards our future generations inheritance of the nature, please spread the word about this planned national test centre.
###
Chris Horner of Pajamas Media has a summary of the issue:
President Obama was caught flatfooted by the embarrassing truth about Spain’s “green economy” after he instructed us — on eight separate occasions — to “think about what’s happening in countries like Spain” as a model for a U.S. future. Spain, of course, is suffering an economic meltdown from enormous public debt incurred through programs like a mandated “green economy.”
But Obama also just implored Spain to drastically scale back or risk becoming Greece. A flip he immediately flopped, by pushing hard to enact the Kerry-Lieberman “path to insolvency” bill based on … Spain. (Cue Benny Hill theme.)
So, embarrassed — or perhaps shameless — Obama changed his pitch: “Think about what’s happening in countries like Denmark.”
Of course, the experience of Denmark — a country with a population half that of Manhattan’s, not exactly a useful energy model for our rather different economy and society — is no great shakes, either.
But it gets better.
In my new book — Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America — I describe the absurdity of the “free ice cream” theories of the “green economy” our statist friends now embrace as their latest raison d’etre for a controlled society. My mother-in-law — visiting from Denmark — is reading my book with a particular interest in its exposé of what her heavily taxed labor pays for in that country.
The book also prompted her to relay an amazing new anecdote to the case study referred to by the Danes as “the fairy tale of the windmills.”
In the northern region of Jutland called Thy, Denmark is forcing people off of their land (“Kelo” is apparently Danish for “Kelo”) and — wait for it — preparing to clear-cut fifteen square kilometers of forest, and eventually thirty, in order to put up more of the bird- and job-killing monstrosities.
These giant windmills are not even intended to fill an energy gap for the Danish economy. No, they are to be onshore experimental versions of massive new off-shore turbines — with the facility to be rented out to wind mavens like Siemens.
The argument they are forwarding for doing this is not just the typically risible claim that this is necessary for the environment. After all, “[the] deforestation will create an increase of 400,000 tons of CO2 emissions, the equivalent of the CO2 emissions of 100,000 people per year.”
They are also forwarding the argument that this must occur in order to create Danish jobs.
Of course, “creating jobs,” to the extent such mandates can do this (as they are typically net job killers), appears much more necessary after the state first made it difficult for the private sector to do such things. Denmark enforced what methods, and what quantity of those methods, are acceptable for producing electricity. It always turns out that the acceptable ways are inefficient, intermittent, and expensive. Which sort of explains the need for mandates.
read the rest here:
Advertisements
Share this: Print
Email
Twitter
Facebook
Pinterest
LinkedIn
RedditFor the occupation as a result of the military intervention, see Turkish occupation of northern Syria
Operation Euphrates Shield (Turkish: Fırat Kalkanı Harekâtı) was a cross-border operation by the Turkish military and Turkey-aligned Syrian opposition groups in the Syrian Civil War which led to the Turkish occupation of northern Syria. Operations were carried out in the region between the Euphrates river to the east and the rebel-held area around Azaz to the west. The Turkish military and Turkey-aligned Syrian rebel groups, some of which used the Free Syrian Army label, fought against forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) as well as against the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) from 24 August 2016. On 29 March 2017, the Turkish military officially announced that Operation Euphrates Shield was "successfully completed".[110]
The Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said on the first day of the operation that it was aimed against both the ISIL and Syrian Kurdish "terror groups that threaten our country in northern Syria".[111] The objective to capture Manbij, under the de facto control of the Rojava administration, that had been promulgated by the Turkish president at the end of February 2017[112] remained unfulfilled.
Background [ edit ]
Northern Aleppo Governorate is a region of major strategic importance in the Syrian Civil War, previously mostly held by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). For ISIL it was their only gate to the Turkish border. For the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the Shahba region between the Euphrates River to the east and the Kurd Mountains to the west is the missing link to connect the cantons of the Federation of Northern Syria – Rojava. For Turkey it is the path to its influence in Syria.[113][114] The stage for the Jarabulus offensive was set by the previous Manbij offensive from June–August, which saw the SDF capturing the city of Manbij and its surroundings from ISIL and in the aftermath moving north. At the same time, Turkey-backed Syrian rebels fought the Battle of al-Rai to approach Jarabulus from the west.
According to an article published in The Independent, the Turkish objectives were to target ISIL, strike at the political and military power of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and to consolidate its position in expectation of shifts towards more war or greater peace.[115] Turkey's defence minister Fikri Işık said that "preventing the Kurdish PYD party from uniting Kurdish cantons" east of Jarabulus with those further west was a priority.[116] In Ankara Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said "at 4 am this morning, operations started in the north of Syria against terror groups which constantly threaten our country".[117][118][119]
Before the operation, SDF forces including People's Protection Units (YPG) units were advancing on Jarabulus following their military victory over the Islamic State in Manbij.[120] Both Manbij and Jarabulus are west of the Euphrates River, but Turkey wanted YPG forces to move back to the east of the river after the conclusion of the SDF's Manbij operation.[121]
Turkey's action pitched its military against a force backed by its NATO ally, the United States.[121][122] It was the first time Turkish warplanes struck in Syria since November 2015, when Turkey downed a Russian warplane, and the first significant incursion by Turkish special forces since a brief operation to relocate the tomb of Suleyman Shah, in February 2015.[121]
Pro-SDF sources allege that Turkey had "an agreement with ISIL" to rescue it in Jarabulus from the SDF offensive.[123] According to Hürriyet Daily News this allegation is believed by "many" in Washington and Turkey and it could pose serious problems for Ankara.[124]
Sunni Islamist cleric Abdul Razzaq al-Mahdi asked Turkey to intervene in Syria and fight the Kurds and ISIL[125][126] and gave permission for Islamist groups in Syria to ally with Turkey.[127][128][129]
Preparations [ edit ]
Reportedly,[130] Turkey had prepared battle plans for the intervention more than a year prior. On 9 May 2016, a plan was reportedly proposed by the US, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar to have the Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement form a "Northern Army" to gather more than 3,000 fighters for the operation. The next phase was to transfer the fighters from Idlib to northern Aleppo through the Bab al-Hawa Border Crossing and the Azaz border crossing. This reportedly began on 13 May.[131] However, the plan was delayed due to doubts from U.S. officials about the capabilities of the Syrian rebel forces that Turkey had recruited to fight with its military, opposition from the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, and the rift between Turkey and Russia that was not mended until early August 2016.[132]
On 20 August 2016, a large number of rebels and a military convoy containing more than 50 vehicles loaded with heavy and medium weapons from al-Rai were transferred to the Turkish border with Jarabulus.[133] On 22 August, as a response to the Gaziantep bombing and two mortar shells launched by ISIL hitting the town of Karkamış adjacent to Jarabulus, the Turkish Land Forces launched 60 artillery shells at Islamic State positions in Jarabulus while simultaneously bombarding Manbij Military Council positions farther south in order to prevent them from advancing further to the north.[134] Karkamış was soon evacuated and cleared of its residents. Turkey continued to shell ISIL positions in Jarabulus after two mortar rounds hit Karkamış and three hit Kilis.[135] On 23 August, Turkey shelled Islamic State territory in northern Syria again. ISIL responded by firing rockets into Turkey.[136]
The Turkey-backed rebels under the brand of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) that took part in the offensive comprised mainly Syrian Turkmen, mostly in the Syrian Turkmen Brigades.[137][138] During the offensive, FSA militants of Turkmen origin used light blue armbands, a color which is often used as a symbol of Turkic heritage; meanwhile, the rebels of Arab origin mainly used red ones.[137][139][140]
The SDF have accused MIT of assassinating Abdel Sattar al-Jader, the leader of the Jarabulus Military Council (a component of the SDF), just prior to the operation.[120]
The campaign [ edit ]
Capture of Jarabulus by Turkish-backed forces (24 August) [ edit ]
Early in the morning of 24 August, Turkish forces directed intense artillery fire against ISIL positions in Jarabulus while the Turkish Air Force bombed 11 targets from the air.[141] Later that day, Turkish main battle tanks followed by pick-up trucks, believed to be carrying Turkish-backed Syrian rebels,[142] and the Turkish Special Forces crossed the border and were joined by hundreds of Free Syrian Army (FSA) fighters as the ground forces attacked the town.[143] U.S.-led coalition planes helped the Turkish forces.[2][121] This was their first co-ordinated offensive into Syria.[121] The FSA said progress was slow because of mines planted by ISIL fighters.[142]
A few hours after the offensive's beginning, Turkish Special Forces and the Sham Legion captured their first village, Tal Katlijah, after ISIL fighters retreated from it to reinforce Jarabulus.[63] Some time later, the FSA captured four more villages[144] including Tel Shair, Alwaniyah and two other villages.[145][146] Hours later, Turkish- and US-backed rebels were reported to have captured the border town of Jarabulus, with ISIL offering little resistance.[147][148] The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) also reported that the FSA had captured almost all of the city.[149] A FSA spokesman stated that a large number of ISIL fighters had withdrawn to al-Bab in front of the offensive.[150]
The fact that not much combat took place between Turkey or Turkish-backed Syrian rebels against ISIL in Jarabulus[151] and the closeness in Islamist political ideology between ISIL and some of the rebel groups involved, has led to much local and international speculation about collusion between Turkey and ISIL in the operation, including allegations of ISIL fighters changing uniform.[152] In an interview published in The Independent on 9 September, an ISIL fighter claimed that "when the Turkish army entered Jarabulus, I talked to my friends who were there. Actually, Isis didn't leave Jarabulus; they just shaved off their beards."[153]
Continued advance of Turkish-backed forces against ISIL and conflict with SDF (24–25 August) [ edit ]
Later on 24 August, speaking in Ankara, US vice president Joe Biden appeared to support Turkey's stance vis-a-vis the Syrian Kurds and said that "the elements that were part of the Syrian Democratic Forces, the YPG that participated, that they must go back across the river" (the Euphrates).[142][154] The YPG, however, initially refused to withdraw from Manbij,[155] while the pro-SDF Jarabulus Military Council groups declared that they would not give up their hometown to the Turkish-backed rebel groups which they considered "no different from ISIS". In consequence, when Turkish-backed FSA units, among them the Sham Legion and Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement, forcibly attempted to enter the SDF-held village of Amarinah south of Jarabulus, they were met with resistance. Whereas the SDF claimed to have repelled the assault, the rebels counter-claimed that they had captured the village. Before clashing with the SDF, the FSA had captured half a dozen villages.[156][157][158][159]
On early 25 August, more than 20 Turkish tanks crossed into the Syrian border.[160] The U.S. foreign minister later informed his Turkish counterpart that the YPG had started withdrawing to the east of the Euphrates river.[161] A spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve later announced that the SDF had withdrawn across the Euphrates river in order to prepare for the Raqqa campaign.[162] The YPG later separately announced it had withdrawn to the east of Euphrates and said all military command along with all YPG-held positions was handed over to the Manbij Military Council.[163] Despite this, Turkey claimed that some YPG units had not retreated, leading the Turkish military to shell the SDF with artillery and, according to Hürriyet Daily News, launch a drone strike against one YPG group.[164][165] While the conflict between Turkey and SDF continued, members of the Jarabulus Military Council stated once again that they "will not allow some "mercenaries" to take over our city. We will liberate Jarabulus," with some claiming that some of the Turkish-backed rebels were former ISIL fighters.[51]
At approximately 11:00 pm local time that evening, internet censorship watchdog organization Turkey Blocks detected a nationwide social media blackout, restricting domestic and mobile services throughout Turkey.[166] Analysts concluded that the blackout measure had almost certainly been implemented to restrict online sharing of sensitive war plans, as the offensive in Syria got under way, using newly amended wartime internet "killswitch" legislation.[167]
Meanwhile, the offensive against ISIL continued, as both the Turkish-backed forces as well as SDF units took control of additional villages south of Jarabulus from ISIL.[168] Pro-PYD sources claimed that clashes had broken out among FSA groups in Jarabulus.[169] Turkish Defence Minister Fikri Işık stated later in the day that FSA was clearing Jarabulus of any remaining ISIL militants.[170] After Jarabulus was largely secured, rebel commanders declared conflicting targets for the further offensive; whereas the Levant Front announced that the rebels would next attempt to take Al-Bab, the Al-Moutasem Brigade and the Sultan Murad Division stated that the Turkish-backed forces would proceed west to break the ISIL siege of Mare', while Turkish media reported that the offensive aimed at securing a strip of territory along the Turkish-Syrian border.[25][30] However, Ankara's forces pushed south and mostly focused on targeting Kurdish-led SDF forces.[171]
Disputed YPG withdrawal; Turkish military and rebels drive SDF south of the Sajur River (26–29 August) [ edit ]
On 26 August, Al-Masdar News claimed that all YPG forces had withdrawn to the east of the Euphrates as result of the continued Turkish pressure, leaving all territory around Manbij under control of their allies in the SDF.[12] Rebel forces later released photos of YPG ID cards and weapons allegedly taken in Amarna, suggesting that at least some YPG fighters remained around Manbij.[13] On the next day Turkish planes bombed the SDF-aligned Jarabulus Military Council positions in the village of Amarna, 10 km south of Jarabulus. According to the SDF, civilian homes were also hit and the SDF avoided moving north to prevent escalation of the clashes.[172] The Turks and the rebel forces then attacked and captured the SDF-held villages of Maz'alah and Yousif Bayk, while also attempting to advance against the stragetic significant hilltop of Amarna.[173][174] In response to the attacks, mostly Arab SDF groups such as the Northern Sun Battalion announced that they would send reinforcements to help the Jarabulus Military Council.[85] Later that day, one Turkish soldier was killed and three were wounded in an anti-tank missile attack on a Turkish tank south of Jarabulus. According to Turkish military sources the missile was fired from territory held by the SDF. The soldier's death was the first reported fatality on the Turkish side.[175][176] Turkish forces retaliated with artillery fire.[177]
Meanwhile, the Turkish Free Syrian Army (TFSA) cleared Jarabulus of mines and explosives planted by ISIL militants before their withdrawal from the town.[178] The Turkish Red Crescent started distributing food after landmines and other explosives had been cleared from the border between Karkamis in Turkey and Jarabulus in Syria. The humanitarian movement handed out various food supplies for around 5,000 people in the town.[179] Taking advantage of the fighting between the SDF and the FSA, ISIL launched a massive counteroffensive and captured al-Rai, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).[180][181]
On 28 August, according to the SOHR and Aleppo24,[182] at least 20 civilians were killed and 50 wounded in Turkish artillery fire and air strikes on the village of Jeb el-Kussa, and another 28 were killed and 25 wounded in Turkish air strikes near the town of Al-Amarneh and the village of Saressat. At least four SDF fighters had also been killed and 15 injured in the Turkish bombardment of the two areas.[183][184][185] Syrian monitoring groups reported that at least 70 people were killed over the weekend (27–28 August), most of whom were civilians, in the Turkish operations. Turkish officials didn't comment on the reported civilian death toll, except to say that commanders were taking all necessary measures to protect noncombatants.[182] Turkey claimed to have killed 25 PKK and YPG militants in the course of the airstrikes.[177] Turkish-backed forces then began a major attack against the SDF positions, capturing Amarna and nearby Ain al-Bayda; rebel groups also claimed to have taken the villages of Qusa, Balaban, Dabisa, Jeb el-Kussa, Suraysat, Umm Routha, Maghayer and Qiratah further south, though this could not be independently confirmed.[186][187] The ANF News Agency published a video of two Turkish army tanks destroyed by SDF anti-tank missiles.[188] Meanwhile, Turkish-backed Sham Legion fighters released footage showing them torturing SDF prisoners.[189]
Some of the Syrian refugees, mainly Syrian Turkmen and Arabs who were living in the area which TFSA forces captured, returned to the Jarabulus area. Erdoğan stated that the necessary help would be given to other refugees who wished to return to their homeland[190] and Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu accused the YPG of the ethnic cleansing of areas which were opposed to them.[191]
On 29 August, Ibrahim Ibrahim, head of the Rojava Media Cell, stated that local forces in Jarabulus and Manbij were being reinforced but denied reports that the YPG was reinforcing Manbij.[192] The United States' envoy to the anti-ISIL coalition called the clashes between the SDF and Turkish-backed rebels a "source of deep concern". The spokesman for the Pentagon called for the YPG to pull back to the east of the river, which he stated had largely occurred. He also warned that such clashes enabled ISIL to find sanctuary and continue planning attacks.[193] In the course of the day, Turkish and Turkish-backed forces first captured all remaining SDF positions north of the Sajur River, and then proceeded to cross it to take three more villages,[194] bringing the number of villages captured by the rebels to 21.[195]
Rebel–SDF ceasefire attempt; Rebel fighting against ISIL continued (30 August – 2 September) [ edit ]
On 30 August, John Thomas, a spokesman for the US Central Command stated that Turkey and SDF had agreed to stop fighting each other and had opened communications with the United States as well as with each other.[196] Jarabulus Military Council claimed that it had reached a temporary ceasefire agreement with Turkey after mediation by the US-led anti-ISIL coalition. It also claimed that the ceasefire had started around midnight of 29–30 August.[197] On the same day, Turkey's foreign ministry said the U.S.' comments regarding the objectives of the Turkish military operation in Syria were unacceptable and that the country would continue its operations until it achieved the goal of eliminating "terrorist threats in the region".[198] Turkish military sources[199] and commander of a Syrian opposition group denied a ceasefire had taken effect. The commander stated however while there was a pause in the operation, it would resume shortly.[200] The U.S. welcomed the putative pause in fighting.[201] Later in the day, Turkish Armed Forces stated that a Turkish tank near Sajur river had been hit by a rocket. However, it was not clear who had carried out the attack. The Turkish military carried out a strike 45 minutes after the tank was hit and claimed it had destroyed a group of "terrorists" west of Jarabulus. It also claimed that it had carried out airstrikes against ISIL targets in Kulliyah in northern Syria.[196][202][203] SOHR confirmed that there was a pause in fighting between the two groups around Jarabulus and Sajor river.[204] General Joseph Votel meanwhile stated that Kurdish fighters had moved to east of Euphrates as per their commitment.[205]
Also on 30 August, SDF forces with coalition support started the Western al-Bab offensive against ISIL in the southwest of the region.
On 31 August, Turkey's officials rejected the announcement of ceasefire made by the U.S. shortly prior, saying Turkey would not accept any compromise or ceasefire between Turkey and what Turkey saw as terrorist elements.[206][207] Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım said that "operations will continue until all terrorist elements have been neutralised, until all threats to our borders, our lands and our citizens are completely over".[206] Meanwhile, ISIL launched a massive counterattack in the southwestern countryside of Jarabulus preceded by a suicide attack. The militants captured four villages (Kiliyeh, Arab Hasan Saghir, Al-Muhsinli, and Al-Bulduq) from both the SDF and Turkish-backed rebels. Two Turkish tanks were reportedly destroyed in the clashes.[208]
On 1 September 2016, explosive experts of the Turkish Armed Forces cleared mines from the area around Jarabulus using controlled explosions. The de-mining operation on the Syrian side of the border was visible from the Turkish border town of Karkamış. An AFP photographer nearby heard at least a dozen explosions.[209]
On 2 September the SDF-aligned Bob Crow Brigade, composed of (mostly British and Irish) international volunteers for Rojava, said it was leaving the Raqqa front and heading to Manbij to defend it against a possible assault by Turkish forces and "Islamist" rebel groups.[9][210] A day prior, the Turkish prime minister's spokesman said the Turkish government would treat such volunteers as terrorists, and Yasin Aktay, a spokesman for Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), speaking to Middle East Eye opined that when it comes to Europeans or Americans joining the YPG, they could only be considered "crusaders" or intelligence agents.[211][212][213] Macer Gifford, a prominent British volunteer with the YPG and leader of its medical unit was quoted as saying "only in the minds of right wing and nationalist politicians in Turkey could the volunteers ever be called terrorists"; he said that while he had no intention to fight against Turkey, he would do so if and when Turkey attacked the YPG.[214]
Later on 2 September 2016, a statement released by the Turkish military said that a total of 271 targets were hit 1195 times by the Turkish Armed Forces and the Free Syrian Army while anti-ISIL coalition jets struck two ISIL targets. Also, the Turkish-backed FSA captured the Syrian village of Qundarah from ISIL.[215] The Turkish military also said that the Turkish Air Force destroyed three buildings used by ISIL in Arab Ezza and Qundarah with airstrikes.[216]
|
. We pretty much did the whole off-season program that they sent home with everyone else. So we're right where we want to be. Look forward to continuing to progress, keeping track of it and hopefully staying on the right path."
That the mental portion of Nelson's recovery has gone smoothly is a credit, he said, to team physician Patrick McKenzie and the rest of the medical staff. They created fresh workouts and new exercises. And when the weeks began to move quickly, Nelson said, his patience was rarely tested the way some athletes can become disengaged through months of potentially monotonous rehab.
"They've kept me entertained," Nelson said. "...We've had some battles of progression, but that's mainly to push them a little bit, and then they try to pull us back a little bit, and we find a happy medium."
By remaining in Green Bay throughout the season, Nelson attended all receiver and offensive meetings. His knowledge of the offense, the routes and the pillars of a successful relationship with quarterback Aaron Rodgers functioned as additional textbooks for the young receivers, many of whom played prominent roles in an injury-riddled season at the position.
But despite Nelson's ever-present approach to rehab, Rodgers said the young receivers were somewhat shortchanged by the inability to watch him practice on a consistent basis.
"I think that was one place they missed last year was not having Jordy out there (in practice)," Rodgers said. "Because the way he practices really sets the tempo and gives you a great look of what greatness looks like in practice every single day.
"And much like I had watching Brett (Favre) and the young receivers had watching Donald (Driver) when he was an older player, those practice habits are really invaluable to a younger player making those jumps from years one to two and two to three."
With Nelson on schedule for a full return by the start of the season, the thin receiving corps that finished last season — Jeff Janis, Jared Abbrederis and James Jones were the three players to walk off the field in Arizona — is suddenly an oasis of depth and experience. The unit boasts two receivers with 1,000-yard seasons in Nelson and Randall Cobb and four developing players who all have shown flashes at some point over the last two seasons.
A trio of youngsters — Janis, Abbrederis and Ty Montgomery, a rookie in 2015 — return to Green Bay having earned their first significant playing time last season, and the next step in their developments, along with that of third-year receiver Davante Adams, will focus largely on subtleties of the game.
Rodgers, whose offense finished a woeful 25th in passing yards per game last season, said he expects them to learn where the windows are when playing against zone defenses, how to use their bodies to get off press coverage and develop the tricks veterans use to create valuable inches of separation.
In other words, the things Nelson has done throughout his career.
"We've said it for years: Aaron wants to see you make plays in practice and carry it over into the game," Nelson said, "and that builds the confidence there. For me, it's continuing to grind on them in the meeting room and continuing to go do work on the field."
And now his handful of understudies will finally be able to watch.In less than 24 hours Mike Keenan went from pondering the possibility of being invited to join future Team Russia coaching staffs to being fired as head coach of Magnitogorsk following its second straight loss.
In a brief conversation with Keenan following his dismissal, he told the Dreger Report he arrived at the arena Saturday morning following a 6-4 loss to Salavat Yulaev and was advised by Metallurg management he had been let go.
Keenan has been offered a position within the organization, but isn't sure of the role or title. He was told, however, his firing won't impact finalization of his Russian citizenship.
On Friday in the Dreger Report, Keenan's stock in Russia appeared to be on the rise. Acquiring Russian citizenship was believed to be not only a positive public relations move for the team and the league, but would also put the iconic coach in a favourable position to take on a role as a coach or staff member with Russian teams preparing for the various upcoming championships, including the World Cup of Hockey in Toronto in 2016.
This sudden turn of events is not new to the KHL, nor is it surprising.
The late Wayne Fleming also had a somewhat bizarre experience during a game in 2009 while coaching Avangard Omsk. During the second period intermission, Fleming was told he would not be allowed on the bench for the rest of the game. He wasn't fired, but benched by the teams general manager. A short time later, Fleming was fired officially.
Bizarre? Yup.
Keenan, who says this is the first time he has been hugged by the guy who fired him, remains open to any and all possibilities both in Russia and abroad and simply adds his latest experience to the long list of those that define his storied career.
His next book will be a beauty.
The Subbanator
P.K. Subban is living the dream and is a key piece in his club’s current and long-term success. However, as illustrated in Subban's recent $10-million donation to the Montreal Children's Hospital, there is the potential for his off-ice presence to be as significant as it is on the ice.
Subban has a magnetic personality, an abundance of energy and a flamboyant style that extends well beyond the boundaries of hockey. However, marketing those attributes is challenging. Unlike other star athletes, hockey players traditionally have been more reserved and respectful of those boundaries, rarely taking risks for the sake of building a personal brand.
Subban has never backed away from a challenge and is proudly the front man for his own marketing firm, P.K.S.S Management Inc., which oversees his business outside of the arena, including the various philanthropic opportunities Subban takes great pride in.
In addition to the launch of PKSubban.com, the Canadiens star defenceman is working on a number of projects that will showcase his artistic side, including something special for both CCM and the NHL's Winter Classic, neither of which Subban was able to discuss. He did tell the Dreger Report that people will definitely get to see a side of him they didn't know was there.
Subban obviously has a flare for fashion, which he intends to include in his many business interests moving forward, but he's also an accomplished sketch artist who says he had to make a decision in school between focusing on hockey and pursuing his passion in art.
He has more than 40 sketch books which he has filled with portraits, landscape designs, fashion ideas and general work over the years.
The Norris Trophy winner is extremely excited about the launch of his website and boasts its video content and constant updating will take sports celebrity websites to the next level.
Subban says everything he does is about growing the game, but there's nothing wrong with growing your brand and profile along the way.
To challenge or not to challenge
The coach’s challenge appears to be working well, but as expected there are some concerns the league may have to address.
The NHL is very sensitive to lengthy delays and it hasn't taken long for head coaches to figure out that the longer they stall arguing a call, the more time their video people will have to decide whether or not to issue a challenge.
Some teams have also been sending video feeds to unauthorized areas within their organization which can, in some cases, compromise the process. For the most part, this one-year test run is helping officials get it right, which was clearly the mandate general managers imposed in March. As long as clubs follow the rules and the delays are minimized, there's no reason to think the existing system isn't here to stay.
However, if the issues persist or can't be resolved, it's possible the league will solely manage the video review in the Situation Room in Toronto to expedite the process.
Until next week...tune in to Sportscentre and TSN.ca for the very latest on Insider Trading.By Steve Kroner
Billy Beane acquired Alberto Callaspo from the Angels on Tuesday night. One of his reasons: to improve the A’s right-handed hitting.
Toronto’s Mark Buehrle then proved Beane’s point.
The lefty worked seven innings in the Blue Jays’ 5-0 win over the A’s at the Coliseum.
Buehrle (7-7), who threw a shutout in his previous start, gave up five hits. He struck out two and did not issue a walk.
All of Toronto’s runs in the A’s 9-4 win Monday night came via homers. The Blue Jays quickly got into long-ball mode Tuesday.
With two outs in the first, Jose Bautista took Dan Straily (6-5) deep to left. Bautista’s 25th homer of the season gave the Jays a 1-0 lead.
Toronto tacked on another run in the fourth. With one out, the Jays got consecutive singles from Edwin Encarnacion, Adam Lind and Colby Rasmus. Encarnacion was going to stop at third on Rasmus’ hit, but Yoenis Céspedes booted the ball in left and Encarnacion scored to make it 2-0.
The Jays broke open the game in the fifth. Emilio Bonifacio opened the inning by jolting a Straily pitch over the wall in left. Home run No. 3 this season for Bonifacio.
After a walk to Jose Reyes, Maicer Izturis bounced one to shortstop Adam Rosales. His throw to second was wild, enabling Reyes to motor all the way home.
Dan Otero replaced Straily with two on and two outs. Rasmus greeted Otero with a single to right to bring home Izturis. Josh Reddick made a good throw to the plate, but Izturis did a nice job to avoid the tag by Derek Norris.
Straily dropped his third straight decision. He gave up five runs – two earned — on six hits in 4-2/3 innings.
A scary moment in the seventh: Reddick got accidentally kneed in the head by Jed Lowrie as the two chased Encarnacion’s bloop single. Reddick seemed dazed, but stayed in the game.
Some good news for the A’s: Starter Bartolo Colon will not be suspended a second time for his connection to the Biogenesis scandal, according to several reports – first by the New York Daily News — in the wake of a Tuesday meeting between officials from Major League Baseball and the players’ union.
Colon, 40, was suspended 50 games Aug. 22 after testing positive for synthetic testosterone. He re-signed with the A’s for $3 million, and the suspension lasted five games into the 2013 season. He’s 14-3 with a 2.54 ERA and made the AL All-Star team.
According to reports, MLB told the union which players it plans to suspend, and Colon wasn’t on the list. Rangers outfielder Nelson Cruz was, which could significantly impact the AL West race between the teams.
The A’s had maintained that Colon would not get, in a sense, double jeopardy.
Steve Kroner is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: skroner@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SteveKronerSFOH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopters deployed via C-5 from Fort Carson to Fort Bliss to conduct aviation reconnaissance operations
The U.S. military today plays a little-recognized role fighting the drug war in support of federal law enforcement agencies along the border with Mexico.
Joint Task Force North, or JTF North, is a U.S. joint service military command organized under U.S. Northern Command, or USNORTHCOM, based at Biggs Army Airfield in Fort Bliss, Texas.
“Our mission is to employ military capabilities to support law enforcement agencies and synchronization in the Northern Command’s area of responsibility,” Brig. Gen. Anthony R. Ierardi, commander of JTN North, told WND. “The purpose of all that is to deter and prevent what we describe as transnational threats to the homeland.”
Initially named Joint Task Force-6, the command was established by Gen. Colin Powell, then commanding general of the U.S. Army’s Forces command, Nov. 13, 1989, in response to President George H.W. Bush’s declaration of the “War on Drugs.”
JTF-6 was renamed JTF North in a ceremony Sept. 28, 2004, and its mission was expanded beyond the drug war to include providing homeland security support to the nation’s federal law enforcement agencies.
Ierardi explained his boss is Air Force Gen.Victor Renuart, commander of USNORTHCOM.”
“We are a subordinate command, so we work for Northern Command in providing the support that is requested by federal law enforcement in an appropriate way to deter and prevent threats to the homeland,” Ierardi said.
A major focus of JTF North traces back to the unit’s original purpose, to bring military support to federal law enforcement agencies fighting the drug war along the border with Mexico.
“Our principal customer is the U.S. Border Patrol,” Ierardi affirmed. “Our missions are for the most part along our southern border with Mexico, but also include missions along our northern border. We employ various military capabilities from the time the federal agency requests the support through the conclusion of the mission.”
FLIR equipped OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopters were used to conduct nighttime aviation reconnaissance operations and UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter support (in background) was provided by the 1st Combat Aviation Brigade, 1st Infantry
Division, based at Fort Riley, Kan.
JTF North has no operational military units assigned permanently to the command.
In a typical mission, a federal law enforcement agency requests military support along the border. If the request is deemed appropriate and within its authority, JTF North will then call upon military units, including Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines, as needed, to volunteer to participate in the mission.
Many of the military participating units see the JTF North mission as an opportunity to train in advance of a scheduled assignment to Iraq or Afghanistan.
Ierardi explained: “So, for example, if an Army aviation unit is in a cycle where they are preparing for deployment to Iraq, or Afghanistan, or anywhere for that matter, their commanders might deem that volunteering for a mission at JTF North might be good training, because of the opportunity to operate in a relevant environment that would replicate what they will face in the Middle East.”
Ierardi pointed to the Border Patrol as an example.
“An Army aviation unit participating in a Border Patrol mission organized by JTF North might see an increase in their night surveillance capabilities as a result of the experience,” he said. “And so it’s a neat way to match the need of the law enforcement agency with the extant capabilities that the military services can provide.”
Ierardi said it’s equally important to spell out what JTF North does not do.
Seabees from Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 24, based in Huntsville, Ala., constructed low water crossings, fences and roads along the Arizona-Mexico border
“We don’t arrest, apprehend or detain any persons that would be involved in potentially illegal activities,” he said. “We are not involved in searches and seizures. We don’t direct the operations of law enforcement agencies – again, we are in support.”
He also emphasized JTF North does not “collect or retain any information about U.S. persons, in accordance with very strict guidance that we have for intelligence oversight.”
Ierardi stressed JTF North operates within the restraints of the Posse Comitatus Act, 18 USC 1385, a Reconstruction Era law that restricts the use of U.S. military services to enforce civilian laws, except where expressly authorized by Congress or the Constitution.
The JTF North website lists the following capabilities as “operational support” the unit is prepared to offer federal law enforcement agencies: aviation transportation, including both insertion and extraction of personnel; aviation reconnaissance; air and maritime surveillance radar; unmanned aircraft systems; ground surveillance radar; listening post and observation post surveillance; ground sensor operations; and ground transportation.
In addition to operational support, JTF North is ready to provide intelligence and engineering support. It also offers general support, which includes mobile training teams in a wide range of areas from basic marksmanship training, to counter-drug field tactical police operations, to integrated mission planning and even tunnel detection.
Several illustrative missions are featured on the JTF North website.
In February, March and April 2007, JTF North provided Seabee engineering support from Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 24, based in Huntsville, Ala., assigned to construct low-water crossings, fences and roads along the Arizona-Mexico border.
In the same time period, a second JTF North mission, Operation Night Owl, involved the 1st Squadron, 6th Air Cavalry Regiment supporting the U.S. Border Patrol in the El Paso Sector by deploying OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopters via C-5 transport aircraft from Fort Carson to Fort Bliss to conduct aviation reconnaissance operations.
Operation Night Owl also coordinated the involvement of UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter support provided by the 1st Combat Aviation Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, based at Fort Riley, Kan.
“Our mission is to coordinate and employ Department of Defense support to federal law enforcement,” Ierardi said. “One of the sub-roles under USNORTHCOM’s mission is for support to civil authorities. We employ capabilities that seek to enhance law enforcement activities to interdict the threats, and we work with federal law enforcement investigative agencies to share information that would be appropriate to share.”
Federal law enforcement agencies seeking JTF North support must first provide written requests for support.
“We will collaborate with the partners that we support and they will provide us with written requests for support that allow them to increase capability in a particular area for a particular duration of time,” Ierardi said.
“The Department of Defense has rules for how we operate,” he explained. “In terms of all of the military that may participate in a particular support mission, Joint Task Force North has tactical control of military forces that might be employed in this mission. So, it’s my responsibility to ensure the safe and effective deployment of the units, while providing the commanders of that organization the opportunity to increase their readiness.”
Ierardi said that at the same time, JTF North “manages the interface with the federal law enforcement agencies to ensure those agencies are being employed correctly.”
“Our DNA, if you will, and the predominant gene that we carry today, is a counter-drug headquarters,” he stressed, referring back to the original reason the unit was created in 1989. “After 9/11 and the creation of Northern Command, it really made sense to take JTF-6, which was the preceding organizational name, and reorient the command to operate within the entire USNORTHCOM area of operational responsibility, not just along the southern border. Today, we also have the responsibility to monitor all transnational threats, including terrorists’ opportunities.”
Ierardi said the resources and the funding for JTF North’s operations still have a counter-drug emphasis.
“So, when we receive a request for support from law enforcement,” he said, “the first thing we have to determine is that there is a nexus to a counter-drug, or to international narcotics trafficking, and that it comes from an authorized federal law enforcement official to ask for that support, and that there is a distinct gain by a Department of Defense military component for providing that support.”
Last Tuesday, U.S. Army Col. Sean B. MacFarland assumed command of JTF North, replacing Brig. Gen. Ierardi, who has been reassigned to Afghanistan, where he will assist in the training and equipping of Afghan military and national security units.
Related special offer:
Get Corsi’s latest book, autographed: “The Late Great USA: The Coming Merger with Mexico and Canada”
General would deploy troops on U.S. soil
U.S. defense fixing communication gaps
Massive attack simulation to involve every state
U.S. simulates ‘dirty bomb’ attacks on Phoenix, Portland
Air Force probes nuke missile incident
Air Force ordered to stand-down tomorrow
Military positioned to launch action – here
Previous columns:
Norad’s new home, Part 2
Norad’s new home
Feds prepping for ‘continuity’ hub?Share This Review More from This Issue
March 2013
Firearms violence, in one form or other, rarely drifts far from the front page. Be it small town school disasters such as Newtown or inner city street gang shootouts, our culture is regularly bombarded with coverage of the mayhem and horror that come with gun violence. Despite the countless hours spent covering such tragedy, however, attention is infrequently paid to the lengthy history of firearms legislation and how indeed we got to a place where the carnage can occur.
Image by Anthony Tremmaglia
Related Articles A Larger Role for Unions
Organized labour may be shrinking but the rhetoric is still upbeat
Organized labour may be shrinking but the rhetoric is still upbeat Firearm Follies
A lover of guns offers an honest appraisal of their less savoury aspects.
The Colour of Labour
A road trip into the heart of brownness.
Thought Crimes
Exploring Canada’s silencing of dissent during World War One.
Enter Saint Mary’s history professor R. Blake Brown, with his second book, Arming and Disarming: A History of Gun Control in Canada. Author of 2009’s A Trying Question: The Jury in Nineteenth-Century Canada, Arming and Disarming unites Brown’s extensive work writing and lecturing on the history of Canada’s firearms laws.
As academic works go, Arming and Disarming is a very accessible read. Brown’s writing is detailed, but not to a painful extent, instead providing excellent referencing for readers interested in furthering their research. Something of a primer, his book provides essential facts about legislative developments interspersed with quotes and anecdotes that are at once interesting and insightful. By now, for example, it is hard to imagine a time when retailers like Eaton’s would openly show the latest and greatest in guns.
Of greater import, Brown’s book offers compelling analysis on a number of fronts, chief perhaps of which is the notion that this country has a seemingly racist history. While many political elites before and after Confederation believed that men of property had inherited a right to bear arms, reflected partly in the English Bill of Rights, they also held that guns in the hands of “suspicious groups” represented a particular threat to established power. As such, Brown notes, “less than noble impulses motivated most gun control measures” during the early years of Canada’s formation.
Arming and Disarming points out that assorted firearms laws were inspired partly by a ubiquitous apprehension of the other, represented at various times by French Canadians, the Irish, Italians, the Japanese, Chinese, Bolsheviks and, of course, aboriginal peoples. Capturing the general sentiment, the Calgary Weekly Herald wrote of the latter group in 1885, “if this country is to be made habitable for white men the government must disarm all the Indians.” Legislative efforts were thus undertaken to keep firearms from those deemed dangerous.
Brown’s analysis in this regard is particularly poignant in view of its current relevance. He notes that “fear has thus motivated much of Canada’s firearm legislation—politicians often invoked racist, ethnocentric, and xenophobic rationales for gun control.” Indeed, following the high-profile shooting at a BBQ last summer in Toronto, in which two people were killed and 22 others shot, Mayor Rob Ford called for immigration laws to be used to exclude from Canada those convicted of such gun crimes, inaccurately implying a foreign origin of the problem.
Whereas in the early 20th century newspapers could boldly point out the Italian ethnicity of assailants in gun crimes, Ford at least understands that direct reference to the race of the culprits he has in mind—young black men—would be unacceptable. Nevertheless, the mayor, other politicians and many members of the public perceive a new “bogeyman,” to borrow Brown’s terminology, with regard to the modern gun problem and driving the need for new gun laws. Arming and Disarming reveals that we might not be so far from where we have been before.
The book’s other significant success is in its description of the Canadian gun lobby. Following the Second World War, large groups of men in this country became involved in hunting, eventually joining with sport shooters and gun collectors to form one of the more powerful lobbies in Canadian history.
While those who support increased gun control sometimes label their opponents “gun nuts”—suggesting a measure of madness in their position—Brown uses Arming and Disarming as “an opportunity to contribute to the Canadian literature on social movements.” Whatever is to be made of their politics, Brown’s book demonstrates clearly that those who oppose firearms regulation in fact represent a model of democratic action. Characterized by country living, traditional masculine ideals and a deep distrust of government, this movement has perceived almost every firearm law as invariably part of a despotic plan by effeminate urban elites to ban firearms completely and forever. Brown contends that this response reflects a growing sense of disempowerment experienced by rural, white, working class men. To this group, the regulation of guns has become a proverbial line in the sand.
It is important to bear in mind that gun control is what has been called a “free rider,” an issue on which the vast majority can espouse a position without actually doing anything in support of that belief. In stark contrast, the firearms lobby has done everything it possibly can to shrivel or kill virtually every proposed piece of gun control legislation since the 1970s. Invoking the language of rights rooted in a sense of collective heritage, the pro-gun movement organized meetings, delegations and petitions, ran advertisements and political candidates, and wrote forests’ worth of correspondence. Arming and Disarming observes that in 1976, when capital punishment was still an issue, the number of letters to Parliament concerning gun control far exceeded those received on the death penalty. And much like other social movements with a legacy of coordinated action, Canada’s gun lobby has been remarkably—albeit not relatively—effective.
The situation in the United States is an inevitable point of comparison throughout Arming and Disarming. Fearing that we might inherit its gun culture, Canadian gun laws have been directly shaped in response to the American situation. As early as 1866, the Halifax Citizen wrote presciently, “our American cousins are rapidly becoming a people of firearms.” Brown notes that media reports of this type highlighted the “perceived differences between Canadian and American gun culture and regulation, and motivated appeals for new laws to cement these distinctions.” Brown identifies Canada’s handgun registry of the 1930s as a significant departure point in our comparative history with gun control. Partially as a result of that registry, American society currently has approximately 60 times more handguns overall than does our own.
What most distinguishes Canada’s situation, making the passage of firearms laws comparatively more possible, is clear. Brown observes: “The modest size of the Canadian gun-manufacturing industry made forming a unified Canadian gun lobby difficult. In the United States, major firearms makers contributed heavily to the [National Rifle Association].”
Indeed, “modest” may even be an overstatement of the size of Canada’s gun industry. In researching Enter the Babylon System: Unpacking Gun Culture from Samuel Colt to 50 Cent, which I wrote with Rodrigo Bascuñán, I was only able to identify two Canadian firearms manufacturers of any magnitude, Colt Canada and Para-Ordnance, and I was recently told by a Toronto Star journalist that the latter may have relocated completely to the United States. (She explained that calls to the company’s listed Toronto phone number were going unanswered.) Without significant financial backing from the gun industry, Canadian organizations such as the National Firearms Association have failed to come anywhere near the lobbying clout of the NRA.
Arming and Disarming quotes Liberal senator Frederick William Rowe, who in 1974 said, “the most potent single lobby in the United States today is the National Rifle Association … [which spent] hundreds of millions of dollars, not to convey the truth to the people of the United States, and inferentially to Canada, but to distort the truth.” The NRA’s potency rests on the fact that the U.S. gun industry has used its ample resources to co-opt what is already a powerful social movement. In rallying its millions of members and directly lobbying U.S. politicians, the NRA is unlike any force here. The lack of such force helps explain 1995’s Liberal Bill C-68, which created Canada’s predictably controversial gun registry.
Arming and Disarming presents a history of gun control chock-full of irony—none more so than Stephen Harper’s about-face on the gun registry. The lone member of the Reform Party to vote for the original legislation, believing his Calgary riding supported it, Harper would eventually become prime minister in 2006 based partly on a promise to dismantle that same registry.
Brown’s book places important events such as the assassination of political figures in the United States and school shootings, including the Montreal Massacre, in context, accounting for their effect on Canadian gun laws, but more recent tragedies, particularly Toronto’s Boxing Day shooting in 2005, go somewhat surprisingly unmentioned. (Other more recent shootings such as the horrors in Newtown and Aurora, and the aforementioned Toronto BBQ tragedy, occurred after this book had gone to the printer.)
The public perception of an increase in gun violence among street gangs, however, represents a critical turning point. While the Harper government—having kept its promise to undo the registry—has the clear backing of the pro-gun movement, it has simultaneously ramped up developments in Canadian gun law, opting to do so through the Criminal Code, including the introduction of various mandatory minimum sentences for firearms offences. In my experience as a criminal lawyer in Toronto, these laws appear to be applied most often to young men of colour. As part of a tough-on-crime agenda—policies similar to those that have failed miserably in the United States—Canadians should be aware of, and filled with trepidation over, the current government’s approach to gun control.
The gun registry was a political triumph for the gun control and women’s movements in Canada, but it was also a significant drain on resources, creating a mammoth and marginally effective bureaucracy. Those who pushed for its creation would maintain that it succeeded in realizing its underlying purpose: making it more difficult to obtain and own any type of firearm in Canada with the addition of more red tape. The registry, however, was a political compromise.
Whether for white men or aboriginal people, hunting for sustenance or sport is an important tradition in this country. While there are some issues with the availability of any gun, there are relatively few problems with access to firearms appropriate for this pastime. Target shooting and, especially, gun collecting—particularly where it involves handguns—is another monster altogether. Given the very significant threat of gun theft from legal owners, and in view of the apparent devastation being wrought with handguns, a complete ban on handguns represents the only safe policy for our society.The Business Council of Australia has called for Parliament to act in the interests of the community.
Australians will face dramatically reduced social services, falling living standards and higher taxes without serious budget repair, a peak business lobby group has warned.
Key points: Challenge to get Australia's budget back in order is now urgent, business council CEO says
Absence of "agreed strategy" to tackle budget "foisting growing debt burden on young Australians", submission says
Submission repeats call to cut company tax rate from 30pc to 25pc
In its pre-budget submission, the Business Council of Australia (BCA) warns the absence of an agreed strategy to end the budget gridlock is "just leaving the tab" from the growing debt burden for future generations to pay.
"Households will face blunt cuts in services, higher taxes and a weaker, less resilient economy," the business council's submission predicts.
The BCA's submission is the latest urging from lobby groups calling for a resolution to the impasse, which has left much of the Federal Government's omnibus bill stuck in the Senate.
The BCA said ordinary Australians would be hit hard, with taxes needing to rise by $5,000 per household per year or $2,000 per person in order to pay off the debt.
Without dramatic cuts, the BCA said social services would have to be slashed, which could see the equivalent of a third of today's social security budget reduced.
The BCA equates the alarming scenario of possible social security cuts to eliminating the entire education and defence budgets, combined.
"None of these options is acceptable, but without intervention they are inevitable," the submission said.
BCA chief executive Jennifer Westacott said the challenge to get Australia's budget back in order was now urgent.
"Stubborn opposition to savings measures and the absence of an agreed strategy to tackle the budget problem are foisting a growing debt burden on young Australians and our future generations," Ms Westacott said.
"Australian households will bear the costs of inaction through blunt cuts in services, higher taxes and a weaker, less resilient economy.
"Burgeoning debt would leave no buffer to respond to economic shocks, or any capacity for substantial investments in physical and social infrastructure."
"They are very real. There's only one way of turning it around - we increase taxes, we cut services or we move a whole lot of people into a higher tax bracket. That's just unacceptable.
"They're extremely alarming projections and that's why we're saying we just have to end the gridlock here. The implications of just kicking this can down the road are really serious.
Ms Westacott warned that programs like Medicare and the NDIS would not be immune from spending cuts.
"What's the alternative? We don't want that — we're just putting a warning out that this would be unacceptable," she told AM.
"We're not saying any of these things should be on the table — we're saying that we either start the careful redesign of programs like health where we get better outcomes, where we slow the rate of growth or we're faced with big cuts later down the track."
Politicians urged to 'act in the interests of the community'
From 2020 onwards, annual real spending will rise by 3 per cent as a result of new programs and an ageing population, rising to 30 per cent of GDP by 2055, the BCA said.
The submission warned that without hard decisions, structural deficits of at least 3 per cent of GDP would be "locked in", adding $50 billion in debt each year.
The BCA hit out at Labor, saying opponents of savings measures had a responsibility to set out alternative measures to the community.
"We are in a vicious circle. The only way to break free from this negative sum game is for the Parliament to act in the interests of the community," the submission said.
The BCA repeated its call to lower the company tax rate to 25 per cent from 30 per cent over 10 years.
"Reducing the company tax rate has become urgent as more and more countries reduce their rates and new business investment in Australia is weak," the submission said.
The BCA described the proposal as "modest", warning that the current 30 per cent company tax rate discouraged businesses from investing and innovating.Mascots have been around since the early days of advertising. Some of the oldest brands, like Kellogg’s, Campbell’s or Coca Cola have used characters to improve everyday recognition of their brand, helping to get the message across.
In today’s web era they’re not any less common. In fact, mascots seem to have been gaining popularity in the last few years. From relatively small companies or service providers like Github or Mailchimp, to big fish such as Compare the Market, more and more businesses decide to add a character to their brand arsenal. But why?
What is a mascot?
A mascot is a character that personifies your brand. Think of it as the face of your company. It can be anything: an inanimate object, animal, human, or even a completely imaginary creature. The aim of a mascot is to communicate your company’s values and talk with your customers on your behalf.
Benefits of a mascot for your brand
Having a mascot as part of your branding may seem like just an aesthetic choice, but it’s actually more powerful than it looks.
Personality and emotion
First of all, a mascot will add some personality to your brand and make it seem more ‘human’. It is much easier to form an emotional bond with a brand’s mascot than it is with the brand itself. Think about Coca Cola’s Santa Claus. Does the logo itself trigger the same powerful reaction as the mascot does? When you let your brand character speak and communicate with the user, the bond will become even stronger.
Recognisability
A well designed mascot will make your brand stand out from the competition. We’re visual creatures and we’re more likely to remember the look of a logo than the actual name on it. If you introduce a character that matches the rest of your branding, your product will become even more recognisable.
Memorability
As we just mentioned, if a product is easier to recognise, it will be also easier to memorise. This will become handy when you decide to change something major in your product, such as the packaging or colours. Your customers will still remember the character and link it to the old version of the product that they’re used to.
Attention
As Susan Weinschenk writes in her book 100 Things Every Designer Should Know About People that we’re hardwired to look out for other humans. There is a whole section in our brains dedicated just to recognising faces. Because of that, whenever there is a photo of a person on a website or in a magazine spread, it instantly grabs our attention. If that person is looking at a product, we’ll naturally follow their gaze. You can use this instinct to your advantage by placing the mascot in strategic places to guide user’s attention whenever you need it.
Brand flexibility
Having a mascot gives you greater flexibility in terms of brand application. A friendly character begs to go on stickers, tote bags, postcards and other promotional materials. You can easily use it in your social media campaigns, tutorial videos, website’s help centre or other online contexts. A mascot will take you much further than just the logo.
How to integrate a mascot into your branding
Now that we’ve grabbed your attention, you may wonder how to integrate a mascot into your own branding and if it’s possible at all. Many people think illustrated characters apply only to brands aimed at young audiences, but that’s not true at all. Consider some of the previous examples – vintage Campbell’s soup or today’s Compare the Market are not geared towards children, yet they’ve successfully embraced friendly characters.
However, it is true that not every brand’s tone of voice can accommodate a mascot. If your company is a serious, down-to-earth business, you should probably avoid having one. It’ll look out of place next to the rest of your brand. Think about it: would you feel confident about a serious law firm that tries to communicate with you via friendly character? To be genuine and trustworthy you have to make sure that you project a uniform image.
To decide if a mascot will work for your brand you need to think of what |
’s on the books and it’s formal, but the reality is the same,” said Peled, adding that “there’s no question” the international court will open legal proceedings against Israel after what he described as the “barbaric, limitless and unrestrained theft of land.”
READ MORE: Israeli settlements not ‘impediment’ for peace, just ‘not helpful’ – White House
It is not yet clear if the law will come into force, as it can be thwarted by judicial authorities. Lieberman himself believes there that the “chance that it will be struck down by the Supreme Court is 100 percent,” as cited by I24news.
The UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, Nickolay Mladenov, stated the law is set to deal another blow to the peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, saying that its adoption will entail “far reaching legal consequences for Israel and greatly diminish the prospects for Arab-Israeli peace.”
The bill was hailed as a major victory by the right-wing nationalist parties. Naftali Bennet, Israel’s education minister and the leader of the Jewish Home party, which has been championing the legislation, called its approval a “revolution” in a Twitter post.
“Our determination paid off,” Bennet said, while commending Netanyahu for his support of the bill.
There has been widespread speculation about the actual stance of the Israeli PM toward the bill. Although Netanyahu publicly voiced his support for the legislation, there have been reports he initially opposed it, fearing international repercussions, but in the end caved in to pressure from his coalition partners, Jewish Home.
Protests against @netanyahu's UK visit are set to take place in London today. https://t.co/d43pIc3mHc — RT UK (@RTUKnews) February 6, 2017
Netanyahu, who has been the subject of an ongoing criminal probe into abuse of power and corruption, was not present at the vote, as he was still on the way back from his state trip to the UK. Dismissing rumors that he intended to postpone a vote until a meeting with US President Donald Trump, scheduled on February 15, had taken place, Netanyahu argued that he had only wanted to “update” the US on the move.
“I never said I want to put it off,” he told journalists in the UK on Monday, as cited by the Times of Israel.
“I act according to national interests. In my view, you don’t surprise friends. Friends don’t surprise each other. Friends update each other. That’s what I did,” he said.
READ MORE: Netanyahu likely to be investigated for bribery, fraud following ‘secret probe’ discovery – report
The Israeli ruling coalition, including Netanyahu’s Likud and Jewish Home, reinforced its push for the bill, first proposed in November, following recent evacuation and demolition of Amona’s settlement, an Israeli outpost in the West Bank which triggered mass protests. The outpost was erected in 1995 and was ruled illegal by the Israeli Supreme Court in 2006.
Last week, Israel approved the construction of over 3,000 settler homes in the West Bank in addition to some 2,500 housing units announced the week before.
Lieberman claimed the decision was aimed at “resumption of normal life in Judea and Samaria, and in order to provide a real answer to living and housing needs in the region.”Started insulating
Joined :
2012/8/31 20:29
Last Login :
Yesterday 17:13 From Milan, IT Group:
Registered Users
Webmasters Posts: 1846
The QBX is compatible-ish with 240mm and 120mm radiators, cpu coolers up to 105 millimeters and high-end GPU. In addition despite the small size of the chassis is compatible with ATX PSU up to 140mm. Since my unit is 150mm, I have used a SFX PSU from Silverstone.
For our test I have used a long Club 3D R9 290X GPU and a Fractal Kelvin S24 on the CPU.
Some pics before the review:
Yesterday I have finally spent some good time with this mini-ITX case, actually is one of the smaller case that I have had here for test. The form factor and the shape remind me the well known Ncase case, however the QBX is made of plastic and steel. The price of this solutions is quite good, around 50 euro on Caseking.The QBX is compatible-ish with 240mm and 120mm radiators, cpu coolers up to 105 millimeters and high-end GPU. In addition despite the small size of the chassis is compatible with ATX PSU up tomm. Since my unit is 150mm, I have used a SFX PSU from Silverstone.For our test I have used a long Club 3D R9 290X GPU and a Fractal Kelvin S24 on the CPU.Some pics before the review: GALLERY
Posted on: 2015/10/13 8:27McCain feeds America a junk food diet with Palin choice
John McCain has put himself and the nation on a strict diet of political junk food by choosing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as the Republican vice presidential candidate.
While the national media and Internet are freely dispensing all the political junk food about Sarah Palin as fast as they can, many voters including those who were considering voting for John McCain can't stomach it. Can you?
Here it is in one large spoonful.
Small-town white-female mayor who bullies librarians and museum directors, lobbies Washington to obtain federal funds and claims that she is against "pork barrel politics," is elected governor of the state with one of the smallest populations in the country, so small that she can afford to work from home for most of the year and charge the taxpayers for working from home as a "duty-station," lives closer to the melting Arctic ice caps than any other governor in the country but does not believe in global warming, cracks the whip in dog-sled races and in retaliation towards state officials who she thinks have wronged her family, and turns otherwise right-wing fundamentalist social vices into Republican political virtues.
What does it sound like when people can't stomach McCain's political junk food diet? "Shame on John McCain for choosing Palin as his running mate." This is just one of the more common, and most disgusted of voter reactions to be heard, and which the media does not report on.
Who are these voters? They include Republicans, independents and Democrats.
Why doesn't the media cover these voter reactions? For one, they are too busy photographing gleeful elderly white women cheering for Sarah Palin as if they had successfully photographed a species of wildlife long considered extinct.
The real reason, however, is that these voters no longer fit into a neat box of supporting Obama or McCain. They do not easily fit into the other available categories of "undecided" or "swing voters." In fact, they may not vote at all -- and that makes the real untold story of John McCain's campaign different than reports of how he discovered a "chick magnet" to resuscitate his dying presidential aspirations.
When McCain loses, reporters will swarm all over the real story, and it is how he alienated so many voters who were hoping that McCain was a serious leader and not just applying his self-acclaimed political maverick mentality on the voters.
"Shame on John McCain" also evokes such a strong feeling not just because people can't stomach McCain's choice of Palin, but because John McCain repeatedly reveals a number of disappointing similarities to outgoing President Bush. It is not just the use of campaign tactics to win the presidency at any costs.
It is McCain's and Bush's ultra-thin skinned reaction when anyone in the public or the media criticizes their most obvious seriously bad choices and decisions, and the parallel stubborn trait of failing to see and acknowledge reality as others see it. You have probably seen McCain in action -- insulting his opponents because he is insulted by criticisms of Palin and her combination of personal dramas, false declarations, actions as a public official and overall lack of qualifications for serving as vice president let alone to step in as president.
Yet it is McCain's inability to see clearly the nation's economic woes that should trouble America the most. Sounding a lot like his former Senate colleague and economic advisor, Phil Gramm, who denied the existence of a recession and called America a country of whiners, McCain persistently claimed that the American economy was sound when every real soccer and hockey mom is worried sick about money. Suddenly, he's declared that America is in a crisis.
Maybe it is McCain's diet of political junk food that he and his entire campaign is consuming that has made him so cranky and desperate. Sens. Barack Obama and Joe Biden can contribute leadership, statesmanship, understanding and intelligence. That is the substantive diet the nation needs.Ukrainian separatists snatched up a new set of weapons for their arsenal last week. But, this time at least, Russia is far from blame. Rebels in the town of Donetsk took a World War Two-era T-54 tank and two Howitzer artillery pieces straight out of the city’s museum commemorating the Second World War, according to an AFP report.
Speaking to the news agency on the condition of anonymity, the guard working at the museum when the rebels waltzed in said, “They had written authorization to take them away.” Who gave said permission, nevermind would even have official authority over the museum collections in the separatist-held city, remains unclear.
The guard said that the rebels loaded the tank and weapons into a large truck, adding that, “They took the tank that was least damaged.” It’s doubtful that that tank and the Howitzers are in working order after not having been used operationally for decades. However, the guard said, “I think they’re going to use them to fight.”
The separatists have demonstrated great artistry in reviving geriatric weapons systems thus far in the conflict. A recently posted YouTube video shows them revving up another World War Two-era tank—this time a Stalin-vintage example—which had sat out in the elements atop a monument in the town of Kostyantynivka for several decades. Thick smoke can be seen pouring from the tanks’ exhaust pipes. Though, it remains unknown whether the band ever got it to budge.
Visitors to the popular museum were stunned on Friday, according to the report. One father who had brought his son to visit the museum not knowing of the rebels’ actions told the AFP, “Can you believe it? They’re even stealing museum exhibits now.”
The tank and howitzers were taken as the Ukrainian National Guard began a large push towards Donetsk with their own (rather more modern) armored vehicles. Clashes on Sunday occurred within 10 kilometers of the Malasia Airlines flight 17 crash site, prompting a ceasefire within a 40-kilometer (25-mile) radius of the site on Monday in order for Dutch and international regulators to continue their investigation and search for bodies.
Whether continued fallout from the ill-fated 777—which, according to US intelligence, was shot down using a Russian-supplied missile system—is holding up further armaments and leading to desperate measures such as those at the Donetsk museum remains unclear.
Follow artnet News on Facebook:The world’s only supersonic passenger plane could return to the skies, with a group of aviation enthusiasts raising more than $400 million to see the Concorde fly again.
The aircraft was retired in the early 2000s, due to a combination of searing fuel prices and a much-publicised catastrophic crash in Paris in July 2000, which killed 113 people.
A group of aviation fans in England have raised $400 million in a bid to see the aircraft fly again – however the plane, which once flew from Paris to New York in a record two hours and 52 minutes, is unlikely to be given the green light from aviation regulators.
“The shape, and of course the performance of the aircraft – it’s an amazing aircraft, both inside and outside,” Nathalie Plan, from the Aeroscopia Museum told 9NEWS.
However, Ms Plan said she did not believe the plane would ever fly again.
“No, unfortunately not – it’s not possible anymore.
The Concorde flew a maximum speed of twice the speed of sound.
© Nine Digital Pty Ltd 2019A Way of Freedom
Writings | Awareness
This article first appeared in Tricycle, November, 2010
What is it like to do nothing? I mean, really do nothing, nothing at all — no recalling what has happened, no imagining what might happen, no reflecting on what is happening, no analyzing or explaining or controlling what you experience. Nothing!
Why would you even try? We struggle in life because of a tenacious habit of wanting life to be different from what it is: the room you are in is too warm, you don’t like your job, or your partner isn’t quite the person of your dreams. You adjust the thermostat, get a new job or tell your partner what you need. Now it’s too cool, you are earning less money, or your partner has found some flaws in you. The more we try to make life conform to our desires, the more we struggle, and the more we suffer. The only way out of this vicious cycle is to accept what arises, completely: in other words, do nothing.
Paradoxically, such radical acceptance opens a way of living that we could hardly have imagined.
Years ago, I attended a three-week retreat in Colorado. I had done many retreats, including seven years in France in which I had no communication with the outside world. There the days were full. We started meditation sessions well before sunrise, and ended late in the evening. We had daily and weekly rituals and much preparatory work and clean up. We practiced different meditation methods, with set periods for practice, set periods for study and a set number of days on each method. With so much to do and to learn, there was no free time.
This retreat was different. The only meditation instruction was “do nothing”. “That’s it?” I thought, “I came here to do nothing for three weeks?” We met for meals, one teaching session in the morning and one group practice session in the evening. We had a meditation interview every few days. The rest of the time was our own. Email, cell phone, text messages, all the usual means of communication weren’t available. With no practices to learn, no commentaries to study, no preparations for rituals I had, quite literally, nothing to do except sit, lie down or go for a walk.
My cabin was on a hillside that looked over a magnificent view of tree-covered hills, with a range of mountains just visible on the horizon. The silence was complete, highlighted by the songs of birds, the wind in the trees, rain and thunderstorms, and the grunts, scuffles or calls of animals in the dark. Every day, the sun rose, crossed the sky, and set, with the moon and stars dancing in the night.
“What a relief,” I thought, “plenty of time to rest and practice.” But I soon found that doing absolutely nothing, not even entertaining myself, wasn’t so easy.
Ajahn Cha, one of the great Thai teachers of the 20th century, gave the following practice instruction:
Put a chair in the middle of a room.Sit in the chair.See who comes to visit.
One has to be careful with such instructions. I once gave this to a woman who came to see me and was surprised to learn that she put a chair in the center of her living room, sat in it, and waited for people to visit. When nobody knocked on her door, she decided that meditation wasn’t for her. Ajahn Cha was, of course, speaking poetically. Nevertheless, in some sense, all of us are like this woman, waiting for something to happen.
No shortage of visitors for me! Relief, peace, a deep sense of relaxation, joy, and happiness all paid their respects. “Good,” I thought, “all this will deepen and wisdom or insight will come.” After all, I had read in many texts that, as the mind rests, it naturally becomes clear.
Instead, the visitors continued, but with a difference. The more deeply I relaxed, the more I became aware of stuff inside me, stuff stored in rusting boxes in mildewed basements. Along came memories, pleasant and unpleasant, stories about my life, old desires, boredom and a sense of futility. I kept pushing these visitors away, or analyzing them, trying to understand them so I could be free of them. I was back in the old struggle, trying to control my experience. The visitors became more disturbing, more demanding of attention. Some harbored hatred and a desire for revenge. Others cried with unfulfilled longing and yearning. Still others drugged me into a dull lethargy. They had no awareness of the beauty and peace around me. I began to lose hope that I would achieve anything in this retreat.
Hope is the one quality left in Pandora’s box and it is not clear whether it is a blessing or a curse. Eliot, in Four Quartets, writes:
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hopeFor hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faithBut the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without hope? The prospect seemed unimaginable. A chill crept down my spine and I found myself slipping into hope’s counterpart, fear. Was I going to sit on the side of this mountain and have nothing to show for it? A consistent theme in the many texts I had read and translated was “no hope, no fear.” I had never thought of applying that instruction to my concern about achievement.
For most of us, the demands of each day keep us busy. Hope and fear come as reactions to specific situations —rumors about possible promotions or layoffs, our child’s first competition or performance, illness in a parent, etc. The deeper hopes and fears remain, untended, forgotten perhaps, but there all the same. Again, from Four Quartets:
And the ragged rock in the restless waters,Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,In navigable weather it is always a seamarkTo lay a course by: but in the sombre seasonOr the sudden fury, is what it always was.
One of my ragged rocks was hope for achievement. I feared an acute disappointment if, at the end of the retreat, all I had done was sit on a mountain and contemplated my navel. Slowly, I realized that to do nothing meant I had to let go of deeply cherished beliefs that I was just beginning to sense, the belief, for instance, that I had to achieve something.
Most of us are quite happy to do nothing for a few minutes, perhaps an hour or two, or, if we have had a particularly demanding stretch, for a day or two, a few days at the most. But to do nothing, to produce nothing, to achieve nothing for a month, a year, six years or more, is quite a different kettle of fish.
I thought of my own teacher who had spent years in mountain retreats in Tibet. As he had told me himself, he would quite happily have stayed in the mountains but his teacher had demanded (in the strongest terms possible) he return to the monastery and teach training retreats. What was it like, I wondered, to be at peace with doing nothing day after day, month after month, year after year?
Then I thought about Longchenpa, the 14th century teacher, whose text was the basis for this retreat. He had spent fourteen years in a cave near Lhasa. What had it been like for him to sit day after day doing nothing?
The depth to which these teachers, and many others like them, had let go of any concern with success or failure was like a knife in my heart. Here was I, practicing for a mere three weeks, worrying about whether I was going to achieve anything. Only now did I appreciate what letting go of hope, ambition or achievement meant, and I found myself feeling a quite different kind of respect and appreciation for these teachers.
The classical texts have relatively little to say about the emotional turmoil that intensive practice often uncovers. Again, these lines from Eliot apply, even though he was writing about old age:
…the rending pain of re-enactmentOf all that you have done, and been; the shameOf motives late revealed, and the awarenessOf things ill done and done to others’ harmWhich once you took for exercise of virtue.Then fools’ approval stings, and honour stains.From wrong to wrong the exasperated spiritProceeds, unless restored by that refining fireWhere you must move in measure, like a dancer.
From the beginning of the retreat, space surrounded and permeated my experience but I had been unable to relate to it. I had been completely caught up in trying to control my experience. Now I stopped ignoring it and just stared into space. My relationship with the emotional turmoil changed, subtly.
Space, I realized, has many dimensions. In front of me was the vast space of the sky. It didn’t depend on anything and nothing depended on it. I watched the play of light and colors as the day passed. When the sun set and the sky lit up with shades of rose and yellow and blue, the space that let me see the sunset didn’t take on any color, yet it was not something apart. At night, it became an empty blackness, punctuated by a thousand points of light, but the panorama of stars was not separate from space. Likewise, thoughts, feelings, and sensations are not different from the space that is mind.
Silence is another kind of space. When everything is quiet and suddenly, there is a noise, we ordinarily say the silence was shattered. But it’s more accurate to say that we forget the silence and listen only to the sound. I started to listen to the silence, around me and inside me.
Time is another dimension. Kant once said that time is the medium in which we perceive thoughts, just as space is the medium in which we perceive objects. Hopes and fears, projections into the future, regrets and joys are all thoughts that come and go in time. Because there was nothing to do with any of them, I began to experience them as comings and goings, like the mists that rose from the ground in the early morning, only to vanish as the day progressed. Some days, what arose was more of a thunderstorm, but, like the thunderstorms in the mountains, the turmoil came and went on its own, leaving space as it was before, and the ground and trees refreshed and rich with life.
I became aware of another dimension, an infinite internal space that had to do with my ability to experience my body. This dimension had more the quality of depth: it seemed to go down forever. There was no bottom. There was no me there. It was like looking into a bottomless abyss, except that sometimes, I became the abyss. Years later, when discussing this experience with an aging teacher, he used the Tibetan phrase zhi mé tsa tral, or no ground, no root.
Two young boys were playing together. One asked the other, “We stand on the ground and the ground holds us up. What does the ground stand on?”
“Oh, my father explained that to me,” the second boy said, “the ground issupported by four giant elephants.”
“What do the elephants stand on, then?”
“They stand on the shell of a huge turtle.”
“What does the turtle stand on?
The second boy thought for a long time, and then said, “I think it’s turtles all the way down.”
Like the woman in the chair who waited for someone to knock on her door, I had been waiting for something to happen, some experience or insight that made sense of everything, put all the ghosts to rest and silenced the “thousand voices in the night.” For decades, I had held the belief, deeply embedded in our culture: know ye the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
“You have to be kidding,” I thought, “I have to let go of belief in truth?” Slowly, it was becoming clear to me that there is no truth out there — or in there, for that matter. There is only the way we experience things. To let go of this belief required a very different effort. Again, from Eliot:
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Here is where faith and devotion come into the picture. Devotion, whether to a tradition, a practice, a teacher or an ideal, is the fuel for faith. I had practiced with devotion before, in the form of guru yoga, or union with the teacher. It’s a powerful practice, greatly valued in the Tibetan tradition, where there are numerous prayers with titles such as “Devotion Pierces the Heart”. The teacher at this retreat exemplified this. He felt such devotion for his own teacher that he could not talk about him without crying.
Faith and devotion do not come easily to me. Now, here, at this retreat, I felt a different kind of devotion for my teachers and, with that, understood that there was nothing to do but to experience whatever came through the door.
We have a choice between two very different ways to meet what arises in experience.
The first is to rely on explanation. We interpret our experiences in life according to a set of deeply held assumptions. We may or may not be conscious of the assumptions, but they are there. Even when we explore our experience, we are usually looking for evidence that supports or confirms them. These assumptions are never questioned. They are taken as fundamental. A self-reinforcing dynamic develops that results in a closed system in which everything is explained, the mystery of life is dismissed, new ideas, perspectives, or approaches to life cannot enter and certain questions can never be asked. This I call belief.
The other way is to open and be willing to receive, not control, whatever arises, that is, not only allow, but embrace every sensation, feeling and thought, everything we experience. In this approach, we allow our experience to challenge our assumptions.
Here, there are no fundamental or eternal truths, and some things cannot be explained, they can only be experienced. This willingness to open to whatever arises internally or externally I call faith.
This being human is a guest houseEvery morning a new arrival.A joy, a depression, a meanness,some momentary awareness comesas an unexpected visitor.Welcome and entertain them all!~ Rumi
Early in the retreat, when difficult experiences arose, I would analyze them, trying to understand what had happened and why. I thought this would help to resolve them and then I wouldn’t have to be bothered by them. Sometimes I would be completely swallowed by emotions and sensations and only come to my senses a few minutes, or a few hours, later. Frequently, I just couldn’t face what was arising. I shut it down, or went for a walk. In short, if what arose didn’t fit my picture of what I wanted or needed, I would start doing something.
Gradually, I learned just to stare into space, in any of its dimensions, the sky, the silence, time or the infinite depth in my own body. I recognized that the only way I could do nothing was, well, do nothing. I had to receive whatever arose, experience it, and not do anything with it. I needed faith to experience powerful feelings of loneliness, worthlessness, despair, or shame, because I often felt I would die in the process. Irecalled how many times my teacher had said this, albeit in different words, “Rest in just recognizing.” But no one had said that “just recognizing” might lead to pain so intense that I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. And I came to appreciate that all my efforts in previous practice had built the capacity so that I could now rest and just recognize.
When I did open to everything, there was no opposition — there was no enemy. I didn’t have to struggle with experience. At the same time, there was no truth, no state of perfection, no ideal, no final achievement. Again, years later, in a conversation with another teacher about this experience, he said, “Don’t worry about truth. Just develop devotion so strongly that thinking stops, and rest right there.”
Any concept of higher truth creates hierarchy, and with that, authority, boundaries, dualism and opposition. What various religious traditions, including Buddhism, call truth is better described as a way of experiencing things. Such phrases as “all experience is empty” or “everything is an illusion” are better viewed as descriptions of experiences, stories, in effect, not statements about reality.
What, then, do we make of all the teachings of various spiritual traditions and other forms of human knowledge? For me, God, karma, rebirth, emptiness, Brahma, Atman, heaven, hell, all of these are stories that people use to understand, explain, or give direction to their lives. The same holds for scientific views, astronomy, biology, quantum mechanics, or neurology. If we wish to be free of suffering, to be free of struggle, then the way to look at experience is “there is no enemy” and stop opposing what arises in experience. Is it difficult and challenging, yes, but it’s possible. And the way to learn to do that is to simply do nothing.
“How strange!” I thought, as the retreat came to a close, “Who would have thought youcould find a way of freedom simply by doing nothing?”Image copyright AFP Image caption Jerome Kerviel says his walk from Rome to Paris has been liberating
The French rogue trader who caused huge losses at bank Societe Generale has lost his appeal against a three-year jail sentence.
France's highest court upheld the jail sentence against Jerome Kerviel but ordered a review of the 4.9bn euros (£4.1bn) in damages he was told to pay.
The court said a lower court decision had not taken into account the bank's own responsibility when it ordered him to make good the bank's entire losses.
Kerviel's lawyer called it "a victory".
"We are starting afresh," said David Koubbi.
"We are going to ask for an expert assessment to establish exactly what happened at Societe Generale. This is the end of the Jerome Kerviel case and the beginning of a new case against Societe Generale."
The bank responded by saying: "Jerome Kerviel has lost his court case. Societe Generale has won. There were failings at the Societe Generale but they have been repaired."
'Available to police'
Societe Generale revealed in 2008 that Kerviel had run up $50bn (£33bn; 38bn euros) of unauthorised trades which had to be unwound.
The process cost the bank 4.9bn euros - the biggest loss of its kind in history.
A new civil trial will take place to decide the eventual damages Kerviel will have to pay.
Kerviel has spent the past three weeks walking back to Paris from Rome, where he met Pope Francis, and is currently near Bologna.
He told the BBC the walk was helping him to come to terms with his past and his future.
Kerviel has always admitted the unauthorised trades, but said officials at Societe Generale knew what he was doing but turned a blind eye as long as it was making money, says the BBC's Hugh Schofield in Paris.
Kerviel said: "The only goal was money, money, money for the bank. I didn't care about what I was doing."
He said he was not trying to evade justice: "I am going back to France - I remain at the disposal of justice and the police, so if they want me I am available."Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Dec. 13, 2017, 7:11 PM GMT / Updated Dec. 13, 2017, 7:11 PM GMT By Lucy Bayly
The Federal Reserve raised interest rates by one-quarter of a point on Wednesday, in a widely expected move that signifies the central bank’s confidence that the economy is continuing to strengthen.
The Fed set its benchmark borrowing rate at 1.25 percent to 1.5 percent at the conclusion of its two-day December policymaking meeting, and projected three more hikes in 2018.
Wednesday's decision was not unanimous, however, with a dissenting vote from two Fed presidents: Chicago's Charles Evans and Neel Kashkari of Minneapolis.
Federal Reserve Board chair Janet Yellen testifies before Congress on November 17, 2016.
It’s the third rate hike this year, and part of a slow but steady strategy to ensure the economy does not overheat.
For almost a decade after the financial crisis, the Fed held off introducing any rate hikes at all, making money easy to borrow while the economy got back on its feet. Now, with unemployment at its lowest level in 17 years and consumer spending on the rise, the Fed is signaling that it is ready to remove the scaffolding supporting the nation’s economic recovery.
The Fed rate affects the cost of borrowing for everything from savings to credit cards to adjustable rate mortgages.
"The third rate hike of the year and fifth in the past two years means that consumers with credit card debt and home equity lines of credit will be welcomed into 2018 with higher interest rates," said Greg McBride, chief financial analyst at Bankrate.
Today’s meeting was the penultimate one for outgoing Fed Chair Janet Yellen, who is set to be succeeded by current Fed Governor Jerome “Jay” Powell.
A Republican and former hedge fund executive, Powell was approved by the Senate Banking Committee last month by a 22-1 vote, and is expected to receive full confirmation by the Senate before Yellen’s term ends on Feb. 3.For U.S. food and beverage companies, life isn't as sweet as they would like.
The industry-backed Coalition for Sugar Reform argues that a trade deal the U.S. announced last week with Mexico will drive up sugar costs for candy makers and others, which are already among the world's highest, and that it will cost U.S. consumers an estimated $1 billion per year.
High U.S. sugar prices have caused confectioners such a Hershey (HSY) and smaller family-owned businesses such as Atkinson Candy to shift production to lower-cost countries such as Mexico in recent years.
Eric Atkinson, head of Atkinson Candy, resisted pressure from his father, Basil Eric Atkinson Jr., to move the company's manufacturing to Costa Rica in the 1990s. However, Atkinson Candy, best known for its Chick-O-Stick bars, decided to set up a satellite facility in Guatemala that now accounts for roughly 10 percent of its sales.
Did sugar industry play down health hazards for decades?
"The food and beverage manufacturers would like changes in the sugar support program that make it less restrictive [for them]," said economist Tom Earley of the consulting firm Agralytica. "There was a provision added to the 2008 and 2014 Farm Bills that limits the Secretary of Agriculture's ability to adjust a number of imports until halfway through the marketing year (which corresponds to the fiscal year). Basically, we go through half the year without enough sugar in the system and uncertainty about how much sugar is going to be imported."
Sugar subsidies, which cost taxpayers nearly $2 billion, have been controversial for decades. Conservative groups such as The Heritage Foundation and Americans for Tax Reform have called for their abolishment. Other economists have denounced the subsidies as a wasteful form of corporate welfare. However, they enjoy plenty of support in Congress and have for years.
Beverage industry blames new sugar tax for lost jobs in Philly
U.S. sugar producers filed complaints with the U.S. Department of Commerce and the International Trade Commission in 2014, accusing Mexican producers of dumping illegally subsidized sugar on the U.S. market. The ITC ruled in favor of the U.S. industry a year later.
Under terms of the agreement worked out last week between the U.S. and Mexico, Mexican prices for raw sugar and refined sugar will rise. The U.S. also reduced the percentage of refined sugar that may be imported and increased the amount of raw sugar available to U.S. refiners.
U.S. producers balked at the agreement, claiming it contained a loophole that would allow Mexican producers to continue dumping their product.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross expressed confidence that the government could address industry concerns as the agreement gets finalized. The American Sugar Alliance, which represents producers and farmers, raised objections to the deal, which it said needed to clarify that the U.S. Agriculture Department and not Mexico has the power to determine the type and purity level of sugar imports.
"We oppose it because it's leading to U.S. factory closures and job loss," said Phillip Hayes, an ASA spokesman.
The alliance claims that unfair competition from Mexico has "already cost U.S. sugar farmers and producers more than $4 billion in losses and are jeopardizing 142,000 jobs in 22 states."
--The Associated Press contributed to this report.1 Introduction
Some of the AXIOM project task priorities (usually in order of importance).
If you're unfamiliar with our current project the AXIOM Beta is the world's first open source, free software, open hardware digital cinema camera - AXIOM Project Background.
Please accept this information as a call for assistance. If you have the required skills, and would be willing to contribute some of your time towards development, then these links should help introduce you to exactly what's required.
It would be beneficial for all concerned if you were to make contact through the preferred channels so that you can be brought up to speed on what's current - See Join the Team for contact channels and languages, and Useful Links for links to repos, sample files etc.
2 AXIOM Beta Related
2.1 Context: Road to Shipping AXIOM Beta Compact
We published this article on 17.07.17... which details some of the remaining tasks prior to the shipping of AXIOM Beta CP.
We've been saying that an announcement will be made regarding shipping time-frames in the first half of August but this probably won't differ too much from what was said in the comments of the linked article, ie:
Including the items described in this article there are ten tasks that need to complete, some of which are more complex than others. Works on an SDI plug-in module have now commenced and a finished component is expected in the first half of November. We're confident over this time frame but with this in mind it's safe to say that the camera won't be shipping in time for December.
Because we're a small team, and because some of us have commitments running alongside the project, it can be difficult to make accurate predictions with respect to exactly when specific tasks will complete but, when discussing this 'last leg' towards shipping, a consensus has been that we'd like to try for March/April 2018, and provided there are no significant setbacks this is potentially realistic, however, as detailed in this article there are some necessary |
Center City Hotel, PA - Front Desk 2 Hotel Interior
Welcome to the Embassy Suites by Hilton Philadelphia Center City offering spacious two-room suites, complimentary drinks and free mad-to-order breakfast daily. /resources/media/es/PHLDTES/en_US/img/shared/full_page_image_gallery/main/ES_lobbyarea01_4_1280x430_FitToBoxSmallDimension_Center.jpg Embassy Suites Philadelphia - Center City Hotel, PA - Lobby Area 3 Hotel Interior
Enjoy our free made-to-order breakfast each morning, and a hotel Evening Reception every night in the lobby - featuring complimentary refreshments and great company. *Service of alcohol subject to state and local laws. Must be of legal drinking age. /resources/media/es/PHLDTES/en_US/img/shared/full_page_image_gallery/main/ES_diningarea01_5_1280x430_FitToBoxSmallDimension_Center.jpg Embassy Suites Philadelphia - Center City Hotel, PA - Dining Area 4 Hotel Interior
Guests enjoy complimentary evening receptions each evening. Grab a drink and relax with colleagues and friends. /resources/media/es/PHLDTES/en_US/img/shared/full_page_image_gallery/main/ES_diningarea02_6_1280x430_FitToBoxSmallDimension_Center.jpg Embassy Suites Philadelphia - Center City Hotel, PA - Dining Area 5 Dining
At the Embassy Suites Philadelphia - Center City hotel, the small things make a big difference to your stay. Relax in the living area of your hotel suite. If you'd prefer, you can sit at your spacious work desk and start your day the professional way. /resources/media/es/PHLDTES/en_US/img/shared/full_page_image_gallery/main/ES_suiteseatingarea01_7_1280x430_FitToBoxSmallDimension_Center.jpg Embassy Suites Philadelphia - Center City Hotel, PA - Suite Seating Area 6 Suites
Relax and spread out at the Embassy Suites Philadelphia Center City. All of our spacious two-room suites consist of a private bedroom with one king size or two double beds and a separate living room with queen size sofa bed and a range of in-suite amenities, including: well-lit work area, high-speed Internet access, dining area, kitchen area with microwave, coffee maker, refrigerator, and wet bar. /resources/media/es/PHLDTES/en_US/img/shared/full_page_image_gallery/main/ES_suite001_8_1280x430_FitToBoxSmallDimension_Center.jpg Embassy Suites Philadelphia - Center City Hotel, PA - Suite 7 Suites
Enjoy impressive views of Philadelphia from your spacious suite. /resources/media/es/PHLDTES/en_US/img/shared/full_page_image_gallery/main/ES_suiteview01_9_1280x430_FitToBoxSmallDimension_Center.jpg Embassy Suites Philadelphia - Center City Hotel, PA - Suite View 8 Suites
The luxury furnishings in our guestroom suites include queen sleeper sofa, armchair, work desk, activity table with upholstered chairs, two televisions, alarm clock radio with MP3 connection, refrigerator, wet bar and microwave oven. /resources/media/es/PHLDTES/en_US/img/shared/full_page_image_gallery/main/ES_insuitedining01_10_1280x430_FitToBoxSmallDimension_Center.jpg Embassy Suites Philadelphia - Center City Hotel, PA - In-Suite Dining 9 Suites
We've put a lot of thought into our suites here at the Embassy Suites Philadelphia, so that all you have to do is turn up and make the most of everything we have to offer. Your stay with us should be effortless, stress-free, and an absolute pleasure. /resources/media/es/PHLDTES/en_US/img/shared/full_page_image_gallery/main/ES_kingbed01_11_1280x430_FitToBoxSmallDimension_Center.jpg Embassy Suites Philadelphia - Center City Hotel, PA - King Bed 10 Suites
The bathroom features a well-lit vanity and a tub with shower. The bath is appointed with plush towels and a rounded shower rod for extra space and comfort. /resources/media/es/PHLDTES/en_US/img/shared/full_page_image_gallery/main/ES_bathroomvanity01_12_1280x430_FitToBoxSmallDimension_Center.jpg Embassy Suites Philadelphia - Center City Hotel, PA - Bathroom Vanity 11 Suites
Select a Double/Double suite offering various views of Philadelphia. /resources/media/es/PHLDTES/en_US/img/shared/full_page_image_gallery/main/ES_doublebeds01_13_1280x430_FitToBoxSmallDimension_Center.jpg Embassy Suites Philadelphia - Center City Hotel, PA - Double Beds 12 Suites
Conduct a productive board meeting at Embassy Suites by Hilton Philadelphia Center City. /resources/media/es/PHLDTES/en_US/img/shared/full_page_image_gallery/main/ES_meetingspace01_14_1280x430_FitToBoxSmallDimension_Center.jpg Embassy Suites Philadelphia - Center City Hotel, PA - Meeting Space 13 Events & Meetings
Plan your next event or meeting in Philadelphia. /resources/media/es/PHLDTES/en_US/img/shared/full_page_image_gallery/main/ES_meetingspace02_15_1280x430_FitToBoxSmallDimension_Center.jpg Embassy Suites Philadelphia - Center City Hotel, PA - Meeting Space 14 Events & Meetings
Guests of the Embassy Suites Philadelphia- Center City hotel in downtown Philadelphia are also welcome to enjoy a range of hotel-wide amenities and services, including: fitness center, hotel business center, and meeting rooms. /resources/media/es/PHLDTES/en_US/img/shared/full_page_image_gallery/main/ES_gym001_16_1280x430_FitToBoxSmallDimension_Center.jpg Embassy Suites Philadelphia - Center City Hotel, PA - Gym 15 Amenities & Services
Feel the ambiance of historic Philadelphia when staying at Embassy Suites by Hilton Philadelphia Center City. /resources/media/es/PHLDTES/en_US/img/shared/full_page_image_gallery/main/ES_elevatorlanding01_17_1280x430_FitToBoxSmallDimension_Center.jpg Embassy Suites Philadelphia - Center City Hotel, PA - Elevator Landing 16 Hotel Interior
Our gift shop is stocked with all of your on-the-road needs. /resources/media/es/PHLDTES/en_US/img/shared/full_page_image_gallery/main/es_giftshop_3_1280x430_FitToBoxSmallDimension_Center.jpg Embassy Suites Philadelphia - Center City Hotel, Pa - Gift Shop 17 Amenities & Services
The Embassy Suites Philadelphia - Center City hotel is centrally located in downtown Philadelphia, surrounded by museums, major corporations, hospitals, universities, local attractions, restaurants, and shopping outlets. /resources/media/es/PHLDTES/en_US/img/shared/full_page_image_gallery/main/es_gstrmview_4_1280x430_FitToBoxSmallDimension_Center.jpg Embassy Suites Philadelphia - Center City Hotel, Pa - Guestroom View 18 Amenities & Services“
Devil: (Holding up glass) Come, Mr. Smith, your good health. I propose we offer a toast. Smith: Well proceed. Devil: Here's to my good friend, Joe Smith, may all sorts of ill-luck befall him, and may he never be suffered to enter my kingdom, either in time or eternity, for he would almost make me forget that I am a devil, and make a gentleman of me, while he gently overthrows my government at the same time that he wins my friendship. Smith: Here to his Satanic Majesty; may he be driven from the earth and be forced to put to sea in a stone canoe with an iron paddle, and may the canoe sink, and a shark swallow the canoe and its royal freight and an alligator swallow the shark and may the alligator be bound in the northwest corner of hell, the door be locked, key lost, and a blind man hunting for it.
”0 Shares 0
0
0
0
"The Syrian Army troops, tipped off by intelligence agents, found out the hideout of a group of Nouralddeen al-Zinki movement in al-Malaah region and stormed their position, killing several terrorists, including the man who decapitated the Palestinian boy," the sources said.
A video showed on Wednesday that Nouralddeen al-Zinki Movement, named by the US as a moderate group, arrested, tortured and severely executed a very young boy on charges of cooperating with the Syrian government forces.
A video released by militants near Handarat refugee camp showed that the terrorists of Nouralddeen al-Zinki tortured a kid on charges of assisting Syrian soldiers and beheaded him in front of the people over a truck.
Nouralddeen al-Zinki is affiliated to the Free Syrian Army which receives US financial supports as a moderate group.
The Takfiri group has been using US-made TOW anti-tank missiles in Aleppo battlefields; FNA reported.Sep 18, 2015
by Dr Michael Salla
Could the highly popular television series Stargate SG-1 (aired 1997 to 2007) be more science than fiction? Secret space program whistleblower Corey Goode claims it is based on real-life advanced travel technologies found all over the planet, solar system and galaxy.
In the latest Cosmic Disclosure episode, “Portals: The Cosmic Web”, Goode responds to questions posed by the host, David Wilcock, about various kinds of travel technologies used by ancient societies and extraterrestrial civilizations. Goode described the difference between various “portal” or “wormhole” technologies that either naturally occurred, or were built by a highly advanced ancient civilization not known even to current extraterrestrial visitors to Earth. This is virtually the same scenario depicted in the Stargate SG-1 series, where stargates are described as being built by a race of beings called “the Ancients.”
Goode referred to technologies depicted in the Stargate SG-1 as a fairly accurate illustration of how ring-shaped ancient portals or “stargates” actually look and work. He said that the navigation system is similar to how the internet operates whereby numerical sequences are assigned for individual computers, networks, ISPs and countries. This is the basis for the IP (Internet Protocol) numbers, which are the backbone for navigating the World Wide Web. You can check the IP address of the device you are using to read this article here.
Similarly, Goode says that a series of numerical coordinates based on hyperdimensional mathematics designate different galaxies, solar systems, planets, etc., which becomes the address for a particular portal. This has similarities with the coordinate navigation system depicted in the original Stargate movie (1994) that was then incorporated into the Stargate SG-1 television series.
Goode is not alone in describing such a numerical address system. Wilcock pointed out that another secret space program whistleblower, Henry Deacon (aka Arthur Neumann), also claims that this is the navigation method used for portal travel. Deacon began publicly disclosing his information regarding portals/stargates back in a 2006 interview on Project Camelot.
Goode said that these ancient portals have been found all over the world, and these are highly sought after by covert teams from the U.S. and other countries. Another whistleblower, Dan Burisch, claims that he was part of a covert team that went into Iraq to find its portal technologies. Indeed, Deacon independently confirmed that a stargate had been discovered in Iraq. There was much circumstantial evidence supporting Burisch’s and Deacon’s claim that the real reason for the U.S. invasion of Iraq was to find ancient portal technologies, as I proposed back in 2003.
In an earlier episode of Cosmic Disclosure, Goode described the sun as a natural portal that is used by spacecraft to enter into or leave our solar system. Elaborating further, he said that solar filaments form torsion fields that create traversable wormholes for portal travel between suns in our galaxy.
The most startling aspect of Goode’s testimony is that the natural and ancient portal systems form a “cosmic web” that spans the universe. By jumping from one portal location to another, one can travel incredible distances between galaxies, and across the universe. Goode’s claim of a cosmic web of portals was also depicted in the Stargate SG-1 series.
The number of similarities between Goode’s account of portal travel with what was depicted in the Stargate SG-1 series raises an intriguing possibility. Was the series part of a “soft disclosure” or “acclimation program” whereby the entertainment industry was used to prepare the public for the truth about portal travel?
It is very plausible that the producers of Stargate SG-1 were given the key ideas that would disclose the highly advanced science used for portal travel, using fiction as a cover. Many episodes of the series depicted how the “stargate/portal” technology was kept secret from the Earth’s population, and the ethical problems this caused for USAF personnel.
One episode even featured the USAF’s then serving Chief of Staff, General Michael Ryan, who appeared in the Cheyenne Mountain complex which housed the ancient stargate technology.
It is very unusual for a sitting member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to do a cameo for television, let alone a science fiction show depicting his military service hiding advanced technologies from the public for national security reasons. This Stargate episode clearly implied that very senior officials in the USAF were in favor of “soft disclosure” through the entertainment industry.
There are many more parallels between the Stargate SG-1 series and Corey Goode’s revelations about the portal travel system used in secret space programs. He has earlier described full disclosure as an event that will soon occur through massive document dumps. In this latest episode of Cosmic Disclosure, Goode reveals that the general public has been silently prepared for such an event by the “soft disclosure” offered by popular shows such as Stargate SG-1.
© Michael E. Salla, Ph.D. Copyright Notice
[Note: The first two episodes of Cosmic Disclosure are available for free on the Gaiam TV website. The first episode is on Youtube. To watch the whole season of Cosmic Disclosure, you need to subscribe to Gaiam TV. If you subscribe using this link, then a portion of your monthly subscription will go towards supporting Corey Goode as he continues his disclosures. His website is here.]
[9/17/15 – Thanks to Chris Breck for providing a screenshot of the credits for Stargate SG-1]It’s deeply misguided to criticize the New Atheists for attacking Islam and branding it as an especially pernicious faith. It’s even more misguided to label them as racist “Islamophobes”. Such critics are in fact erecting a double standard for human rights, as Islam is clearly more oppressive than other major faiths, and more eager to impose its religious “truths” on others. It is the faith whose members can embrace burqas, honor killings, fatwas, and acid attacks on schoolgirls. It is the unique faith that threatens to exterminate people who name teddy bears after their prophet. (I’ll be discussing the new Pew Report on Muslim beliefs later this week).
Two nice palliatives to the “Islamophobia” canard have been published in the last week. Ali A. Rivzi’s piece in PuffHo, “An atheist Muslim’s perspective on the ‘root causes’ of Islamist jihadism and the politics of Islamophobia, is particularly telling because Rivzi is an ex-Muslim, as well as a Pakistani-Canadian writer and physician living in Toronto.
Rivzi begins by recounting Thomas Jefferson’s meeting in 1786 with Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, Libya’s ambassador to London. Jefferson noted:
The ambassador answered us that [their right] was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.
This thread of jihadist thought continues to this day. Yet while those words were once imputed to religious belief, now many liberals are desperately ascribe them to causes not in existence in 1786. Rivzi continues:
So where did Abdul Rahman Adja’s bin Laden-esque words come from? They couldn’t have been a response to American imperialism (the start of the conflict precedes the presidency of George Washington), U.S. foreign policy, globalization, AIPAC or Islamophobia. Yet his words are virtually identical to those spouted ad nauseum by jihadists today who justify their bellicosity as a reaction to these U.S.-centric factors, which were nonexistent in Adja’s time. How do we make sense of this? Well, the common denominator here just happens to be the elephant in the room. In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings and the foiled al Qaeda-backed plot in Toronto, the “anything but jihad” brigade is out in full force again. If the perpetrators of such attacks say they were influenced by politics, nationalism, money, video games or hip-hop, we take their answers at face value. But when they repeatedly and consistently cite their religious beliefs as their central motivation, we back off, stroke our chins and suspect that there has to be something deeper at play, a “root cause.” The taboo against criticizing religion is still so astonishingly pervasive that centuries of hard lessons haven’t yet opened our eyes to what has been apparent all along: It is often religion itself, not the “distortion,” “hijacking,” “misrepresentation” or “politicization” of religion, that is the root cause. The recent attack on “new atheists” like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens by Nathan Lean and Murtaza Hussain have been endorsed by renowned liberal writers like Glenn Greenwald, who has also recently joined a chorus of denialists convinced that jihad and religious fervor had nothing to do with the Tsarnaev brothers’ motive, despite an abundance of evidence to the contrary. (HuffPost Live recently had a great segment holding Murtaza Hussain accountable for his claims.) In a way, these attacks on Dawkins et al. are a good thing. Typically, resorting to ad hominem attacks and/or labeling the opposing side “bigoted” is a last resort, when the opponent is unable to generate a substantive counterargument.
I’ll give one more excerpt from Rivzi, but do read the piece yourself, as well as Sean Faircloth’s related piece at the Richard Dawkins site, “Are liberals finally going to get it this time about Islam?”
Rivzi (my emphasis):
I also understand that extremism in any ideology isn’t a distortion of that ideology. It is an informed, steadfast adherence to its fundamentals, hence the term “fundamentalism.” When you think of a left-wing extremist, do you think of a greedy capitalist? Would you imagine a right-wing extremist to be dedicated to government-funded social welfare programs? The “extremists” and strict followers of the Jain faith, which values the life of every being, including insects, don’t kill more than their average co-religionists. Instead, they avoid eating foods stored overnight so as not to kill even the microorganisms that may have collected in the meantime. In a true religion of peace, the “extremists” would be nonviolent pacifists to an extreme (and perhaps annoying) degree, not the opposite. Too often in the aftermath of these tragedies, whether they occur in Boston or Karachi, I notice people rushing to defend the faith from judgment instead of acknowledging the victims. If a link is considered or even discovered, everyone from the Western media to Hollywood deems that person “Islamophobic” for linking Islam to terrorism. But the number-one reason that terrorism is linked with Islam is not the media or “Islamophobes.” It is that jihadi terrorists link themselves with Islam.... For the fast-growing secularist/humanist movement, criticism of religion isn’t a demonstration of bigotry but a struggle against it. To us, bigotry against bigotry isn’t bigotry, and intolerance of intolerance isn’t intolerance.
Those liberals who accuse critics of Islam of being “Islamophobes” remind me of those pro-evolutionists who get mad when I emphasize the obvious fact that virtually all creationism comes from religion. There is no doubt of that, and no doubt that the tenets of Islam motivate most Islamic terrorists. They say so! Are we to second-guess them? In fact, religiously-motivated creationists hide their true motivations (e.g., advocates of Intelligent Design) far more often than do Muslim jihadists.
The “Islamophobia” canard comes, in part, from a sneaking suspicion that it’s bad to criticize religion because some people simply need it. Combined with this faitheism is the double standard that we shouldn’t hold other ethnic groups to as high a standard as we do our own. But when religions infringe on basic human rights, as Islam does so frequently, then it is not bigotry to criticize it.
Even more misguided is the assertion that Islam’ is no worse than any other religion in suppressing human rights. As if Quakers would throw acid on schoolgirls or issue fatwas! Such claims are simply stupid, but typical of a mentality that abandons all rationality when defending faith itself.
In response to such a claim by Glenn Greenwald, Sam Harris proposed a “dueling cartoon” contest:
What Sam proposed here is that he would post cartoons making fun of any faith other than Islam, and in return Greenwald would post anti-Islamic cartoons. A very clever proposal, and one with a predictable outcome.
Greenwald didn’t respond. Checkmate Harris.Peru Six ordered to return to South America after appeal rejected
Updated
One of six Australians accused of murdering a hotel doorman in Peru says the group will not defy an order to return the country because they have nothing to hide.
The Australians - Jessica Vo, brothers Hugh and Tom Hanlon, along with Harrison Geier, Andrew Pilat, and Sam Smith - are accused of killing Lino Rodriguez Vilchez while travelling in Peru in January last year.
Mr Rodriguez Vilchez's family claims the Australians pushed the 45-year-old from an apartment building after a dispute over a noise complaint.
The death was originally ruled a suicide, but investigators reopened their inquiries after a public campaign by Mr Rodriguez Vilchez's brother, Wimber, who argued the evidence appeared inconsistent with suicide.
The group, known as the Peru Six, maintain they are innocent.
They have been ordered to front court in Lima in August, but they fear they will not receive a fair trial.
Mr Geier says a Peruvian judge has rejected their request to deliver evidence via video-link from Australia.
But he says the group will not defy the summons.
"We just want an opportunity to actually give statements, so far they haven't allowed us to have any input whatsoever," he said.
Mr Geier says there has been an outpouring of support from the public and officials.
"The Government has been great and the various departments like DFAT and obviously Bob Carr and the Attorney-General," he said.
The group's lawyer has indicated there will be another appeal before they agree to appear in a Peruvian court
Topics: courts-and-trials, law-crime-and-justice, murder-and-manslaughter, crime, australia, nsw, peru
First postedWhat’s up with … ex-Bears QB Steve Fuller?
BY NEIL HAYES
For the Sun-Times
Jay Cutler doesn’t have to be a strong leader to be a successful quarterback. Ask former Bears backup Steve Fuller.
Fuller can think of at least one scenario in which Cutler could be a successful quarterback for the Bears without being a natural leader. Unfortunately, it involves the late Walter Payton.
‘‘The answer is probably not — unless there is a really, really strong personality,’’ Fuller said when asked whether a quarterback could be successful without being a leader. ‘‘I could have been a success with a guy like Walter Payton as the designated leader, but those situations are rare.
‘‘I don’t see how you can’t be a strong personality when the ball is in your hands and you have such a factor in winning and losing a game. I would put leader as the
No. 1 quality every quarterback should have.”
First-year general manager Ryan Pace and coach John Fox are signing free agents and preparing for the NFL draft in an attempt to resurrect the Bears. At the same time, they seem resigned to the fact that their future quarterback isn’t on the roster and might not
be anytime soon.
This might be a good time to remind Bears fans that even when the franchise was at its best, the quarterback situation was far from ideal. Although Jim McMahon was entrenched as the starter, Fuller made four starts in 1984 and five during the 1985 Super Bowl season.
Is he the most overlooked member of the 1985 Bears?
‘‘I would say just the opposite,’’ Fuller said. ‘‘As a backup on a really good team, I think I’ve gotten as much attention and support as I deserve, especially from Chicago people. I have no worries or complaints whatsoever. To be even a small contributor was fabulous, looking back on it. The single fact that I was a 1985 Chicago Bear is a great benefit and joy to me.’’
It also has been sobering in recent years because so many of his teammates, including McMahon, are paying a physical price for all the hits delivered and absorbed in pursuit of the Bears’ only Lombardi Trophy.
‘‘It’s a function of us getting older,’’ Fuller said. ‘‘When you start getting into your 50s, I won’t say everything hurts, but everything does hurt. The cognitive issues are most worrisome because that really steps into your lifestyle and ability. You certainly want to be a friend and be there if they need you.’’
As the offensive coordinator at Hilton Head High School in South Carolina, Fuller realizes more than most that he’s teaching kids to play a game that’s inherently dangerous.
‘‘You try to be part of the solution with teaching methods and how you approach it,’’ he said. ‘‘You also have to call out guys who don’t have the proper mentality or willingness to stay healthy and do it the right way. It’s not the type of game you can half-ass. You have to commit to the training and weightlifting and agility work to better prepare yourself as a player. It’s going to be an issue as long as we’re playing the game.’’
Success at quarterback is dependent on a lot of factors, perhaps none as important as timing. Fuller wonders how things might have been different for him if he hadn’t been thrust into the starting lineup as a rookie for a mediocre Chiefs team in 1979.
‘‘Some guys make it strictly on talent without the work ethic,’’ he said. “There are a lot of guys who make it on preparation, work ethic, intelligence, football savvy. I think a lot of it has to do with fitting into the right system with the right coordinator and surrounding cast.
‘‘[Joe] Montana was one of the greatest quarterbacks ever, but what if he had gone to the Falcons? I’m sure he still would’ve been great, but his career would have been much different.’’
Fuller still has hope for Cutler.
‘‘I don’t know Jay, but I like Jay,’’ he said. ‘‘He gets a bad rap. I don’t know where all that comes from. He’s a talented player, but he’s searching for the right fit. The right fit might be a coaching staff, a coordinator or the guys around him.
‘‘I get a funny feeling it’s all going to work itself out, but it has to happen quickly.’’
THE STEVE FULLER FILE
Then: Bears backup quarterback.
Now: Husband, father, real-estate developer and offensive coordinator at Hilton Head (South Carolina)
High School.
Quote: ‘‘If we had not figured out a way to finish that season the way we did, [‘The Super Bowl Shuffle’] would’ve been a 30-year embarrassment.’’Two Republican officials in New Jersey switched political parties over what they said are racist comments made by presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Hackensack Mayor John Labrosse and Deputy Mayor Kathleen Canestrino filed a change of party affiliation to independents on Thursday with the Bergen County Board of Elections, they announced in a news release.
“The divisive and racist statements that Trump keeps making are insulting to many of our people and completely unacceptable. We don’t want a young student in one of our schools hearing these things and believing that their own elected officials are supporting these types of statements,” the pair said in a statement.
Census figures show about 17,000 of the city’s nearly 44,000 residents in 2014 were foreign-born. Nearly 13,000 spoke Spanish at home, according to the data.
“We felt at this time, the best thing for us to do is to make a statement so that the citizens of our town are aware that we support the diversity in our community,” Canestrino told 1010 WINS.
Labrosse and Canestrino said there was not a specific comment that influenced their decision. They say it was the general tone of the campaign.
“And hearing these types of comments, it was really offensive to both of us,” Canestrino told WCBS 880’s Marla Diamond.
Their decision to switch party affiliations came after the state’s top Republican, Gov. Chris Christie, refused to criticize Trump’s comments about an American-born federal judge of Mexican heritage and said that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee is not a racist.
“Those are Donald’s opinions and he has the right to express them, the same way anybody else has the right to express their views regarding how they’re treated in the civil or criminal courts in this country,” Christie said.
Trump said that U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel cannot judge him fairly in lawsuits against Trump University because he is of Mexican heritage and Trump has pledged to build a wall with Mexico. Trump later said in a statement that his comments were “misconstrued” as an attack against people of Mexican heritage.
While filling in for Boomer Esiason during the Boomer & Carton Show Thursday morning, the governor also chimed in on elected Republicans who complain about Trump or have pulled their support.
“All these guys — governors, senators — they all sat on the sidelines. I went and asked these people for their support and they said, ‘let’s see how it plays out.’ Now they don’t like how it played out and they say ‘well, what are we going to do?’ What are we going to do? Millions of people voted. It is still a democracy and the fact is, the voters of our party and the voters of the Democratic Party have a right to pick who they want to pick,” he said.
Even though Labrosse and Canestrino were registered Republicans, Hackensack selects council members in a nonpartisan election.
(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. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)Personalized medicine, often applied to treat cancer, may be possible for patients with multiple sclerosis as well. Certain patients respond differently to certain multiple sclerosis medications, such as interferon-β (IFNβ), and researchers at San Raffaele Scientific Institute in Milan may have an answer as to why. The team, led by Federica Esposito, MD, PhD, found that multiple sclerosis patients with a specific mutation in the gene SLC9A9 have more frequent relapses despite treatment with IFNβ.
“A proportion of multiple sclerosis patients experience disease activity despite treatment,” wrote Dr. Esposito, explaining the motivation behind the study. “The early identification of the most effective drug is critical to impact long-term outcome and to move toward a personalized approach.”
To achieve this goal, the research team looked for associations between multiple sclerosis patient gene expression and response to treatment with IFNβ. The researchers’ findings, published in Annals of Neurology and entitled, “A Pharmacogenetic study Implicates SLC9a9 in Multiple Sclerosis Disease Activity,” demonstrated that a genetic mutation in the gene SLC9a9, namely the rs9828519G variant, can be used to predict how multiple sclerosis patients will respond to treatment.
.
“Exploring the function of this gene, we see that SLC9A9 mRNA expression is diminished in multiple sclerosis subjects who are more likely to have relapses,” noted Dr. Esposito. When the research team used patient-derived T cells to study the effects of SLC9A9 gene expression on IFN, they saw an increase in the pro-inflammatory molecule IFNγ.
RELATED: Mitochondria May Play a Role in MS Development and Progression
The new information in this study may be able to screen multiple sclerosis patients for efficacious disease therapies. For example, if a patient carries a mutation in SLC9A9 that prevents its transcription into mRNA, that patient may not be well suited for IFNβ and may be a candidate for a different treatment option.
The idea is similar to that of MSPrecise, best described by an article published in Gene, “MSPrecise: A Molecular Diagnostic Test for Multiple Sclerosis Using Next Generation Sequencing.” This screen also finds mutations in DNA, specifically in cerebrospinal fluid-derived B cells that express a VH4 gene. Clinicians have shown it accurately identifies 84% of patients who develop relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (RRMS). If used together, a clinician may be able to determine if an individual has RRMS via MSPrecise, then determine if IFNβ is a suitable treatment by testing for SLC9A9 mutations.
At present, currently approved multiple sclerosis therapies are developed to treat a wide range of patients and are tested on diverse patient populations in order to determine if they are relatively effective in treating the disease in across a broad clinical population. However, as the human DNA is decoded and gene mutations are better understood, the more possible it becomes to tailor future MS therapies to maximize therapeutic value for each individual patient.Cairo: Thousands of Egyptians paid a tearful farewell to veteran lyricist Abdul Rahman Al Abnoudi, who died on Tuesday. He was 77.
Senior officials and celebrated singers attended Al Abnoudi’s funeral before his burial late Tuesday in a tomb near his house in the Suez Canal city of Esmailia.
Al Abnoudi, Egypt’s most famed lyricist in the past five decades, had stayed in Esmailia since early 2000 due to a lung disorder, leaving densely populated Cairo where he had lived since the 1960s when he had came to the Egyptian capital from his village Abnub, around 700 kilometres south of Cairo.
During his career, Al Abnoudi, who was skilled in writing poetry in the Egyptian dialect and his southern vernacular, produced 22 collections of lyricism. He also wrote lyrics for several of Egypt’s most celebrated singers, including Abdul Halim Hafez, Shadia, Najaat, Mohammad Munir and Ali Al Hajar.
He also penned lyrics for celebrated Lebanese singers Sabah and Majda Al Rumi.
His poems focused on the suffering and aspirations of the poor, landing him in trouble with Egypt’s rulers.
In 1966, when Jamal Abdul Nasser was Egypt’s president, Al Abnoudi was detained for joining a communist group. After his release, Al Abnoudi remained an opponent of Nasser. But after Nasser’s death in 1970, Al Abnoudi displayed a U-turn in his view of the late leader, becoming one of his staunchest supporters. Al Abnoudi attributed this radical change to what he called “Nasser’s siding with the poor”.
Al Abnoudi had strained relations with Anwar Al Sadat, who succeeded Nasser in power until 1981. His writings critical of Al Sadat’s regime brought him under investigations, forcing Abnoudi to leave Egypt and live in self-exile in Britain for three years. He returned home after his close friend, singer Abdul Halim Hafez, interceded with authorities on his behalf. Al Abnoudi again angered Al Sadat when he wrote The Legal and the Illegal, a poem in which he sharply criticised the Egyptian leader’s peace treaty with the Israeli regime.
Al Abnoudi fell out of favour with Hosni Mubarak who succeeded Al Sadat in presidency from 1981 due to his antigovernment poems. However, Al Abnoudi was awarded the prestigious State Merit Prize in 2000 when Mubarak was still in power. Al Abnoudi was a prominent backer of the 2011 revolt that forced Mubarak out of power. He published a series of poems lauding the uprising and eulogising the young protesters slain during the revolt.
He lashed out at the Muslim Brotherhood during their year-long rule, criticising their curbs on artistic freedom and perceived monopoly of power. In 2013, the army, led then by Abdul Fattah Al Sissi — Egypt’s incumbent president — ousted president Mohammad Mursi from the Muslim Brotherhood following enormous protests against his rule.
The Brotherhood’s removal drew strong backing from Al Abnoudi. He maintained good relations with Al Sissi, who became Egypt’s president in June last year.
Al Sissi called Al Abnoudi’s death a “great loss for Egypt and the Arab world”.
“His pen has enriched the lyrical poetry with poems that reflected the Egyptian citizen’s roots and realities,” the presidential office said in a statement.
The opposition also paid homage to Al Abnoudi.
“He lent to songs a new political and humanitarian dimension,” said Mohammad Abul Ghar, the head of the Social Democratic Party. “His main concern was Egypt and its future. He had a strong populist sense.”
Following his death, state and private TV stations began airing shows focusing on Al Abnoudi’s life and works instead of their regular programmes.
Several institutions, including Egyptian Opera House and the Journalists’ Syndicate, have unveiled plans to pay tributes to Al Abnoudi.
He is survived by his wife, TV presenter Neal Kamal, and two girls Aya and Nur.The altered wrestling video shows the president punching a man with the CNN logo superimposed on his head.
President Donald Trump is continuing his feud against the media. On Sunday morning, he tweeted a video showing him punching a man with the CNN logo superimposed on his head during a WWE wrestling match.
The video follows Trump's series of tweets Saturday targeting Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, co-hosts of MSNBC's Morning Joe, and renewing his resentment against what he called the "fake and fraudulent" media. He defended his amount of tweeting as "modern day presidential" and called out CNN saying, "I am thinking about changing the name #FakeNews CNN to #FraudNewsCNN!"
The original video footage is from WrestleMania 23 in 2007 when Trump went up against WWE CEO Vince McMahon during a "Battle of |
Tennessee State
Tyler Stone, Southeast Missouri State
Fuquan Edwin, Seton Hall
Taylor Braun, North Dakota State
Nick Kellogg, Ohio
Jordair Jett, Saint Louis
Chaz Williams, UMass
Mike Duman Auto Sales
Killian Larson, Grand Canyon
Josh Davis, San Diego State
Sam Dower, Gonzaga
Jamil Wilson, Marquette
Davion Berry, Weber State
Kareem Jamar, Montana
Jason Brickman, Long Island
Kendrick Perry, Youngstown State
Sales Systems, LTD
Ian Chiles, Morgan State
Davante Gardner, Marquette
Josh Huestis, Stanford
Niels Giffey, UConn
Rian Pierson, Toledo
Tyler Johnson, Fresno State
Markel Starks, Georgetown
David Stockton, Gonzaga
Portsmouth Partnership
Shayne Whittington, Western Michigan
D.J. Covington, VMI
Akil Mitchell, Virginia
James Bell, Villanova
Troy Huff, North Dakota
Isaiah Sykes, UCF
Jake Odum, Indiana State
Joe Jackson, Memphis
Cherry Bekaert
Chad Posthumus, Morehead State
Will Neighbour, Arkansas-Little Rock
De'Mon Brooks, Davidson
Okaro White, FSU
Sean Armand, Iona
Andre Dawkins, Duke
Langston Galloway, Saint Joseph's
Patrick Miller, Tennessee StateFilter by artist 1964 A Tribute to the Beatles Aimee Mann Alt-J Amadou & Mariam, Redline Graffiti America Aretha Franklin Banks & Toulouse Belle & Sebastian, Spoon & Andrew Bird Bernadette Peters With Wolf Trap Orchestra Big Daddy Kane Blondie & Garbage Boston- the Band & Joan Jett and the Blackhearts Brad Paisley, Dustin Lynch, Chase Bryant & Lindsay Ell Bruno Mars Caravan Palace Celtic Woman Chance the Rapper Chicago the Band & the Doobie Brothers Chick Corea Elektric Band and Bela Fleck & The Flecktones Chris Isaak Chris Stapleton, Anderson East & Brent Cobb Conor Oberst (Of Bright Eyes), Hop Along DJ Shea Van Horn & Matt Bailer Dashboard Confessional and The All-American Rejects Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds David Sedaris Dead and Company Deep Purple & Alice Cooper Delta Rae, The Church Sisters Depeche Mode Diana Krall Diana Ross Dierks Bentley, Cole Swindell & Jon Pardi Digable Planets Dispatch, Guster & Marco Benevento Earth Wind and Fire Ed Sheeran Elvis Costello & The Imposters Fleet Foxes & Animal Collective Florida Georgia Line, Nelly & Chris Lane Foreigner, Cheap Trick, & Jason Bonham's Led Zeppelin Experience Freddie Gibbs Gene Ween Band George Thorogood & The Destroyers | 38 Special Get Low w/ Mathias & Friends Gipsy Kings featuring Nicolas Reyes and Tonino Baliardo Goo Goo Dolls Gorillaz Hanson 25th Anniversary Here Come the Mummies Il Divo Incubus & Jimmy Eat World Iron Maiden & Ghost J. Cole Jack Johnson Jackson Browne and Willie Nelson & Family Jamestown Revival & Colter Wall Jason Aldean, Chris Young & Kane Brown Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit & The Mountain Goats Jeffrey Osborne Joe Jackson John Legend John Mayer John Mellencamp Jurassic 5 Katy Perry Kendrick Lamar, Travis Scott & D.R.A.M. Kenny Loggins Kindred the Family Soul Kool & the Gang Lady Antebellum, Kelsea Ballerini & Brett Young Leo Kottke Lifehouse & Switchfoot Lindsey Buckingham & Christine McVie Linkin Park & Machine Gun Kelly Lionel Richie Little Dragon, Xavier Omar Lizz Wright Lizzo, Brooke Candy Luke Bryan, Brett Eldredge & Lauren Alaina Lyfe Jennings Lyle Lovett & His Large Band Mary Chapin Carpenter and Lucinda Williams Matchbox Twenty & Counting Crows Maze Featuring Frankie Beverly and The O'Jays Mew Michael Bolton and Dave Koz & Larry Graham Michelle Branch Mitski, Julia Jacklin, Half Waif My Morning Jacket Natalie Merchant Neil Gaiman Nick Murphy (Chet Faker) One Republic, Fitz and the Tantrums & James Arthur PJ Harvey Paul Simon & Sarah McLachlan Petit Biscuit Pilobolus Punch Brothers Queen & Adam Lambert Rag'n'Bone Man, Ivy Sole Rebelution Regina Spektor & Ben Folds Rick Springfield and Richard Marx Rod Stewart & Cyndi Lauper Rodrigo & Gabriela, Ryan Sheridan Roger Waters Sam Hunt, Maren Morris & Chris Janson Santana Shawn Mendes & Charlie Puth Sheryl Crow Sister Hazel Slightly Stoopid St. Paul & The Broken Bones Steve Miller Band with Peter Frampton Sting Sturgill Simpson & Fantastic Negrito Styx, REO Speedwagon & Don Felder Summer Lights & Mercy Me Tedeschi Trucks Band The Ambassador: Jimi Hendrix The B-52s The Beach Boys The Chainsmokers The Chris Robinson Brotherhood The Cranberries The Districts The Fixx The Moody Blues The Record Company & The Deadmen The Total Package Tour: NKOTB, Paula Abdul & Boyz II Men Three Dog Night Train, Natasha Bedingfield, O.A.R. Valentino Khan Violent Femmes WAR and Los Lonely Boys Walter Beasley Waxahatchee, Palehound, Outer Spaces White Ford Bronco: DC's All 90s Band Who's Bad: The Ultimate Michael Jackson Experience Wilco & Kacy Clayton Young the Giant, Cold War Kids & Joywave Zac Brown Band Filter by venue 930 Club The Birchmere The Fillmore Silver Spring Howard Theatre Jiffy Lube Live Merriweather Post Pavilion Verizon Center Wolf Trap Filene Center
The options for summer entertainment in the DC area seem endless. With over 150 musical performances throughout the season, there's something for every taste of music. Use this ultimate summer concert guide to make sure you don't miss out on all the fun!
Get started: Click a music icon on the map to view upcoming concerts at that location, or filter the map by selecting your favorite artist and venue above.Rocky Horror Picture Show star Tim Curry is recovering at home following a major stroke, according to reports.
The British actor, 67, who lives in Hollywood, is said to be “doing great” following his collapse.
His agent Marcia Hurwitz denied a suggestion that the actor had been left with his speech impaired by the stroke.
Join Independent Minds For exclusive articles, events and an advertising-free read for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent With an Independent Minds subscription for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent Without the ads – for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month
Shetold the Daily Mail: “Tim is doing great. He absolutely can speak and is recovering at this time and in great humour.”
Curry played Dr Frank-N-Furter in the cult Rocky Horror musical alongside Susan Sarandon and Meatloaf in 1975.
The actor pulled out of a 2011 Trevor Nunn production of Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are Dead at the Chichester Festival Theatre suffering from asthma attacks and a chest infection.After many defeats over the last two years, Congress might yet again take up Sheldon Adelson’s legislation to federally ban online state-based gambling, if members insert the RAWA into the State Justice Commerce Appropriations bill in Congress next week. The legislation, called the Restoration of America’s Wire Act (RAWA), was originally introduced in Congress in March of 2014 by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT).
As Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ) will be expected to represent the interests of his own state, which has found success in legalizing state-based online gambling, by strongly opposing the RAWA amendment expected to be submitted by Rep. Charlie Dent (R-PA). Should Rep. Frelinghuysen prove to be more loyal to Adelson than his constituents at home, voters in his district might well render their judgment on Election Day next year.
RAWA, by the claims of it’s sponsors, would “restore” what they claim is the original intent of the 1961 Wire Act to federally ban internet gambling. However, the Wire Act was never intended to regulate online gambling, given that the Internet did not exist at the time. Enacting RAWA would extend the Wire Act to federally ban online gambling, something never intended by Congress in 1961 when the Wire Act was passed to prohibit sports betting over phone lines.
While Adelson has obtained the support of Senators like Graham, Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Tom Cotton (R-AR) for RAWA, he has donated tens of millions to help elect Republicans to the Senate. After Adelson donated $20 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, to elect Republican candidates to U.S. Senate seats, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) also submitted his own RAWA-like bill in the Senate to advance Adelson’s cause.
Fear mongering has been a hallmark of the argument in favor of RAWA. Supporters claim that if one state legalized online gambling it would force legalized online gambling in all states. This argument failed when IT experts proved otherwise based on the experience of New Jersey, Nevada and Delaware, the three states that have legalized regulated online state-based gambling.
Seeking to build support for RAWA, Rep. Chaffetz held a hearing before the House Oversight Committee he chairs, titled “A Casino in Every Smartphone.” Opponents of RAWA dominated the hearing, and by its end there was very little support in Congress for enacting RAWA. Experts involved in the implementation of state-based gambling testified on how technology allow the prohibition of citizens in states that ban online gambling while allowing participation by those who live in states where it is legalized. Additionally, advocates of limited Constitutional government made strong arguments on how a federal ban on online gambling violates the rights of states to set their own regulations and laws regarding online gambling. In the end, the hear not only failed to build support for RAWA, it made clear that RAWA had little support in Congress among members of either political party.
RAWA has attracted strong grass-roots opposition from many conservative and libertarian groups. Additionally, More than 90 percent of those who participated in the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) opposed RAWA, echoing the strong grass-roots opposition to the proposed federal ban on gambling.
Online gambling has been successful, and has generated substantial tax revenues for the three states that have implemented and legalized regulated online gambling – New Jersey, Nevada, and Delaware. A federal ban on Internet-based gambling would adversely affect states like Georgia and Illinois, that have chosen to allow the sale of state lottery tickets online.
RAWA has little support among the public, or influential grass-roots groups, or among members of Congress. Given it is nothing more than a crony capitalist favor for billionaire Adelson and his network of casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, it has become quite politically toxic for politicians to support enacting RAWA. The proposed legislation has failed several times in Congress, and that is likely to happen again in the current session of Congress.Marvel Comics just came off a banner 2016, and this year's looking even bigger. Editor-in-chief Axel Alonso stopped by Fuse to speak about the publisher's goals for 2017. His personal biggest hope? "I think it's to continue what we've been doing, which is to continue diversifying the line, the writers who are working on our books, and the characters who live in our world—while also bringing back some of our classic characters and putting them back center-stage where they belong. For people who think we don't care about them, you're wrong, we've always had our eye on them." Last summer, Fuse spoke extensively with Alonso about Marvel's changing face, led by characters like Riri Williams (a black teenager who attends MIT and becomes the new Iron Man), Kamala Khan (the Muslim, Pakistani-American successor to the historically blond-haired, blue-eyed Ms. Marvel) and Amadeus Cho, a Korean-American Hulk.
Touching on the "interesting few years ahead," following the 2016 presidential election, Alonso says, in the clip up top, that Marvel's nonpartisan approach goes like this: "We like to speak to what's going on, speak through metaphor, speak potently. When we see injustice, we like to confront it. We like to think that we're on the right side of history, that's a tradition that dates back to Stan Lee and all of his guys. And I think that it's important that we keep our eyes open and we listen, we listen to both sides of the issue. And we come up with stories that we think say something about the world, that we can stand behind." It goes without saying that Marvel will have a giant 2017 in its TV and film branches, as well. Netflix will premiere three new shows—Iron Fist, The Punisher and The Defenders, the posse miniseries bringing together Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, Daredevil and Iron Fist. Alonso says new Elektra, Kingpin and Bullseye standalone stories will soon arrive, leading to February's "Running with the Devil" cross-comic arc. It's a "huge story," Alonso says, "and don't be surprised if characters like the Punisher or Iron Fist—also Netflix characters—play a role in that as well."
Iron Fist will also get two new comics, a solo and another called Iron Fists, plural, with Danny Rand taking a young woman as his apprentice. See Axel Alonso tell Fuse how Marvel Comics will align with Marvel Television and Marvel Studios next:(This is part of my journey playing through Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within. You can follow the entire series on the Nostalgia Lane page.)
Let’s start this game proper! Chapter One, baby!
At his castle in Germany, Gabriel Knight is working on a new novel and between brushing back his luxurious flowing hair and finger typing, he throws his hands up in exasperation. He read the script for the game, maybe?
This is the “new” Gabriel, played by Dean Erickson who took over for Tim Curry’s voice acting in the first. To bring any of you who haven’t played the first game up to speed, Gabriel was a novelist/private investigator who became a “Schattenjäger” — a Shadow Hunter. He’s also very southern, very sarcastic, and has a giant talisman that wards him from evil. There, you’re mostly caught up.
Gabriel’s late-night finger pecking is interrupted by the horrible acting of his assistant, who lets him know that a mob is banging on the door. Because mobs only show up in the night, that’s when they’re the most dramatic, dontcha know. Cue a lot of German accents as they clamor for help from the Schattenjäger (a phrase that sounds more and more like something frat boys chug every time it’s mentioned) due to a werewolf attack on a young lady. Werewolf? The game’s going there already? Guess so. So how do we know it’s a werewolf?
The dad of the killed girl steps forward and says that he saw human eyes in the giant wolf’s face. His name, I kid you not, is Syp. Well, Sepp, but it sounds just the same. Look at that baleful face! How can I deny him justice? A-Schattenjäging I go!
Gabriel agrees to go down to the village for a little investigation, and that’s when the game fimally switches out of full video to allow for interaction. As you can see with this full interface, you’ve got the room itself as well as icons for manipulating the scenery, rewatching movies, and listening to tapes.
Well, time to start looking around! I open up my duffel bag and look through my inventory for a few items of interest, such as my cool knife, a couple of letters about my new castle and how my book is doing, and mentions that I’m well off, financially. So why can’t I hire a gang of assistants again? Speaking of which, I click on the table and the game goes into a half-minute sequence of showing me writing to my assistant in New Orleans. Licking and addressing the envelope and everything. Immersive? I guess… kind of feels like someone is heady with FMV power. I could’ve done without that tongue. At least so early in the game.
So basically the way this game controls is that you click on interactive elements and then the screen transfers to a short video showing you Gabe doing whatever Gabe does. Sometimes he does a lot more than you’d assume (i.e. actions instead of just describing objects). Thus far, the action is decent for a guy who’s pretty much putting on a one-person show. Way to don that jacket, man!
As the constant ticking of the clock in the room — the only sound — starts to drive me mad, I read the newspaper and get a possible lead about wolves and a zoo. I’m thinking that there’s going to be a big wolf motif in this game.
Gabe heads outside and almost instantly finds a giant paw print in the ground not ten steps from the front door. You think the police would have been over this. A couple more steps past that and he finds a bit of dark hair on the ground. Because Gabe is morbid like this, he picks it up and tucks it into his jacket. For his scrapbook, I assume. “Gracie, good news! More human remains for my album!”
I go into a toolshed and start clicking on the items. One click of a bag of cement is enough of a signal for Gabe to take it down and start mixing some up because he’s been waiting his whole life for this moment. Seriously, I was like, Gabe, Gabe what are you doing. I didn’t tell you to do that. I just wanted a description. Why are you making cement, Gabe? Gabe, this isn’t even your house, Gabe. Gabe. Fine, you’re cleaning it up.
Well, might as well use it. I head back over to the paw print and make a cast of it. Guess the game knows more than I do? Is there an auto-pilot switch so that it can play itself?30 Things Every New Software Tester Should Learn
by Heather Reid
This is a guide to learning more about software testing. As you start on your journey you will have tasks you can work through. Software testers are always learning but we cannot always quantify it. We learn about the product we are testing. We learn and develop relationships with developers, managers and testers. This makes us great at what we do. We are also chameleons. We change based on the environment we are in or the product we have to test. We have to continue to educate ourselves about the tools we need to test each product.
I have split the tasks up to create more digestible chunks of information. This is by no means a complete list. It will get you started on your journey. Take each task and work towards checking off the activities.
After completing the activities listed here, there is further exploration to do. As you follow the steps, reflect on what you have done so far. Maybe you would like to redo a task or adventure down another course of research. Tasks could even be done in a different order. Every tester is different and that is an asset to your testing ability.
✓ (Task 1) Are you interested in software testing?
Let's start with a little self-reflection.
An important part of being a tester is your mindset and being aware of it.
What led you to this article?
Why is software testing valuable to you?
What do you believe software testing is? We'll talk about this more in the next Task but it's good to think about what you currently believe it is.
Take a moment to think about the questions above and other questions you might have. By the end of this guide, the aim is to have the majority of those answered. You're going to have more questions as you go too. Questions prompt a search for answers which results in learning.
We are surrounded by tech daily. There may be things you use in your everyday life that bother you. Perhaps a software package at work that takes longer than a minute to load. The app on your phone that freezes just after an update. Or perhaps when you get locked out of your emails and discover you can't recover or reset your password. You might have started to think more about that software package by maybe looking at your task manager as it loads.
Can you be a person who strives to make software better? Can you be an advocate for the users? The business? Your work colleagues?
Do you know what it takes to get there? Do you know what you need to learn? Think about all the good and horribly bad software you have come across in your life. You are the chameleon in both. In a good situation, you want the product to stay good so you keep learning to stay on top of it. In a bad situation, you want to learn more so you can feel like you did everything you could before the software was released. Learning is the key. No matter the situation you will always be learning even if you aren't aware of it.
This sounds daunting, don't let it put you off. Start with the first question and think about it. By the end of this guide, you will be more confident in your answers to all of these questions.
What to do next:
Commit to print why you are here (a post-it or whatever medium you prefer)
Where do you plan to be at the end of this?
What skills do you have now that you think are useful for testing?
What do you currently perceive software testing to be?
Plan this guide into your schedule. Be realistic about what you can achieve. Consider your day to day work and your energy levels.
✓ (Task 2) What is software testing?
Start by writing down what you think software testing is and what a software tester would do.
There are many aspects to software testing. It does not always involve using the product. It is not just about finding bugs. Testing can start around the requirements stage. Thinking about what the product should do, where risks could be, and how the user/customer navigates the product is all part of testing.
One discussion I recently had, about whether it is fair to assume that customers are your users, gave me perspective on terms we use to represent stakeholders. Stakeholders, to me, covers everyone who has an interest in the software product. In the end, we agreed that the person who pays for your software may not be the one who actually uses it. This is a great example of how software testers should look at things from different perspectives. Below are examples gathered from discussions with other testers about what they think testing is or is not.
What Testing Is What Testing Is Not Verifying whether software meets the expected value to its users. Investigating the product to find any information that is of value to our stakeholders. Simple, quick, predictable. Only verifying that the product matches the description. Mitigating surprises - Trying to find problems before software is released to stakeholders. Increasing quality - this is a whole team exercise. Prove that the software has worked once. Exploring products. A valuable activity in software development but often misunderstood due to its unpredictable and creative nature. Well understood or valued by everyone. A process that is fixed, unimaginative and best kept under strict rules. Communicating - with stakeholders (customers, users, developers, etc.) and work together to find out if the product is improving. A phase that a project needs to go through in order to be successful. Infinite. All testing is sampling. For every non trivial product, there are an unimaginable number of parameters with a great number of possible values. How do you know you are testing the important ones? Ever finished - we can make decisions about stopping criteria but there are an infinite amount of combinations that could be checked.
What to do next:
Read this list of things of what software testers do.
Try asking people around you about the title of this task. Ask people you work with testers and non-testers, ask people on Slack and maybe even ask your family. Has this changed much from what you originally thought? How different were the responses you got?
Research other industries such as pharmaceuticals, appliances etc. What is their approach to testing? How different or similar is it to the tech industry? Do any of the differences change your thoughts on how you would approach testing?
✓ (Task 3) Testing for non-testers
When I started in software testing I had no idea what testing was. I also had no clue of where to start. One of the most useful resources I came across was the pathway Testing for non testers by Katrina Clokie. Using Katrina's pathway I was able to understand testing and the value it provided. I was also able to investigate her references further to start expanding my knowledge and list of people I should look to for advice.
This is one of the things that will not be done overnight! I recommend reading it and referring to Task 1 of this guide each time. Reflect on each link you read within Katrina's blog post. Are there any things you want to practice? Are there any things you don't and if so, why? Has this changed the thoughts you wrote down on Task 2?
What to do next:
Share the link with your team.
Read an article a day from Testing for non-testers.
Create your own list of things to learn and practice. You will most likely be updating this constantly.
✓ (Task 4) Get social
This will be a slightly easier task to get started with but you will need to put in the effort to keep it up. Start as simply as you like or feel comfortable with. I do recommend achieving all of the steps below when you can.
Engaging in social activities has enabled me to meet local testers who are willing to help me when I come across a tough problem. Through these social gatherings, I have made some friends in a city I am new to. It's nice to have a sympathetic ear with friends who understand what you are talking about.
What to do next:
Go to Meetup.com and look for a local software testing meetup.
Join the Testers.Chat or Ministry of Testing Slack.
Join Twitter, start finding testers to follow and get involved in some conversations.
Join The Club, a software testing and QA discussion forum.
Read Andrew Morton's blog posts on attending the Bristol STC meetup and the Cardiff STC meetup.
Start looking up testing conferences such as TestBash, Agile Testing Days, EuroStar, STPCon, Global Testing Retreat, TestCon, STAREAST, Let's Test, Nordic Testing Days. We'll cover these more in Task 23. They are a big part of getting social.
✓ (Task 5) Get organised
It can be difficult to stay organised when there is so much information being thrown at you. I struggled with this a lot, I still do occasionally. Tiny Habits was recommended to me by another tester when I was getting started. I go back to it frequently and set myself new tiny habits to achieve, particularly when I feel like things are going awry. This does not take a lot of time but it will save you in the long run.
You might also want to think about writing mind maps. There are a lot of free tools out there to help you with this. I find a mind map can help me streamline a random thought process a lot easier. Ever had a million ideas running through your mind that are loosely related but you can't get them into a sensible order to make something of? Mind maps can help with this, so can the good ole reliable post-its on a wall approach.
If you're more of a gamer, or the above don't appeal to you, you could also try Habitica. It's a free app where you can earn points/coins when you achieve your daily goals. You also lose health if you miss a daily goal. Kinda cool!
What to do next:
Sign up to Tiny Habits and do it for a week.
Start a mindmap.
Investigate if Habitica is for you.
Create a personal Kanbanflow or Trello board. Start with the column headers "To Do", "In Progress" and "Done". Add a card for each thing you would like to achieve and move them across the columns as you progress with them.
✓ (Task 6) Sign up to the Dojo
Sign up to The Dojo and explore it. The Dojo is run by the Ministry of Testing. I have found it to be an amazing resource for my career. I can watch training videos, access testers blogs and I get notified of upcoming events that they host. I started with a free membership and finally graduated to a paid membership this year.
What to do next:
Start with a free membership to the Dojo.
Read these web testing 101 articles on the Dojo.
Watch this video from Michael Wansley at TestBash Brighton 2016.
Watch this video from Danny Dainton a nice 99 second talk about how he stopped wasting his time.
Investigate the content on the Dojo further.
✓ (Task 7) What is a bug?
I know a bug in software when I see one, or at least I like to think I do. I thought it would be easy to explain what a bug is. When I tried to find a definition I found many that just didn't cover the scope enough. James Bach defines a bug as "Anything that threatens the value of the product. Something that bugs someone whose opinion matters". That is a nice high-level definition. On Testing Computer Software you will find "most bugs cause a program to change its behaviour when the programmer didn't want or expect it to or cause the program not to change its behaviour when the programmer did expect it to".
In most of the definitions, I found them to only mention the code or the developer. None of these are wrong. Going back to the definition from James Bach and looking at the ideas of the three amigos we could also have bugs in specifications. This would threaten the value of the product and it would not then be a bug with the code.
Think about the technology you use:
Have you encountered bugs in any of it?
Why did you feel like they were bugs?
Did you do anything about it (e.g. report a bug in an app through the app store)?
Can you think of three different things that help you decide whether a bug is actually a bug or not? These are called Oracles and we will look at them in more detail in Task 13.
✓ (Task 8) Recommended Reading
This is a starting point for your reading list. You won't achieve all of this in one day. Some of the books I list here will be referred to in relevant sections later in the series. This is to make you aware of the existence of the books and work towards purchasing or borrowing them from the friends you will make when you get social.
I asked people what books they would recommend for testing and I got the following (this is by no means a comprehensive list):
Explore It! by Elizabeth Hendrickson, an excellent book about exploratory testing.
Evil by Design by Chris Nodder, I love this book! I learn something new every time I read it. I'll cover more about this later.
Agile Testing by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory is one of those books that everyone raves about and you wonder why it took you so long to read it.
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman which I have not personally read. This has been recommended to me by enough people that I will be starting it as soon as I finish this article.
The Dojo also has a list of free and paid for eBooks that is added to over time. Check that out now that you're a member.
Next:
Start to read one of the books mentioned above. If you're unsure where to start, I suggest Thinking, Fast and Slow.
Look at the recommended reading list from the CAST 2015 speakers.
Ask on one of the Slack channels or on Twitter for more suggestions of books to read.
Explore the Book Club.
✓ (Task 9) Write a user story
A user story is like a set of instructions you get with flat pack furniture. By writing a user story it will help you to understand their purpose.
It should provide:
A description of what needs to be done.
Acceptance criteria outlining what the story needs to accomplish.
Any criteria which are out-of-scope for the story to be considered accomplished.
Note any dependencies required to start the story.
Mountain Goat Software has examples of agile user stories to give you an idea of what to expect when you're out in the wild. EPICs are essentially a large user story. They are broken down into smaller digestible or deliverable pieces called user stories.
Take the user story below as an example, the overall EPIC would be "Flat Pack TV Stand". The user story is then a smaller piece of that "Left Leg and Top Shelf Construction". The dependencies are things that we need but not things we would do, for example, we would need a screwdriver to be able to assemble the shelf. The acceptance criteria are things that we actually have to do.
Writing a user story will help you to think about writing requirements for users more. It will also help you to think about the approach to take for testing these user stories. As a tester you will have a unique set of skills when it comes to analysing user stories. You will be able to highlight missed details, misuse cases, abuse cases and how it can be misunderstood. Not everyone gets the chance to provide early input with user story writing. It is an excellent process, you are testing before there is ever a piece of code written!
Your tasks for today:
Write a user story for making toast, a peanut butter sandwich or even Ikea furniture using the templates above.
How do you know if you missed something?
Have you made any assumptions?
Think about the order things need to be done in. Are there any optional inputs?
Are there any requirements or prerequisites (assume the user has bread for example)?
Try to make toast or a sandwich from scratch following your user story exactly.
✓ (Task 10) Testing personas
When you are testing you shouldn't only test for you. You need to think about impatient users, users who take their time, users who have a bit of a tester in them and like to "break" things and many more. Katrina Clokie has an excellent guide to getting started with testing personas. As you get familiar with an application, things like this may slip from your mind and you may go into autopilot somewhat. I find trying to get into the user persona more helps me to avoid this pitfall.
Before thinking that personas may not already exist within a project, it may also be worth looking into whether personas research and documentation already exists. You can then use it to build things from a testing perspective.
For today:
Pick an app on your phone or a program on your computer to test.
Navigate through it using the different user personas in Katrina's article.
What did you learn from this?
How did the application perform under each persona?
Think about and research how others approach personas.
✓ (Task 11) Test a user story
This is linked to Task 9 and a follow on from Task 10. There are many ways to document testing but we will not focus on those here. If you've never written testing documentation, you could look at the test case templates on Tutorialspoint.
Task 9 and 11 have many similarities: While writing the user story, you were testing it just as well, weren't you? But the thing that has changed is that you now have an actual product at your disposal and that makes a world of difference.
You now have something to get hands on with, you can leave the theory behind and put it to practice. This is where you start using your ability to learn. The speed and precision with which you can learn new and interesting information will define your skill and value as a tester.
Concentrate on your mindset as you test the story. This is the most important part when testing a user story.
Questions to ask yourself as you test this story:
Who is this story important to?
What is the one problem this User Story tries to solve?
How could this be misunderstood?
How could accidental bugs find their way into this?
What behaviour should it absolutely NOT show?
When are you done?
At what point did you feel like quitting your analysis and want to start testing?
Does this feel reasonable?
✓ (Task 12) Heuristics
Cem Kaner and James Bach describe a heuristic as "a fallible method of solving a problem or making a decision". Karen Johnson says that a heuristic "Refers to experience-based techniques for problem solving, learning, and discovery. Where an exhaustive search is impractical, heuristic methods are used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution. Examples of this method include using a rule of thumb, an educated guess, an intuitive judgment, or common sense."
James Bach has an excellent document about how to design a test strategy using heuristics. Read over it and think about it for a while. It's a lot to take in when you first read it. If you think about how to apply and understand heuristics in testing, understanding these concepts get easier with time and experience.
Michael Bolton has an interesting blog post about heuristics to help you know when to stop testing. This is important in testing as we can become so absorbed in testing one feature that we may miss others.
Can you think of any other heuristic? Explain it to someone and give it a name. Test Sphere and Explore It! from Task 8 could help you with this.
Do you know of any heuristics you have used before? Use the articles above as guidelines.
Research and share other heuristics you might have found.
Pick any of the heuristics and start a discussion with peers.
✓ (Task 13) Oracles
According to Michael Bolton "An oracle is a principle or mechanism by which we can tell if the software is working according to someone's criteria; an oracle provides a right answer--according to somebody". Cem Kaner describes it as "a software testing oracle is a tool that helps you decide whether the program passed your test".
Michael Bolton also talks about how all oracles are heuristic but not all heuristics are oracles. This can take time to understand so do take your time with it. Katrina Clokie's article about Heuristics and Oracles may help you to think about this in everyday terms.
What to do next:
Read Testing Without A Map by Michael Bolton. It gives a step by step guide on using oracles to determine if you are 'done' testing.
Check out Testing Mnemonics list that Lynn McKee has put together. Also, read FEW HICCUPS by Michael Bolton which expands the HICCUPS mnemonic.
What oracles have you used? Can you see any oracles in your testing work?
When an app on your phone updated, did it maintain a consistent behaviour? If not, did you like this inconsistency? Was it an improvement on the previous behaviour or did you consider it to be |
appearance at Musso’s. And we’re not talking just the directors and actors (Chaplin, Bogart, Bacall, Monroe), either, but also the writers – who habitually used the excuse of its proximity to the long-shuttered Stanley Rose Book Shop to slide in for a quick freshener or two. Raymond Chandler knew his way around the bar blindfolded, as did F Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, back in the days when glamour, literary talent and heavyweight boozing were inseparable. The red-jacketed bartenders will recommend a martini in the classic style (with gin rather than vodka), while the furnishings glow with original noir-era authenticity.
• Open Tues-Sat 11am-11pm, +1 323 467 7788, mussoandfrank.com
United Artists Theatre (at Ace Hotel Los Angeles)
Downtown Los Angeles has a spectacular concentration of golden age theatres and movie palaces, all of them generously dusted with throwback charm, but relatively few of them can be seen outside of special tours (arranged by organisations such as the Los Angeles Conservancy). One of the more accessible is the freshly restored and retro-fitted United Artists Theatre, part of the Ace Hotel on Broadway. John Barrymore was master of ceremonies on opening night (Boxing Day, 1927), the pipe organ departed in 1955 but the iridescent 3,000-mirror-disc dome remains. Check listings for movie screenings and gigs (including Patti Smith on 29 and 30 January 2015).
• Doubles from $250, +1 213 623 3233, acehotel.com
Park Plaza Hotel
Facebook Twitter Pinterest John Turturro in the Coen Brothers’ movie Barton Fink, parts of which were filmed at the Park Plaza. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Working Title
Originally a neo-gothic lodge for the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, the Park Plaza Hotel near downtown LA has had its ups and downs: the pool was used for swimming events during the 1932 Olympics, and since the 60s it has been both a YMCA and a retirement hotel. It can currently be hired out for weddings, special events and movie shoots (including Barton Fink and the retro-noir Gangster Squad) and has been well looked after in recent years. The best way to enjoy the venue’s glamour is to check local listings: in 2013, for example, it hosted the 1940s-themed Golden Stag New Year’s Eve party.
• parkplazala.com
Union station
Resplendent with its immaculate fusion of Dutch Colonial, Mission Revival and Streamline Moderne (late art deco) architecture, Union station, which opened 1939, is more than just a transportation hub: it’s an instant passport across terracotta tile and travertine marble to a time when all men wore trilbys and female passengers were commonly attired in evening wear. Check out Yvonne de Carlo in the 1949 noir, Criss Cross. Also seen to great effect in Union Station (1950, doubling as Chicago’s Union Station) and The Narrow Margin (1952). The building – arguably the last great railway station in the US – has an excellent bar and restaurant, Traxx.
• metro.net/about/union-station.Traxx, open Mon-Sat 9am-9.30pm, +1 213 625 1999, traxxrestaurant.com
The Prince
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: Jakob N Layman
Tucked away in the residential heart of Koreatown, The Prince may sell itself as a brazenly overdressed Olde English theme restaurant specialising in deep fried chicken, but nothing can diminish the venue’s star turn as a location in Roman Polanski’s 1974 classic, Chinatown. Back then it was known as The Windsor, but looked no different, doubling as the long-gone Brown Derby where detective JJ Gittes (Jack Nicholson) meets client Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway). The mood of the movie soaks deep into every crimson booth, to which Dunaway matched her highly dangerous shade of lipstick. Sip on a signature lemon soju and dream up something nefarious.
• Open daily 4pm-2am, +1 213 389 1586, theprincela.com
Formosa Cafe
There is a scene in the 1997 movie adaptation of James Ellroy’s LA Confidential in which crusading 50s cop Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) strides into a bar, mistakes movie star Lana Turner for a call girl, and gets a cocktail to the face for his wayward identification skills. That very bar – a West Hollywood landmark since 1925 when former owner Jimmy Bernstein, an ex-prizefighter, set up shop in a converted trolley car – remains just the way it appears in the movie: a low-lit, deep-red, A-list lush’s paradise. It’s been patronised through the years by the likes of Humphrey Bogart, Ava Gardner, James Dean and mobster Bugsy Siegel, whose safe remains buried in the floor.
• Open Mon-Fri 4pm-2am, Sat-Sun 6pm-2am, +1 323 850 9050, no website
Cicada Club, The Oviatt Building
Formerly owned by west-coast haberdashery kingpin James Oviatt, this well-tended 1928 art deco high-rise, featuring original glasswork by René Lalique, hires out its rooftop penthouse for weddings and private events. No exclusive invitation is required to enjoy the former shop space on the ground floor and mezzanine, now the Cicada restaurant, though. At weekends, Maxwell DeMille’s Cicada Club takes over, featuring acts such as Dean Mora’s Latinaires, who’ll whisk you back through the decades in a blur of tango, rumba, salsa, mambo and other chilli-hot musical styles. Dressing up in suitable period attire is positively encouraged and pre-show dance lessons are complimentary.
• +1 213 488 9488, cicadaclub.com, check website for events listings
Alex Theatre, Glendale
Opened as a vaudeville house and movie palace in 1925, and still fronted by the 1940 addition of a 100ft-tall neon tower, the Alex offers a great excuse to head a little east of Hollywood, into Glendale, in search of prime golden age authenticity. A detour via Glendale railway station is recommended, as it’s pretty much unchanged since the prominent location’s appearance in the 1944-noir Double Indemnity. Classic movie screenings are organised by the Alex Film Society – in July 2014 it put on a noir double-bill: Gun Crazy (filmed in nearby Montrose) and The Lineup – and the live calendar for 2015 includes In the Mood, a 1940s Big Band Revue.
• +1 818 243 2539, alextheatre.org
Guardian readers who are also cinema fanatics can find Odeon discount codes by visiting discountcode.theguardian.comThe Help to Buy scheme is an equity loan provided by the Government. They lend you up to 40% of the cost of your new build home, so you will need a minimum 5% deposit and a 55% mortgage to make up the rest.
For this scheme you must have a mortgage, which will be a first charge, as the equity loan can only be a second charge. The equity loan is for a maximum of 25 years or before if the property is sold or the mortgage is redeemed, whichever term is the shorter of the two.
You will not be charged any interest on the 40% loan for the first five years of owning your home. However a management fee of £1 a month will be applicable from the date of purchase. From year six, a fee of 1.75% is payable on the equity loan, which rises annually by RPI (Retail Price Index) inflation plus 1%.
Example: 20% Equity Loan for a home purchased for £200,000.Christina Tournant, freshman of Maseeh Hall, dies in Florida
Christina E. Tournant ’18, who lived in Maseeh Hall, has died at home in Florida while on voluntary medical leave, President L. Rafael Reif wrote in an email to campus last Friday.
At a meeting with dorm residents earlier in the afternoon, Professor Suzanne Flynn, a Maseeh Hall housemaster, said that the death was apparently a suicide but that the case was still under investigation.
The 2014 valedictorian of Osceola High School, Tournant was interested in studying biomedical engineering at MIT. Tournant was a sister of the Alpha Phi sorority as well as a diver on the swim team.
“She was that kid that was just happy,” Tournant’s mother, Tava Wilson, told the Tampa Bay Times. “She wanted to do all kinds of fun things.”
Tournant had been suffering from postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome for the past two years, the newspaper reported. The syndrome caused her severe pain and circulatory issues. Her condition worsened in December, and in February, she took medical leave from MIT.
Wilson said it was the physical pain that led to her daughter’s “emotional pain.”
“She was very stoic and didn’t want to let on how horrible she was feeling … She was really stoic to a fault,” Wilson said.
The Tampa Bay Times reported that minutes before Tournant was found dead last Thursday night, apparently having jumped off a parking garage at Tampa International Airport, she had sent a text message to her mother: “I love you, mom.”
“Sorry,” she wrote in a separate note, “I couldn’t keep fighting.”
Reif wrote in an email to campus Friday that “we will come through this tragic period together.” A community gathering was held in Lobby 7 on Saturday to remember Tournant.
Chancellor Cynthia A. Barnhart PhD ’88 spoke at the gathering. “People across our community are feeling the impact of the recent losses and those that came before,” she said. “There is no shame in asking for help and support.”
Tournant’s death came less than a week after the death of fellow freshman Matthew L. Nehring ’18, which Reif announced on March 1.
“Four days ago, we gathered in lobby 10 for a similar reason,” Barnhart said. “Coming so close together, [the deaths] are a terrible blow,” she said.
Members of the MIT community who feel affected by the deaths can access MIT student support resources and Mental Health Services at http://together.mit.edu, or via phone at 617-253-2916 during the day and at 617-253-4481 during nights and weekends.
Please contact news@tech.mit.edu if you have a story, photograph, or recollection that you would like to see included in this article.
This article, written by Tech staff, was published online March 6 and last updated March 8.A story of rampant child abuse—ignored and abetted by the police—is emerging out of the British town of Rotherham. Until now, its scale and scope would have been inconceivable in a civilized country. Its origins, however, lie in something quite ordinary: what one Labour MP called "not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat."
Imagine the following case. A fourteen-year old girl is taken into care by the social services unit of the town where she lives, because her parents are drug-addicted, and she has been neglected and is not turning up in school. She is one of many, for that is the way in Britain today. And local government entities—Councils—can be ordered by the courts to stand in for parents of neglected children. The Council places the girl in a home, where she is kept with others under supervision from the social services department. The home is regularly visited by young men who try to entice the girls into their cars, so as to give them drugs and alcohol, and then coerce them into sex.
The girl, who is lonely and uncared for, meets a man outside the home, who promises a trip to the cinema and a party with children of her age. She falls into the trap. After she has been raped by a group of five men she is told that, if she says a word to anyone, she will be taken from the home and beaten. When, after the episode is repeated, she threatens to go to the police, she is taken into the countryside, doused in petrol, and told that she is going to be set alight, unless she promises to tell no one of the ordeal.
Social workers tell girls they cannot help them
Meanwhile she must accept weekly abuse, in return for drugs and alcohol. Soon she finds herself being taken to other towns in the area, and hired out for sexual purposes to other men. She is distraught and depressed, and at the point when she can stand it no longer, she goes to the police. She can only stutter a few words, and cannot bring herself to accuse anyone in particular. Her complaint is dismissed on the grounds that any sex involved must have been consensual. The social worker in charge of her case listens to her complaint, but tells her that she cannot act unless the girl identifies her abusers. But when the girl describes them the social worker switches off with a shrug and says that she can do nothing. Her father, his drug habit notwithstanding, has tried to keep contact with his daughter and suspects what is happening. But when he goes to the police, he is arrested for obstruction and charged with wasting police time.
Over the two years of her ordeal the girl makes several attempts on her own life, and eventually ends up abandoned and homeless, without an education and with no prospect of a normal life.
Impossible, you will say, that such a thing could happen in Britain. In fact it is only one of over 1,400 cases, all arising during the course of the last fifteen years in the South Yorkshire town of Rotherham, all involving vulnerable girls either in Council care or inadequately protected by their families from gangs of sexual predators. Almost no arrests have been made, no social workers or police officers have been reprimanded, and until recently the matter was dismissed by all those responsible as a matter of no real significance. Increasing public awareness of the problem, however, led to complaints, triggering a series of official reports. The latest report, from Professor Alexis Jay, former chief inspector of social work in Scotland, gives the truth for the first time, in 153 disturbing pages. One fact stands out above all the horrors detailed in the document, which is that the girl victims were white, and their abusers Pakistani.
Sociologists convinced government that the police are racist
Fifteen years ago, when these crimes were just beginning, the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry into the conduct of the British police was made by Sir William Macpherson a High Court judge. The immediate occasion had been a murder in which the victim was black, the perpetrators white, and the behaviour of the investigating police lax and possibly prejudiced. The report accused the police – not just those involved in the case, but the entire police force of the country – of ‘institutionalised racism’. This piece of sociological newspeak was, at the time, very popular with leftist sociologists. For it made an accusation which could not be refuted by anyone who had the misfortune to be accused of it.
However well you behaved, however scrupulously you treated people of different races and without regard to their ethnic identity or the colour of their skin, you would be guilty of ‘institutionalised racism’, simply on account of the institution to which you belonged and on behalf of which you were acting. Not surprisingly, sociologists and social workers, the vast majority of whom are professionally disposed to believe that middle class society is incurably racist, latched on to the expression. MacPherson too climbed onto the bandwagon since, at the time, it was the easiest and safest way to wash your hands in public, to say that I, at least, am not guilty of the only crime that is universally recognised and everywhere in evidence.
Police more concerned with political correctness than crime
The result of this has been that police forces lean over backwards to avoid the accusation of racism, while social workers will hesitate to intervene in any case in which they could be accused of discriminating against ethnic minorities. Matters are made worse by the rise of militant Islam, which has added to the old crime of racism the new crime of ‘Islamophobia’. No social worker today will risk being accused of this crime. In Rotherham a social worker would be mad, and a police officer barely less so, to set out to investigate cases of suspected sexual abuse, when the perpetrators are Asian Muslims and the victims ethnically English. Best to sweep it under the carpet, find ways of accusing the victims or their parents or the surrounding culture of institutionalised racism, and attending to more urgent matters such as the housing needs of recent immigrants, or the traffic offences committed by those racist middle classes.
Americans too are familiar with this syndrome. Political correctness among sociologists comes from socialist convictions and the tired old theories that produce them. But among ordinary people it comes from fear. The people of Rotherham know that it is unsafe for a girl to take a taxi-ride from someone with Asian features; they know that Pakistani Muslims often do not treat white girls with the respect that they treat girls from their own community. They know, and have known over fifteen years, that there are gangs of predators on the look-out for vulnerable girls, and that the gangs are for the most part Asian young men who see English society not as the community to which they belong, but as a sexual hunting ground. But they dare not express this knowledge, in either words or deed. Still less do they dare to do so if their job is that of social worker or police officer. Let slip the mere hint that Pakistani Muslims are more likely than indigenous Englishmen to commit sexual crimes and you will be branded as a racist and an Islamophobe, to be ostracised in the workplace and put henceforth under observation.
No one will be fired
This would matter less if fear had no consequences. Unfortunately political correctness causes people not merely to disguise their beliefs but to refuse to act on them, to accuse others who confess to them, and in general to go along with policies that have been forced on the British people by minority groups of activists. The intention of the activists is to disrupt and dismantle the old forms of social order. They believe that our society is not just racist, but far too comfortable, far too unequal, far too bound up with fuddy-duddy old ways that are experienced by people at the bottom of society – the working classes, the immigrants, the homeless, the illegals – as oppressive and demeaning. They enthusiastically propagate the doctrines of political correctness as a way of taking revenge on a social order from which they feel alienated.
Ordinary people are so intimidated by this that they repeat the doctrines, like religious mantras which they hope will keep them safe in hostile territory. Hence people in Britain have accepted without resistance the huge transformations that have been inflicted on them over the last thirty years, largely by activists working through the Labour Party. They have accepted immigration policies that have filled our cities with disaffected Muslims, many of whom have now gone to fight against us in Syria and Iraq. They have accepted the growth of Islamic schools in which children are taught to prepare themselves for jihad against the surrounding social order. They have accepted the constant denigration of their country, its institutions and its inherited religion, for the simple reason that these things are theirs and therefore tainted with forbidden loyalties.
And when the truth is expressed at last, nobody is fired, no arrests are made, and the elected Police and Communities Commissioner for Rotherham, although forced to resign from the Labour Party, refuses to resign from his job. After a few weeks all will have been swept under the carpet, and the work of destruction can resume.Lynn La/CNET
Sprint may try its luck in a potential merger with T-Mobile next year, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The Journal, citing unnamed sources, said Sprint is working on a possible bid for T-Mobile for the first half of next year. The deal could be worth more than $20 billion.
A deal would significantly reshape the wireless landscape. Sprint, the third largest carrier in the US, would combine with T-Mobile, which is the fourth and smallest national carrier. The idea is that the combined company would be better-suited to compete against Verizon Wireless and AT&T, which are both far larger than its two smaller competitors.
But a deal will also test the mettle of regulators, who have in the past said they preferred four competitors in the wireless market. AT&T was forced to scrap its planned takeover of T-Mobile in 2011 after regulators signaled they would not approve the deal. It ended up being a costly move with AT&T paying $3 billion to T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telekom and providing $1 billion worth of spectrum -- which T-Mobile has used to build its LTE network.
The Journal does note that Sprint hasn't yet decided on whether it would move ahead with the bid.
Beyond the regulatory hurdles, Sprint and T-Mobile operate on different wireless technologies, although they are slowly converging with the move to LTE. T-Mobile's 3G technology is based on GSM, while Sprint's is based on CDMA. Sprint, however, is upgrading its network to handle different flavors of technology and spectrum.
Lori Grunin/CNET
Both companies have had a busy year. Over the last few months, Sprint closed its acquisition of Clearwire, shut down its Nextel network, best known for its walkie-talkie feature, and all while wrapping up its own takeover by Japanese carrier SoftBank. More recently, it unveiled Sprint Spark, its super-fast LTE service.
T-Mobile, meanwhile, has been solidly on the road to recovery with its Uncarrier campaign, which shed contracts, introduced an early upgrade program, did away with international data roaming charges, and provided free data to tablet customers. In doing so, the carrier has seen growth as customers flocked back to the carrier -- a reversal from recent years.
T-Mobile CEO John Legere told CNET in July that he was open to deals with companies such as Sprint and Dish Network, and has indeed had experience running a business and selling it off, having successfully done so with Global Crossing.
A Sprint representative declined to comment. CNET contacted T-Mobile for comment, and we'll update the story when they respond.A conference committee report for a proposal that criminalizes the use of drones for surveillance and permits Texans to document the activities of law enforcement personnel was adopted by both the Texas House and Senate late Sunday.
House Bill 912 carries more than 40 exemptions, including one that permits members of the media to use drones to photograph and record breaking news activity. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, more than 30,000 unmanned aircraft are expected to be in use in the U.S. by 2020. It now heads to the governor’s desk for approval.
One exemption will need further clarification, said the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Craig Estes, R-Wichita Falls, before the Senate approved the measure 26-5: as it’s written now, one exemption states that the ban does not apply to residents who live within 25 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border.
“Our legislative intent was to have law enforcement be able to use drones,” Estes said, and he added that “we don’t want private citizens to be able to use drones at the border, either.”
He said he would work with the Texas Department of Public Safety and others to ensure the ban extends to citizens along the border, too. Sen. Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa, D-McAllen, said he opposed the possibility that regular citizens, including members of the Minutemen Militia, could cite the exemption to conduct aerial surveillance.
“That definetely was not my intent,” Estes said.
Shortly after the report was adopted by the Senate, House members also passed the measure 140-4.Last Updated: Tuesday, 6 July 2004, 12:40 GMT 13:40 UK E-mail this to a friend Printable version Wild parrots settle in suburbs By Sean Coughlan
BBC News education
Back garden in Reigate - picture by Nic Hamilton The number of wild parrots living in England is rising at 30% per year, says an Oxford University research project. Parks and gardens in the leafy London suburbs have been adopted as a preferred habitat by birds that are native to southern Asia. In the Surrey stockbroker belt, a single sports ground is believed to be home to about 3,000 parrots. The rate of increase, helped by mild winters, is much greater than had been expected. The findings have also been echoed by a large number of e-mails from BBC News Online readers, who have reported how parrots - particularly parakeets - have now become familiar sights. Parrot hotspots These hundreds of e-mails, including photographs, highlighted hotspots such as west of London, Surrey and parts of Kent. Parakeets in King George Park in Ramsgate, picture by Mark Jobling But there were also parrots reported in inner-London, including parks in Peckham, Brixton, Greenwich and Kensington. And a few parrots had been spotted in East Anglia, the North West and in Scotland. There were also sightings from readers overseas, reporting urban parrots in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Spain and the United States. E-mails from readers also offer a range of theories about the arrival of parrots in Britain - including that they were brought by Jimi Hendrix, that they escaped during the making of a film and that they were released from aviaries damaged during the great storm of 1987. Researchers have been tracking several varieties of parakeet, originally from countries such as India and Brazil, but which are now surviving in ever-greater numbers in southern England. The findings, from Oxford University's Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology, give a glimpse of exotic creatures in unlikely places. Last summer, there were areas of woodland that sounded more like equatorial rain forest than suburban parkland.
Adam Tandy, Richmond Alexandrine parakeets have been spotted by Lewisham crematorium and orange-winged parakeets, native to the Amazon, have now set up home in Weybridge. South American monk parakeets have formed a colony in Borehamwood and blue-crowned parakeets were observed in Bromley. There have been reports that there could now be 20,000 wild parrots, including parakeets, living in England, with the largest concentration around London and the South East. The population boom has been put down to a series of mild winters, a lack of natural predators, food being available from humans and that there are now enough parrots for a wider range of breeding partners. In particular, they have been observed in growing numbers in the outer suburbs and the Home Counties, with trees in parkland and sports grounds becoming their homes. Rugby fans Esher Rugby Club's ground was observed to have had a parrot population that grew from 800 to 2,500 in the space of three years - and researchers estimate there might be 3,000 living there. In an English country garden? Four parrots in Karen Smith's garden in Richmond Project Parakeet, led by researcher Chris Butler, has been examining the growth of the population of wild parakeets - with the aim of finding whether the current sharp increase will continue. If it does, there are concerns that wild parrots could become a pest to farmers or threaten other wildlife. Grahame Madge, spokesman for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), says parakeets are bigger and bolder than some of their native rivals - and "are quite capable of evicting other birds". They also like fruit and he says that if they moved into fruit-growing areas, it would pose problems for farmers. Heathrow flights At present, the RSPB says parakeets are particularly concentrated in the west London, south-west London and Thames Valley area - and this has given rise to the urban legend that the birds originally escaped from a container at Heathrow airport. We have a flock of sometimes up to 20 green parakeets flying around the neighbourhood. You wouldn't believe it unless you'd seen it with your own eyes
Nigel Pettinger, Bromley But Mr Madge says there has never been any proof of this theory. Escaped parakeets have been spotted nesting in this country since the 19th Century. Even though there was a wild population in the 1960s, the numbers remained very low through to the mid-1990s, when the population appeared to start increasing more rapidly. Birdline UK's Parrot Rescue, which looks after abandoned birds, says parrots are now acclimatised to conditions in this country and are quite capable of living and breeding here. But this is causing problems for other native birds, which are being pushed out by the growing numbers of parrots. A selection of your comments on local neighbourhood parrots I saw around 10 or 12 green parrots in my garden one Sunday morning. I tried to tell the wife, but with me being a city boy and her a country girl, I was met with a howl of laughter and ribbing for the following month... but he who laughs last. Matt Hearn, Pinner, North London. Parrots feeding in the garden of Case van Velzen, a reader in Miami I remember about 20 years ago coming home to Hampton station a little the worse for wear on a summer's evening and seeing a flock of parakeets flying overhead. When I burbled this out to a mate it was clear he thought that I had only seen them as a result of the mid-afternoon lager. It seems, from looking at other correspondence, that south west London is a hotbed of avian immigration. Beats the hell out of seagulls!
Paul, ex-London My wife and I were in Kew Gardens, she said that she saw a parrot, at first I thought she was joking, but five minutes later I saw three of them feeding at a bird table.
Andrew, London I remember very well the first time I saw one, it was during a local football match about four years ago in which I was playing goalkeeper. I got distracted by by this flash of green dashing from one tree to another. The opposition took advantage and scored. We ended up losing the game. Damn parrot.
Huw Mellor, Addlestone, Surrey Not quite the right parrot picture, but thanks to Jansen Mann This one (see picture above) stayed for about two hours, making short work of the sunflower seeds in the feeder before flying off home, presumably to Syon Park in Isleworth? We haven't seen them since but I did think I heard one two days ago.
Jessica Gooch, Harrow I have two green parrots visiting my peanut feeding device on my washing line three times a day, everyday. This has been happening since November last year. I've added some parrot feed in the device in recent weeks.
Kaleem Naseem, Harlesden, London I walk past the colony at Westminster University sports ground, just off the Great Chertsey Road, every morning. The legend is the origional pair were let out by Jimi Hendrix.
Jamie, Chiswick We get parrots around Twickenham all the time - or "posh sparrows" as we call them. When we first moved in, we called the RSPCA and told them that there was an escaped parrot in a tree in the garden. They told us that he'd probably be OK. We thought the RSPCA just didn't care, until we saw flocks of them flying over. A truly wonderful (if not very English!) sight.
Damon Evans, Twickenham, UK When I first moved to Ealing a couple of years ago, I thought I was seeing things when I saw a flock of bright green birds in the tree outside. They are regular visitors now.
Helen, London Two parakeets seen flying over my garden two to three weeks ago - any more spotted any further north?
Pat Moyses, Peterborough Last year during the summer a peach-faced parakeet became a regular visitor to our garden. There must be more because you could here its mate calling from trees across the field. We live in Glazebrook just outside Warrington.
James Balme, Warrington Cheshire You're all either liars or mad. The only place you'll see a parrot in the UK is a pet shop or a badly-stocked zoo.
Barry Stewart, Edinburgh I am sure I saw three in one place, flying from tree to tree beside the car park in Bushey Park, at Hampton Court. I could hardly believe my eyes, but this explains it.
Des Hickey, Kingston, London, UK Richmond Park has had a colony of green parakeets for some years, but the population does seem to be getting larger. Last summer, there were areas of woodland that sounded more like equatorial rain forest than suburban parkland.
Adam Tandy, Richmond, Surrey There has been a small flock of parrots in my local park for about a year now. I have seen them "mobbing" a heron on one occasion.
Becky Blackburn, Lee, London SE12 We have a flock of sometimes up to 20 green parakeets flying around the neighbourhood. You wouldn't believe it unless you'd seen it with your own eyes!
Nigel Pettinger, Shortlands, Bromley I have now seen two parrots in North Norfolk, one about two years ago and the second one three months ago. I thought I was seing things the first time, on the most recent occasion I saw it a few times over a period of about three days.
Robin Tallis, Hanworth, Norfolk There are lots of smallish green parrots always in the trees round the corner from where I live in Ealing. It seems to be a specific set of trees at the eastern-most entrance to Lammas Park W13. They make a bit of noise but are very pretty and unusual to see.
Stu Maddison, London, GB No, I only see parrots in the pet shop but suspect that this is a good indication that some global warming has happened (although I suspect the parrots didn't find their own way here).
Di Drinkwater, Manchester, UK - the Cold North I was out on my bicycle last night towards dusk passing through Brent River Park near Boston Manor. I cycled past a couple of large trees and scared two very large flocks of parakeets who were nesting above. I have often wondered whether parrots/parakeets are becoming more widespread in the south.
Mitch Sharpe, Ealing Place Guido Van Arezzo - there are several big nest of green parrots. The number has significantly increased in the last three years.
Brussels, Belgium I believe these birds started out as a small colony at Laleham Reach, Surrey and appear to have spread up and down the River Thames. I have personally seen them at Runnymede to the west and Hampton Court to the east.
David Barnes, Ashford, Middlesex The Laleham flock is rumoured to have originated from escapees from Shepperton Film Studios that broke out during the shooting of a film set in the tropics.
Ralph Lunt, Ashford Middlesex A little bit of history: the parrots are probably decendants of those few that ecaped whislt filming "The African Queen" at Shepperton Studios.
Terry, Crawley I am fascinated by these little creatures. We have a population of rose-ringed parakeets living here in The Hague. They are usually seen in small groups here and they like park like surroundings.
Joanne Middleton, The Hague, Netherlands We have a growing flock, which now numbers over 40. They particularly enjoy demolishing the dead oak tree in an adjoining garden and delight in hanging upside down on our bird feeders. They are very noisy in the evenings but are very entertaining to watch. They are certainly more intelligent that pigeons.
Marian Wright, Surbiton, England Ring-necked parakeets are common around here but do not always have things their own way. The peregrine at Queen Mother reservoir became very adept at picking them off last winter.
Robin Dryden, Langley Actually it wasn't dead, it was only resting!
Robin Hull, London, UK
E-mail this to a friend Printable version
SEE ALSO: Bird-owners face pneumonia threat
14 Jun 04 | Berkshire Quaker parrots invade Barcelona
28 Aug 03 | Europe Parrot demo flocks to Number 10
31 May 04 | UK
RELATED INTERNET LINKS: Birdline UK Parrot Rescue Project Parakeet RSPB The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites
TOP EDUCATION STORIES 'Shortage' in holiday childcare
£260m 'wasted' in axing schools
Head teacher's £200k angers unionThe most subversive moment in Star Wars: The Last Jedi happens when the characters Finn, Rose Tico, and DJ are on their way back from the casino on Canto Bight. An interstellar mash-up of Las Vegas and Monaco, Canto Bight is a playground for the rich, powerful, and politically connected. Rose calls it “a terrible place filled with the worst people in the galaxy.” She tells Finn that most of Canto Bight’s inhabitants made their money selling weapons to the First Order. But when Benicio Del Toro’s DJ goes through the records of one of the arms dealers, writer and director Rian Johnson throws a curveball at the audience. The dealer had been selling to the Resistance, too. The revelation puts a new spin on the conflict at the center of the movie and the entire franchise. Who is really benefiting from the never-ending war between the Sith and the Jedi?
The new trilogy has changed the meaning of the original three films. Return of the Jedi’s happy ending—when the Emperor is killed, the second Death Star is destroyed, and Darth Vader is redeemed—is gone. What was once the final conflict in the battle between good and evil has become a blip in a larger story. The implications are horrifying. Many characters in The Last Jedi have never known a time without war. The Sith and the Jedi have been fighting for at least 70 years. Anakin Skywalker was 9 years old at the start of The Phantom Menace; his grandson is in his 20s and fighting in the same battle. It’s no wonder Leia’s call for help at the end of The Last Jedi fell on deaf ears.
Rose thinks everyone on Canto Bight is an arms dealer because it’s the only way to make that much money during a civil war. There is a massive military-industrial complex that lies underneath the Skywalker family saga. War costs money. The U.S. government has spent over $400 billion on the F-35 fighter jet program, and estimates have the total |
tend to interfere with the scheduler. Moreover, they do not compose elegantly with lazy evaluation. PTM interface is shown below:
data PTM a data PVar a instance Monad PTM newPVar :: a -> PTM (PVar a) readPVar :: PVar a -> PTM a writePVar :: PVar a -> a -> PTM () atomically :: PTM a -> IO a retry :: PTM a
A PTM transaction may allocate, read and write transactional variables of type PVar a. Transaction is atomically executed using the atomically primitive. It is important to notice that PTM provides a blocking retry mechanism which needs to interact with the scheduler, to block the current thread and resume another thread. We will see later how we allow such interactions while not imposing any restriction on the structure of the schedulers.
One-shot Continuations
The concurrency substrate enables creation and scheduling of I/O-performing computations through one-shot continuations. An SCont (stack continuation) is a suspended I/O computation, which is in fact just a reference to a TSO object. Capturing the current continuation is just getting a reference to the current TSO, and hence is very fast. In the following discussion, we use SConts when referring to the Haskell object and threads when referring to its corresponding RTS version. SCont interface is shown below:
data SCont newSCont :: IO () -> IO SCont switch :: (SCont -> PTM SCont) -> IO () getCurrentSCont :: PTM SCont switchTo :: SCont -> PTM ()
Given an I/O-performing computation newSCont returns a reference to an SCont which when scheduled, will perform the I/O action. The switch primitive is a bit unique. Switch takes a function which is applied to the current continuation. The result of the function is PTM transaction of type PTM SCont. This transaction can encapsulate the actions necessary for appending the current SCont to the scheduler and fetching the next SCont to switch to. The switch primitive performs this transaction atomically, and switches control to the resultant SCont.
Performing the body of switch atomically in a transaction avoids the nasty race conditions usually seen in multicore runtimes where one-shot continuations are used for modelling schedulers. In such systems, there are often cases where before the switch primitive has had a chance to return, another processor picks up the current continuation (appended to the scheduler) and tries to switch to it. It becomes necessary to go for complicated solutions such as releasing the scheduler locks after the target thread resumes execution to prevent races. In our case, PTM eliminates the need for such a mechanism - the other processor would not be able to access the current SCont, unless the transaction has committed and control has switched to the target SCont. Primitive getCurrentSCont returns a reference to the current SCont under PTM. Primitive switchTo commits the current PTM transaction and switches to the given SCont. As we will see, these two primitives are necessary for abstracting the scheduler.
Return value of a switching transaction
Since switchTo eagerly commits the transaction, the code that follows switchTo is not evaluated. This is a problem if the transaction that contains switchTo has a type different than PTM (). Consider the following code:
s :: String <- atomically $ do { sc <- getCurrentSCont; -- save the current SCont somewhere switchTo someSCont; return "This is never evaluated!" } print s
The type of the transaction that contains switchTo is PTM string, and atomically performing the transaction is expected to return a String value. But the value returned when the current SCont resumes execution (after switchTo) is a (). Our solution is to make switchTo return a error "Attempting to use return value of a switched transaction", and any attempt to use the return value of a switching transaction throws a runtime error.
SCont Status
Of course, care must be taken to ensure that the control does not switch to an SCont that is either running, blocked on an MVar, or completed. But how do we know whether the given SCont is ready to run? We expect the scheduler writer or library implementer to indicate the status of SCont before switching. SCont status API is show below.
data ResumeToken data SContStatus = SContRunning | -- SCont is currently running SContKilled | -- SCont was killed by an (asynchronous) exception SContSwitched SContSwitchReason data SContSwitchReason = Yielded | -- SCont has yielded, but runnable BlockedInHaskell ResumeToken | -- SCont is blocked on a user-level concurrent -- data structure (MVars and such) BlockedInRTS | -- SCont is blocked on a foreign call, blackhole, etc,. Completed -- SCont has run to completion setSContSwitchReason :: SCont -> SContSwitchReason -> PTM () getSContStatus :: SCont -> PTM SContStatus
Any attempt to switch to an SCont with status other than SContSwitched Yielded throws an exception. Primitive setSContSwitchReason updates the status of SCont. Since setSContSwitchReason is a PTM action, the effect of updating the status takes place when the transaction commits and the control has switched to another SCont. This avoids any race conditions that might be involved in reading the status of an SCont before it has switched.
Before a switch operation, we expect the programmer to indicate the reason for switching through setScontSwitchReason. Exception is raised by the switch primitives if a switch reason has not been provided. When a switched SCont resumes execution, its status is automatically updated to SContRunning.
Resume tokens are utilized for supporting asynchronous exceptions. Resume tokens are discussed along with the discussion on asynchronous exceptions.
SCont-Local Storage
SCont-local storage (SLS) provides a solution for associating arbitrary state with an SCont. Each SCont has a single slot with type Dynamic. SLS interface is give below:
setSLS :: SCont -> Dynamic -> IO () getSLS :: SCont -> PTM Dynamic
Data.Dynamic provides a way for safely casting between any arbitrary data type and Dynamic type. This allows SLS to be generic as well as type-safe. Moreover, SLS is GC'ed along with the SCont.
Abstracting the Scheduler
Concurrency substrate does not impose any structure on the user-level schedulers. The programmer might choose to implement a single scheduler for the entire system or a scheduler per capability. The schedulers might also be hierarchical, with pluggable load-balancing policies. However, we need a uniform interface such that the concurrency libraries, STM, asynchronous exceptions, safe-foreign calls, blackholes and other such mechanisms can interact with the user-level scheduler. For this purpose, we introduce the notion of scheduler actions, which is expected for every SCont. The substrate interface for scheduler actions is shown below:
------ Schedule SCont Action :: SCont -> PTM () ------ getScheduleSContAction :: PTM (SCont -> PTM ()) setScheduleSContAction :: SCont -> (SCont -> PTM ()) -> PTM () ----------- Yield Control Action :: PTM () ----------- getYieldControlAction :: PTM (PTM ()) setYieldControlAction :: SCont -> PTM () -> PTM ()
Abstractly, given an SCont, the scheduleSContAction appends the SCont to a scheduler. The yieldControlAction picks an SCont from a scheduler and switches to it. The get* functions will fetch the scheduler actions of the current SCont. In order to make the ideas more concrete, let us assume that we have a very simple round-robin scheduler, implemented as a PVar[SCont]. One possible implementation of scheduler actions for this scheduler is given below.
scheduleSContAction :: SCont -> PTM () scheduleSContAction sc = do sched :: PVar [SCont] <- -- get sched contents :: [SCont] <- readPVar sched setSContSwitchReason sc Yielded -- sc is ready to be run writePVar $ contents ++ [sc] yieldControlAction :: PTM () yieldControlAction = do sched :: PVar [SCont] <- -- get sched contents :: [SCont] <- readPVar sched case contents of x:tail -> do { writePVar $ contents tail; switchTo x -- DOES NOT RETURN } otherwise ->...
The implementation is pretty straight-forward; scheduleSContAction appends the given scont to the back of the list, and yieldControlAction picks an SCont from the front of the list and switches to it. The otherwise case of yieldControlAction is chosen if the there are no available SConts to switch to. This will be discussed later under Sleep Capability. Having the scheduler actions as PTM actions ensures that the operations on the scheduler are always properly synchronized. Notice that scheduleSContAction returns while yieldControlAction does not. We expect every user-level thread (SCont) to be associated with a scheduler. The scheduler actions are saved as fields in the SCont's TSO structure so that the RTS can access them. Typically, when a new SCont is created, it is immediately associated with a scheduler.
User-level Concurrency
Now that we have defined an abstract scheduler interface, lets look at how to construct user-level concurrency primitives using the scheduler actions.
Schedulers
Since our first goal is to implement GHC's concurrency support in Haskell, let us start with forkIO and yield. These two primitives are sufficient for a simple cooperatively scheduled lightweight thread system. In order to make the presentation cleaner, assume that we have the following helper functions.
getSSA = getScheduleSContAction setSSA = setScheduleSContAction getYCA = getYieldControlAction setYCA = setYieldControlAction
Primitive yield appends the current SCont to the scheduler, picks the next SCont from the scheduler and switches to it. We utilize the scheduler actions to achieve this. The implementation of yield is shown below. It is important to notice that yield does not assume anything about the implementation of the scheduler except for the scheduler actions. Hence, there is no need to re-implement yield primitive for every scheduler, thus minimizing the overhead of implementing new schedulers.
yield :: IO () yield = atomically $ do -- Append current SCont to scheduler ssa <- getSSA ssa a -- Switch to next SCont from scheduler switchToNext :: PTM () <- getYCA switchToNext
Primitive forkIO also follows the strategy of utilizing scheduler actions. The implementation of forkIO is shown below.
forkIO :: IO () -> IO SCont forkIO f = do -- Switch to next thread after completion let epilogue = atomically $ do { sc <- getCurrentSCont; setSContSwitchReason sc Completed; switchToNext <- getYCA; switchToNext } ns <- newSCont (f >> epilogue) atomically $ do { -- Initialize scheduler actions ssa <- getSSA; setSSA ns ssa; yca <- getYCA; setYCA ns yca; -- Append the new SCont to current SCont's scheduler ssa ns } return ns
Here, the thread that invokes forkIO initializes the new SCont ( ns ) with its own scheduler actions, and appends it to the scheduler. After the newly created SCont finishes execution, the control must switch to another thread in the scheduler. This is captured by the epilogue.
A full implementation of a round-robin scheduler can be found here. This scheduler has one queue per capability. Work is shared among the capabilities by spawning threads in a round-robin fashion on the capabilities.
MVars
MVars are one of the basic synchronization mechanisms exposed by GHC's concurrency library. A simple user-level implementation of MVar might look like:
newtype MVar a = MVar (PVar (State a)) data State a = Full a [(a, PTM ())] | Empty [(PVar a, PTM ())]
MVar is either empty with a list of pending takers, or full with a value and a list of pending putters. The PTM () action in the full and empty list represents the logic necessary for waking up the pending putters and takers. The following snippet shows the implementation of takeMVar.
takeMVar :: MVar a -> IO a takeMVar (MVar ref) = do hole <- atomically $ newPVar undefined atomically $ do st <- readPVar ref case st of Empty ts -> do s <- getCurrentSCont ssa <- getSSA let wakeup = ssa s writePVar ref $ v where v = Empty $ ts++[(hole, wakeup)] switchToNext <- getYCA setSContSwitchReason s $ BlockedInHaskell... switchToNext Full x ((x', wakeup):ts) -> do writePVar hole x writePVar ref $ Full x' ts wakeup otherwise ->... atomically $ readPVar hole
Primitive takeMVar first creates a hole, which will contain the result. If the MVar happens to be empty, we fetch the scheduleSContAction for the current thread, and append append it along with the hole to the end of the queue. This enqueued PTM action, when executed, will append the current thread to its scheduler. We indicate the reason for switching to be BlockedInHaskell. Finally, the control switches to the next runnable thread using the yieldControlAction. All of these actions occur atomically within the same transaction.
If the MVar is full with a pending writer, we first fill the hole with the value. Then, MVar's status is updated with the enqueued value and the rest of the writers. Finally, we execute the dequeued PTM action to place the writer into its corresponding scheduler.
Notice that just like yield and forkIO, takeMVar is scheduler agnostic; the MVar implementation is cleanly separated from the scheduler implementation. Moreover, the same MVar might be shared between threads from different schedulers since they utilize the uniform scheduler interface. Since the scheduler actions are PTM actions, actions from different schedulers can be composed together elegantly and simplifies reasoning about synchronization. An implementation of a MVar can be found here.
As an aside, the race condition in swapMVar can be eliminated with the help of PTM abstraction. Thus, PTM abstraction makes it easy to construct correct concurrent data-structures.
System Threads and Parallelism
We retain the task model of the current runtime system. There is a one-to-one mapping between tasks and system threads. Tasks are not exposed to the programmer and is transparently managed by the RTS. Any task that is not performing a safe-foreign call needs to acquire a capability to run. The number of capabilities represents the number of SConts that can run in parallel. Just like in the current system, the rts parameter -N controls the maximum number of capabilities. Cores are system resources and hence, the control over their allocation to different processes should be a property of the context under which the programs are run. Hence, we believe it is important to have non-programmatic control over parallelism.
A program always boots up on 1 core running the main function. Additional capabilities can be created on demand using the following primitives.
getNumCapabilities :: IO Int getCurrentCapability :: PTM Int newCapability :: SCont -> IO ()
Primitive newCapability runs the given SCont on a free capability. If there are no free capabilities, a runtime error is raised. A typical, initial task spawned on another core would pull work from the scheduler and switch to it. For example,
initialTask :: IO () initialTask = atomically $ do s <- getCurrentSCont yca <- getYCA setSContSwitchReason s Completed yca
When a program boots up with N capabilities, the programmer can choose to create N-1 additional capabilities using the primitive newCapability which run initialTask.
Sleep Capability
In a multicore setting, runnable SConts might not always be available on a capability. In this case, the capability must wait for SConts to be added to the scheduler. In our system, this must be handled under yieldControlAction, where it is expected that the control switches to another SCont. The concurrency substrate provides
sleepCapability :: PTM ()
primitive that aborts the current transaction and blocks the current capability. The capability is implicitly woken up when one of the PVars that it has read from has been updated. Then, the original transaction is re-executed. Under yieldControlAction, one of the PVars read before sleeping will be the scheduler data structure. Hence, the capability is woken up when the scheduler data structure is updated. The complete implementation of yieldControlAction example introduced earlier is given below.
yieldControlAction :: PTM () yieldControlAction = do sched :: PVar [SCont] <- -- get sched contents :: [SCont] <- readPVar sched case contents of x:tail -> do { writePVar $ contents tail; switchTo x -- DOES NOT RETURN } otherwise -> sleepCapability
SCont Affinity
Every SCont is bound to a particular capability and only that capability is capable of running the SCont. Switching to an SCont that is not bound to the current capability raises a runtime error. SCont affinity interface is shown below.
setSContCapability :: SCont -> Int -> IO () getSContCapability :: SCont -> PTM Int
A newly created SCont is bound to the current capability. Primitive setSContCapability is used to change the affinity of an SCont that belongs to the current capability. Trying to change the affinity of an SCont that belongs to a different capability throws a runtime error.
Bound SCont
Similar to bound threads concurrency substrate supports bound SConts. The interface is shown below.
newBoundSCont :: IO () -> IO SCont isCurrentSContBound :: IO Bool rtsSupportsBoundSConts :: Bool
Creating a bound SCont creates a new task, which is the only task capable of running the bound SCont. When switching to a bound SCont, the RTS transparently switches to the corresponding bound task. Similarly, when switching away from a bound SCont, the RTS suspends the current bound task, and switches to another appropriate task. However, an unbounded SCont (created through newSCont primitive) might be run on any unbounded task (referred to as worker tasks). New worker tasks might be created by the RTS on demand.
Scheduler Interaction with RTS
We retain certain components of GHC's concurrency support that interact with the scheduler in the C part of the runtime system (RTS). Some of these interactions such as non-termination detection and finalizers become clear only in the RTS. Other interactions like safe-foreign calls and asynchronous exceptions, which can potentially be implemented in Haskell, are retained in the RTS for performance and simplicity. Furthermore, there are issues like black-holes, which are complicated enough that they are best handled transparently from the programmer's point of view.
We observe that our scheduler actions are sufficient to capture the interaction of user-level scheduler and RTS. As mentioned earlier, the scheduler actions are saved as fields in the TSO structure. In order to invoke the scheduler actions from the RTS (upcalls), we need a container thread. We associate with every capability an upcall thread and an upcall queue.
Whenever a scheduler action needs to be invoked from the RTS, the scheduler action is added to the upcall queue. During every iteration of the RTS schedule() loop, we check for pending upcalls. If there are pending upcalls, we save the current thread, switch to the upcall thread, execute every upcall to completion, and finally switch to the original thread.
Next, we shall look at various RTS interaction with the user-level scheduler and how scheduler actions enable them.
Blocked Indefinitely
Unreachable Concurrent Datastructure
The BlockedIndefinitelyOnMVar is raised on a thread that is blocked on an MVar, but the MVar has become unreachable. This is performed at the end of a garbage collection, just before resuming execution of the Haskell threads. In the vanilla RTS, after raising BlockedIndefinitelyOnMVar exception on a blocked thread, the thread is added back to the run queue. However, in the lightweight concurrency (LWC) implementation, this is not so straightforward. In particular,
How do we know whether the SCont is blocked on a concurrent data structure in Haskell?
How do we safely add the thread to the Haskell scheduler?
We know that any SCont blocked with status SContSwitched BlockedInHaskell t is blocked on a concurrent data structure. For an SCont that is blocked on a concurrent data structure which has become unreachable, we raise BlockedIndefinitelyOnConcDS exception. Subsequently, we utilize the SCont's scheduleSContAction to put the SCont back into its corresponding scheduler. Importantly, since the scheduler actions are PTM actions, the necessary synchronization is taken care of by the PTM layer.
Unreachable Scheduler
Unlike the vanilla RTS, schedulers can become unreachable in the LWC implementation. Concurrency substrate allows the programmer to install finalizers with the following primitive.
setFinalizer :: SCont -> IO () -> IO()
For the given thread, setFinalizer installs the given IO () as the finalizer. If an SCont is blocked with status SContSwitched Yielded has become unreachable, we run the SCont's finalizer, if installed.
Preemptive Scheduling
GHC's concurrency library supports preemptive scheduling of threads. In the LWC implementation, we utilize the scheduler actions to preempt the thread; on a timer interrupt, we execute the current thread's schedulerSContAction followed by yieldControlAction. This is similar to the implementation of the yield primitive described earlier.
Safe Foreign Calls
A safe foreign call does not impede the execution of other Haskell threads on the same scheduler, if the foreign call blocks. Before performing the foreign call, the task, say T1, releases the capability that it currently owns. This might wake up other tasks which are waiting to acquire a free capability. After the foreign call has completed, T1 tries to reacquire the last owned capability. In the fast path, the foreign call quickly completes and T1 reacquires the capability. In the slow path, some other task, say T2, acquires the capability.
Slow-path in Vanilla RTS
In the vanilla RTS, T2 will pick the next available thread from the current capability's run queue and resume execution. When T1 eventually completes the foreign call, it tries to reacquire the capability. Thus, performing a safe-foreign call does not block all the threads on that capability.
Slow-path in LWC RTS
The fast path in the LWC implementation is the same as vanilla implementation. However, in the slow path, we need a way for T2 to resume the scheduler, and a way for T1 to join the scheduler when the foreign call execution eventually completes. Assume that the Haskell thread that is running on the task T1 is t1. We utilize the yieldContrlAction of t1 to enable T2 to resume execution of other threads on the scheduler. When T1 eventually resumes execution after the foreign call, it finds that it has lost the race to acquire the capability to T2. At this point, T1 executes t1's scheduleSContAction to join the scheduler.
PTM retry
GHC's STM module provides a retry primitive, which blocks the thread invoking retry to block until one of the TVars it has read has been written to. After a thread blocks on the STM, the next available thread from the capability's run queue is resumed. Eventually, the blocked thread is added back to the run queue when one of the TVars in its read set has been written to.
For retry under PTM, while waiting on a PVar is still an RTS mechanism, interaction with the scheduler is implemented using the scheduler actions. After blocking the thread on the PTM, RTS executes the blocking thread's yieldControlAction to resume the scheduler. When the thread is eventually unblocked, its scheduleSContAction is executed to put the thread back into its user-level scheduler data structure.
Black-hole Handling
Long lived thunks may be blackholed to avoid duplication of work. A blackholed thunk is owned by the thread which blackholed it. When a thread encounters a blackhole owned by some other thread, the vanilla GHC suspends the thread until the thunk finishes evaluation. This requires interaction with the scheduler. In general, any thunk evaluation may encounter a blackhole.
For the LWC implementation, can we utilize the scheduler actions to yield control to another thread from the user-level scheduler, similar to the solutions above? The simple answer is no. Since the scheduler actions themselves are implemented in Haskell code, they can also encounter blackholes. Hence, we might encounter situations where the user-level scheduler becomes blocked on a thread that it is scheduling, resulting in a deadlock.
Since thunks (usually) represent pure computation, can we not duplicate thunk evaluation when we detect a deadlocked scheduler? Unfortunately, this is not so straightforward. The closure that represents a thunk is lost when the thunk is blackholed. Moreover, the thread evaluating the blackholed thunk (blackhole owner) might be running on the same or a different capability than the thread entering the blackhole. Correspondingly, the blackhole owner thread might either not be schedulable or running. This complicates the problem of potentially forcing a blackholed thunk's evaluation on a thread other than the blackhole owner. It is for these reasons we handle blackholes transparently from the programmer's perspective in the LWC implementation.
When a thread enters a blackhole, there are essentially 3 parameters that we need to consider:
PTM : Is the current thread manipulating a scheduler? since schedulers are implemented in Haskell code, there isn't a clear distinction between the scheduler and the rest of the program. As an approximation, we assume that whenever a thread is in the middle of a PTM transaction, it is potentially manipulating the scheduler. UPT : Is the current thread an upcall thread? In the common case, when a thread enters a blackhole, we utilize its scheduler actions to block it on the blackhole's blocking queue. But an upcall thread, evaluating scheduler actions from the RTS is not associated with any scheduler and hence does not have scheduler actions. This case must be handled separately. CCAP : Is the blackhole owner on the current capability? If the blackhole owner is on the current capability, then the blackhole owner is currently suspended. Otherwise, thunk evaluation is potentially progressing on another capability.
Since each of these conditions can either be true or false, we have 8 cases to consider.
(1, 2) PTM(F) UPT(F) CCAP(T/F) - This is the typical case when a thread blocks on a blackhole. Here, we enque the thread on the blackhole's blocked thread queue and perform the yieldControlAction to switch to another thread. When the thunk finishes evaluation, we examine the blocked thread queue. If a blocked thread is not an upcall thread, we know it has a scheduleSContAction, which is executed to resume the blocked thread.
- This is the typical case when a thread blocks on a blackhole. Here, we enque the thread on the blackhole's blocked thread queue and perform the yieldControlAction to switch to another thread. When the thunk finishes evaluation, we examine the blocked thread queue. If a blocked thread is not an upcall thread, we know it has a scheduleSContAction, which is executed to resume the blocked thread. (3, 4) PTM(F) UPT(T) CCAP(T/F) - This case cannot happen. Upcall threads only execute PTM actions.
- This case cannot happen. Upcall threads only execute PTM actions. (5, 6) PTM(T) UPT(T/F) CCAP(T) - We are under PTM and potentially manipulating the scheduler. The blackhole is owned by a thread on current capability and is suspended. Hence, the only option is to force evaluation of the thunk. This is achieved by creating a closure (AP_STACK) that contains all of the frames from the blackhole owner thread until the update frame that corresponds to the blackholed thunk. Blackhole owner's stack is modified such that when it resumes, it evaluates the newly created closure instead of resuming the original thunk evaluation. Current thread evaluates the newly created thunk to force evaluation of the thunk. Here, the current thread is said to have inherited the thunk.
- We are under PTM and potentially manipulating the scheduler. The blackhole is owned by a thread on current capability and is suspended. Hence, the only option is to force evaluation of the thunk. This is achieved by creating a closure (AP_STACK) that contains all of the frames from the blackhole owner thread until the update frame that corresponds to the blackholed thunk. Blackhole owner's stack is modified such that when it resumes, it evaluates the newly created closure instead of resuming the original thunk evaluation. Current thread evaluates the newly created thunk to force evaluation of the thunk. Here, the current thread is said to have the thunk. (7) PTM(T) UPT(F) CCAP(F) - A user-level thread under PTM has blocked on a blackhole owned by a thread on a different capability. We cannot inherit the computation. The solution is similar to (1).
- A user-level thread under PTM has blocked on a blackhole owned by a thread on a different capability. We cannot inherit the computation. The solution is similar to (1). (8) PTM(T) UPT(T) CCAP(F) - This is a tricky case. Upcall thread blocks on a blackhole, which is owned by a thread on a different capability. We need to put the capability to sleep and wake-up when the blackholed thunk finishes evaluation. Here, we enque the upcall thread on the blackhole's blocked thread queue. Now, the current capability does not have any runnable threads. Hence, it goes to sleep. When the thunk finishes evaluation, we examine the blocked thread queue. If a blocked thread is an upcall thread, we push it on its owning capability. This implicitly wakes up the capability, which resumes execution.
RTS Messaging Layer
Since thunk evaluation and blackholing is a critical for good performance, we would like the common case - thunk finishes evaluation without being blackholed - to be fast. Hence, we retain the RTS messaging layer between the capabilities for blocking on a blackhole. When a thread enters a blackhole whose owner thread resides on another capability, a block request message is sent to the corresponding capability. Notice that the association between SConts (threads) and capabilities is essential for identifying which capability to send the block request message to. During every iteration of the RTS Schedule loop, a capability checks its inbox for pending messages, and if any, processes the messages. Hence, no synchronization is necessary for replacing a thunk with a value.
Exceptions Escaping SConts
Every SCont has a top-level exception handler, which catches all exceptions and executes the SCont's yieldControlAction in the exception handler. If an exception escapes the computation spawned as an SCont, we mark the SCont's status as SContKilled, and switch to the next available SCont from the scheduler. This ensures that schedulers are not lost if an SCont is killed.
Asynchronous Exceptions
The substrate exposes
throwTo :: Exception e => SCont -> e -> IO ()
primitive which raises an arbitrary exception on the given SCont. The masking semantics is exactly the same as throwTo under Control.Concurrent. Under the hood, RTS messaging layer is used to raised exceptions on SConts belonging to other capabilities. This is necessary since raising asynchronous exceptions involves modifying the stack, and hence, is safe only if performed on the capability to which the target SCont belongs to. If the calling SCont blocks on throwTo, we utilize the scheduler actions to resume other SConts that might be available on the scheduler.
If an exception is raised on an SCont that is blocked on an blackhole, STM, or user-level concurrent data structure, we remove the SCont from any blocking queues, raise the exception, and utilize the SCont's scheduleSContAction to enqueue it back to the scheduler. If an exception is raised on a SCont suspended on a scheduler, we simply raise the exception.
For blocking actions in the RTS, such as STM, and blackholes, RTS knows how to remove the SCont from the corresponding queue. However, if an SCont happens to be blocked on a user-level data structure such as an MVar, how do we asynchronously remove the thread from the MVar data structure? Once could envision a model where a SCont blocking on a concurrent data structure would provide a unblockSCont :: PTM() which can be used to remove the blocked SCont from the user-level blocking queue. In the RTS, blocking queues are implemented as doubly-linked lists such that removing an element from the middle of the list is fast. However, implementing an efficient unblockSCont action for every user-level data structure can be cumbersome and complicated, and defeats the purpose of lifting the concurrency library to Haskell.
Alternatively, instead of eagerly removing the SCont from the user-level blocking queue, we can defer it until the SCont is about to be unblocked from the blocking queue. In this case, on receiving the asynchronous exception, we will raise the exception on the SCont, eagerly append it to the scheduler, and mark the blocked action as invalid. The invalidation is achieved through resume tokens.
data ResumeToken newResumeToken :: PTM ResumeToken isResumeTokenValid :: ResumeToken -> PTM Bool data SContSwitchReason = BlockedInHaskell ResumeToken |...
Primitive newResumeToken allocates a new, valid resume token. The validity of a resume token can be queried using the primitive isResumeTokenValid. Whenever an SCont blocks on a user-level data structure (i.e. updating switch reason to BlockedInHaskell ), it is expected that it is provided a new, valid resume token. If an asynchronous exception is raised on this blocked SCont, the resume token is transparently invalidated. Eventually, when the SCont is about to be unblocked from the concurrent data-structure, the resume token can be queried for validity. If the resume token is invalid, then the blocked SCont has been resumed already and hence it should not be resumed again. The following snippet shows the implementation of takeMVar primitive that can tolerate asynchronous exceptions. The only change is to the wakeup function.
takeMVar :: MVar a -> IO a takeMVar (MVar ref) = do hole <- atomically $ newPVar undefined atomically $ do st <- readPVar ref case st of Empty ts -> do s <- getCurrentSCont ssa <- getSSA token <- newResumeToken let wakeup = do { v <- isResumeTokenValid token; if v then ssa s else return () } writePVar ref $ v where v = Empty $ ts++[(hole, wakeup)] switchToNext <- getYCA setSContSwitchReason s $ BlockedInHaskell... switchToNext Full x ((x', wakeup):ts) -> do writePVar hole x writePVar ref $ Full x' ts wakeup otherwise ->... atomically $ readPVar hole
Thus, except for resume tokens, asynchronous exceptions are transparently handled by the runtime system.
Related WorkMany on the left claim to be tolerant liberals who care about women and gays and the harassment they subjected to. However, since they believe that women and gays should only be Democrats when they come across someone who isn’t, they are completely intolerant and treat them with utter disrespect.
For example, a woman recently went into a Starbucks wearing a Trump shirt and was treated horribly. She claims that associates saw her shirt and started shouting at her and making fun of her. The conduct was so bad that the company later issued an apology. It’s currently unclear if the associates responsible were disciplined.
According to reports, Kayla Hart, a female Trump supporter from Dilworth, North Carolina, was bullied earlier this week in a Starbucks for wearing a Trump T-shirt. Upon entering the coffee shop, which has had problems with conservatives in the past, Hart was allegedly shouted and laughed at.
Specifically, she told reporters that during her visit, “they shouted out ‘Build a wall’ and shoved a drink at me and then all the baristas in the back started cracking up laughing.” What’s worse, instead of her name being on the drink, it simply said: “build a wall.” Instead of staying to enjoy her drink, she decided to leave. “I just walked out because everyone was staring,” recalled Hart.
The whole situation confused and saddened Hart. “I don’t know what politics has to do with getting a cup of coffee,” she stated, adding, “I just found it really sad that I can’t wear a t-shirt with our president without being made fun of.”
Hart informed reporters that she wasn’t trying to attack Starbucks, only inform others about what happened. “This isn’t me trying to get people to stop going to Starbucks,” continued Hart. “I just want it to be put out there so people know this is what’s occurring. I don’t think it’s right you should be humiliated for wearing a T-shirt with your opinion on it,” she explained.
When asked to comment, Starbucks completely distanced themselves from the behavior exhibited in their store in an attempt to avoid a public relations nightmare. “We failed to meet this customer’s expectations of us, and we have apologized and are working directly with her to make it right. This experience is not consistent with our standards or the welcoming and respectful experience we aim to provide every customer who visits our store,” said the company in a written statement, noting, “we have spoken with our store partners about this situation and are using this as a coaching opportunity for the future.”
Unfortunately, this is not the first time this month that a someone was shouted at for simply being a conservative. Prior to the incident that Hart was involved in, Jonathan Hale and Carl DeMaio, two gay conservatives who are married to each other, filmed Jeff LeTourneau, the co-chair of the Democratic Party of Orange County, harassing them outside of a Walmart while they were attempting to gather signatures to recall a Democratic senator who voted to raise taxes. In the video, LeTourneau, who is also gay, is heard trying to intimidate the conservative activists. “you f****** belong to a party that writes our destruction into its platform! How dare you be in this county!” yelled LeTourneau at one point in the video. Get your s*** and get out of here! You’re a f****** disgrace to any gay person I know! Piece of s***! Get out of here!” he continued.
LeTourneau continued screaming like this for several minutes. He finally stopped when a woman approached, agreed to sign, and chastised him for acting so inappropriately. Throughout the unhinged Democrat’s profanity-laced tirade, Hale and DeMaio managed to keep their cool. In doing so, they appeared much more reasonable than the screaming liberal.
The authoritarian left must not be allowed to bully those they disagree with. When someone finds themselves being accosted by an apoplectic liberal, conservatives should do their best to remain calm and film the behavior. Doing so will give countless others the opportunity to see just how reasonable some conservatives are and just how intolerant some liberals can be.Greek astronomy is astronomy written in the Greek language |
, his iconic Crunchberries, his slightly salty Peanut Butter Crunch, or his ever-iridescent Oops! All Berries, the Cap’n Crunch section of the cereal aisle is a monument frozen in history. Its red, yellow, orange, and blue palette of boxes is a never-wavering Stonehenge that attracts kids and kids-at-heart alike with its eternal recognizability.
Sure, Quaker releases new Cap’n Crunch cereals all the time, but this pattern of short-lived and totally wacky Limited Edition cereals still reflects retro sensibilities. Just as they did with 1975’s Punch Crunch or 2000’s Mystery Volcano Crunch, Quaker regularly plops a Sprinkled Donut Crunch or Caramel Popcorn Crunch onto shelves, milks the hype until the novelty bursts, and yanks the flavor from shelves.
Nostalgia-holics everywhere are then left with a residual sugar high, fond memories, and a desire to taste what’s next. Meanwhile, Cap’n Crunch himself kicks his feet up and plots his next guerrilla strike.
It’s a genius strategy, and before you say I’m reading too deep into it, consider the effort put into recent Limited Edition Cap’n Crunch cereals.
This year’s boxes of HomeRun Crunch and Orange Creampop Crunch cereals both featured callbacks to obscure Quaker mascots on the back. At the same time, the brand’s social media presence is genius and self-aware. Not only does the Cap’n respond entirely in character, and not only does he have his own animated YouTube talk show, but he is also forthright in interacting with Crunch superfans. This is a blessing I’ve experienced firsthand when I received a personalized letter from Horatio himself:
Someone onboard the S.S. Guppy knows what they’re doing, and I salute them for it. Remember when you were a kid coming home from school on Friday afternoon? You had a bounce in your step and plenty of optimism about the blissful and sugary sweet Saturday morning waiting ahead of you.
Cap’n Crunch remembers this feeling. And he knows that while people may grow up and markets may shift, sometimes change isn’t the solution.
Sometimes you just have to keep the magic alive.Many of London’s big Victorian Cemeteries have suffered over the years. Originally set up and run by private companies, many of these companies ran into financial difficulties after the Second World War, effectively abandoning cemeteries or selling them cheaply to local authorities. As a result, these cemeteries became overgrown and vandalised. Tower Hamlets, one of London’s “Magnificent Seven” Victorian cemeteries, was one of places that found itself derelict and unloved in the late 20th Century. Thankfully, today all of that has changed.
Opened in 1841, Tower Hamlets Cemetery served London’s East End. Due to its location in Bow, it has often been referred to as “Bow Cemetery” by locals. Like many large cemeteries opened around this time, it contained a consecrated section for Anglican burials and an unconsecrated section for Nonconformist burials.
Sections of ground were also set aside for “public graves” – large graves where several unrelated people could be buried. Some of these graves were huge – up to forty feet deep, and big enough to fit thirty bodies in them. These graves were intended for those who were unable to afford a private grave plot, and at Tower Hamlets, situated among many poor working-class districts of the East End, a large proportion of burials took place in the public graves. Within two years of the cemetery opening, 60% of burials were in public graves, and over the years the proportion rose to 80%.
The number of burials that took place at Tower Hamlets in its first fifty years is quite staggering. By 1889, almost a quarter of a million people had been interred there.
People from all walks of life were laid to rest at Tower Hamlets: music hall stars, teachers, engineers, trade unionists and merchants. There are fewer grand memorials to be found here than at places like Kensal Green, reflecting the mostly working-class make-up of the neighbourhood Tower Hamlets Cemetery was situated in.
A much-loved local politician was buried at Tower Hamlets in 1921. Will Crooks served the people of Poplar as a member of the London County Council and chairman of the Poplar Board of Guardians. Crooks had had a tough start in life – his father lost an arm in an industrial accident when Will was just three years old, and his mother struggled to support their large family. Will and some of his siblings had to spend some time in the workhouse, a difficult time which later inspired Crooks to campaign for better conditions in workhouses. As an adult, Crooks became involved in trade unionism and played a prominent part in the 1889 London Dock Strike. A gifted orator, he went on to become mayor of Poplar in 1900, and later became MP for Woolwich (an excellent post about Crooks’ achievements in South London can be found on Running Past). He remained an MP until shortly before his death in 1921, and the inscription on his grave shows the affection he was held in.
While exploring the cemetery, I came across the graves of a number of the Brothers of the Charterhouse, pointed headstones that caught my eye amongst the sea of less dramatic shapes. The Brothers of the Charterhouse are retired men of limited means who live in the almshouses first set up by Sir Thomas Sutton in Clerkenwell in 1611. Perhaps some of the Brothers pictured here are now buried at Tower Hamlets.
A modern war grave marks the previously unmarked burial place of an early Victoria Cross recipient. Major John Buckley was serving in the Bengal Army, a part of the East India Company, in Delhi when rebellion broke out in 1857. With eight others, Buckley defended an ammunition storehouse for many hours, finally blowing it up rather than letting the explosives fall into the hands of mutineers. He was awarded the Victoria Cross, the highest honour for gallantry, “for gallant conduct in the defence of the Magazine at Delhi, on the 11th May, 1857.” Tragically, after being released from captivity, he discovered that his wife and children had been murdered by the rebels. Originally from Stalybridge in Cheshire, Major Buckley died in London at the age of 63 in 1876.
Even by the end of the 19th Century, Tower Hamlets Cemetery was overcrowded, untidy and falling into disrepair. Five bombs fell on the cemetery during the Second World War, shattering the two chapels on the site and damaging memorials. However, burials continued until the 1960s, when the cemetery was sold to the Greater London Authority. In 1966, the cemetery was officially deconsecrated by an Act of Parliament and no further burials took place there.
The Greater London Authority planned to make the cemetery into a park, and the cemetery’s bombed-out chapels were demolished and many gravestones cleared. However, a lack of funding and strong opposition from local people brought this work to a halt and the cemetery became overgrown and derelict, no longer used for burials but not yet suitable to be used as a park.
In 1986, following the abolition of the Greater London Authority, Tower Hamlets Borough Council took control of the cemetery and in 1990, the Friends of Tower Hamlets Cemetery was formed. The Friends came to be because local residents were concerned at the poor state of the cemetery and wished to do something about its neglected state. Gradually, the Friends began to transform the overgrown cemetery into a pleasant green space with clear paths and benches, where local people could relax and enjoy the peace.
Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park was designated as a Local Nature Reserve in 2000, due to the area’s rich biodiversity. Many wild plants and flowers grow among the graves, and many birds, butterflies and moths, insects and mammals call the old cemetery their home. Some of the species found in the Cemetery Park, such as the tiny Small Blue butterfly, are quite rare. While visiting I saw at least six different species of butterfly, including the beautiful yellow Brimstone.
The Soanes Centre was opened near the Southern Grove entrance to the cemetery in 1993. This facility caters for children of all ages and provides workshops where children and young people from local schools can explore the vast array of plant and animal life present in the cemetery. Thousands of schoolchildren benefit from the work of the Soanes Centre each year – rather like the old Nature Study Museum at St George in the East, the centre gives children and young people living in built up inner city areas to explore and interact with nature.
Today, Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park is thriving. Activities taking place there range from woodworking to art classes, wildlife walks to recording inscriptions on graves. This summer, the Cemetery Park will once again host the Shuffle Festival, an arts festival that raises funds for local community projects. The park’s past as a burial ground is respected, researched and celebrated, and the Friends of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park have transformed a sad, derelict space into a place for education, remembrance, relaxation and leisure.
References and further reading
Friends of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park http://www.fothcp.org/
Tower Hamlets Cemetery – BBC London, 10th May 2005 http://www.bbc.co.uk/london/content/articles/2005/05/10/tower_hamlets_cemetery_feature.shtml
At Bow Cemetery – Spitalfields Life, 13th July 2010 http://spitalfieldslife.com/2010/07/13/at-bow-cemetery/
OAP finds VC hero John Buckley’s grave while tidying up Tower Hamlets Cemetery, East London Advertiser, 11th December 2012 http://www.eastlondonadvertiser.co.uk/news/heritage/oap_finds_vc_hero_john_buckley_s_grave_while_tidying_up_tower_hamlets_cemetery_1_1737459We forecast what we can and happily cede the rest to the players and the drama they improvise on the court. Sports Illustrated’s College Basketball Projection System, now in its third year, simulates the season 10,000 times and ranks teams 1–351 according to their average efficiency. Last year in the preseason, we identified North Carolina as a weak No. 1 in a historically wide-open field—and five months later, the Tar Heels led Villanova with 15 minutes left in the national title game. What transpired after that, culminating in Kris Jenkins’s buzzer-beating three, was the greatest finish in the history of the sport. You don’t get Jenkins’s dagger without the exhilarating crapshoot that is the single-elimination NCAA tournament, and you don’t get the nation’s most accurate preseason projections—as ours have been for the past two years—without running 10,000 simulations.
This project starts from the ground up, assessing every roster, player by player. For offense, the system projects efficiency and shot volume by considering past performance, recruiting rankings and advanced AAU stats, development curves for similar Division I players over the past 14 seasons, the quality of a player’s teammates and his coach’s ability to develop and maximize talent. Those stats are weighted based on the team’s rotation—including scouting intel on who’s expected to play—then used to produce each team’s offensive efficiency projection. (The simulations account for variance in individual performances as well as injury scenarios.) Team defensive efficiency projections are based on players’ projected rebound, steal and block percentages, height (taller frontcourts make for stingier D), experience (veterans have fewer lapses) and coaches’ defensive résumés. For a deeper look at how our model works, read this explainer, and for all of our analytics-driven preview content, click here.
This is how our system ranks all 351 teams heading into 2016–17:
Rank Team Proj. Off. Eff. Off. Rank Proj. Def. Eff. Def. Rank Proj. Pyth. Win% Proj. Conf. Rank Proj. NCAAs seed 1 Duke 125.2 1 94.0 11 0.9641 1st in ACC 1 seed 2 Kansas 118.6 8 91.5 3 0.9519 1st in B12 1 seed 3 Kentucky 119.2 7 92.0 4 0.9515 1st in SEC 1 seed 4 Oregon 120.1 4 93.9 9 0.9447 1st in P12 1 seed 5 Villanova 120.2 3 94.2 13 0.9431 1st in BE 2 seed
While our projections saw no dominant teams in the 2015–16 preseason, this year they view Duke as a juggernaut, ranking first in offensive efficiency by a wide margin and 11th in defense. We went back and examined every preseason No. 1 from the past decade—using beginning-of-season rosters to project performance—to see how these Blue Devils stacked up, and starting with the ‘07–08 preseason, only one team had a stronger projection. That was ‘08–09 North Carolina, which came into that season with a veteran, national player of the year candidate in power forward Tyler Hansbrough; a supporting cast of efficient sidekicks in guards Ty Lawson, Wayne Ellington and Danny Green; and two elite freshmen big men in Ed Davis and Tyler Zeller.
If that roster blueprint seems familiar, it’s because it closely resembles what the Blue Devils have now. Junior combo guard Grayson Allen is SI’s projected frontrunner for national player of the year and he’s just the kind of high-volume, high-efficiency scorer that makes an elite offense possible. He has quality veterans around him in guards Matt Jones and Luke Kennard and power forward Amile Jefferson. And Duke added two freshmen who could potentially be the No. 1 pick in the 2017 NBA draft (Jayson Tatum and Harry Giles) and two more who could be first-rounders (Marques Bolden and Frank Jackson). The Blue Devils can give every, meaningful minute to players who were ranked in the top 35 of their recruiting class, and they have depth to withstand injuries. All this adds up to an otherworldly offensive projection; it just needs to work in the real world the same way it did for Carolina in 2009, when the Tar Heels cruised to a national title. If issues arise—if say, Duke’s lack of a true, pass-first point guard is a problem—then Kansas, a team with two veteran floor generals, a crop of talented underclassmen and a strong, No. 2 overall projection, will be right there waiting.
Rank Team Proj. Off. Eff. Off. Rank Proj. Def. Eff. Def. Rank Proj. Pyth. Win% Proj. Conf. Rank Proj. NCAAs seed 6 North Carolina 121.8 2 95.8 27 0.9406 2nd in ACC 2 seed 7 Virginia 115.0 25 90.6 2 0.9393 3rd in ACC 2 seed 8 Wisconsin 114.8 27 90.6 1 0.9385 1st in B10 2 seed 9 Gonzaga 116.3 14 94.5 16 0.9157 1st in WCC 3 seed 10 Arizona 115.3 23 93.8 8 0.9147 2nd in P12 3 seed
In 2009–10, when Butler made the first of its back-to-back runs to the national championship game, it had more than just wunderkind coach Brad Stevens and future NBA draft picks Gordon Hayward and Shelvin Mack on its side. The Bulldogs also had a remarkable level of roster continuity, bringing back every rotation player from a team that finished 38th in efficiency the previous season. They allocated a nation-high 93.2% of their minutes to the same players from ‘08–09, made substantial improvements—and came within a halfcourt heave of upsetting Duke in the title game. Wisconsin, which finished 38th in efficiency last season—just like ‘08–09 Butler—brings back 99% of its minutes played, and our projections think the Badgers can improve enough to chase their third Final Four in four years.
Wisconsin’s defense, which was already elite last season, projects to be the nation’s best, but its offense, which we forecast to jump from 90th in efficiency to 27th, is its prime area for growth. The Badgers gave 28% of their minutes to freshmen last season, many of whom committed turnovers at an uncharacteristically high rate for the program, which has a history of ranking among the nation’s best at ball-control. Sophomores Ethan Happ (a TO rate of 19.0% last season), Khalil Iverson (28.7%) and Alex Illikainen (15.9%) are expected to become more sure-handed with experience, and they should benefit from running the same offense, under the same head coach, all of this season, too. Bo Ryan’s midseason retirement, and the switch to longtime assistant Greg Gard—who subsequently implemented a classic version of the swing offense—made for an abnormal season.
Rank Team Proj. Off. Eff. Off. Rank Proj. Def. Eff. Def. Rank Proj. Pyth. Win% Proj. Conf. Rank Proj. NCAAs seed 11 Purdue 117.8 9 97.2 37 0.9014 2nd in B10 3 seed 12 Xavier 115.6 19 95.4 24 0.9013 2nd in BE 3 seed 13 Louisville 112.3 49 92.7 5 0.9005 4th in ACC 4 seed 14 Syracuse 113.6 33 93.9 10 0.8999 5th in ACC 4 seed 15 Indiana 119.6 5 99.4 79 0.8936 3rd in B10 4 seed 16 UCLA 116.7 12 98.2 50 0.8789 3rd in P12 4 seed 17 California 111.7 53 94.3 14 0.8760 4th in P12 5 seed 18 NC State 117.6 10 99.4 80 0.8742 6th in ACC 5 seed 19 West Virginia 111.8 52 94.5 15 0.8736 2nd in B12 5 seed 20 Connecticut 112.5 46 95.6 25 0.8663 1st in Amer 5 seed 21 Creighton 114.6 29 97.9 46 0.8587 3rd in BE 6 seed 22 Saint Mary's 116.2 16 99.5 83 0.8560 2nd in WCC 6 seed 23 Michigan 115.5 20 99.0 67 0.8554 4th in B10 6 seed 24 Baylor 117.0 11 100.3 102 0.8544 3rd in B12 6 seed 25 Texas 112.5 45 96.6 31 0.8528 4th in B12 7 seed
The player data we’ve gathered from the past 14 seasons gives us a unique window into how much can be realistically expected out of highly ranked recruits. Players outside the top 20 of the Recruiting Services Consensus Index tend to take until Year 2 to break out, and those second-tier recruits tend to make the biggest freshman-to-sophomore offensive leaps of any players in D-I. That bodes well for Louisville, which lost key seniors Damion Lee and Trey Lewis, but has two former top-40 recruits ready to take over in sophomore combo guard Donovan Mitchell and wing Deng Adel. Both of them flashed breakout-star potential during their appearance at the adidas Nations camp in Garden Grove, Calif., this summer, and they’re a big reason why the Cardinals are ranked 13th and projected to finish fourth in a loaded ACC.
Three teams appear in SI’s projected top 25 that were left out of the popular human polls. NC State (No. 16) has added as much key talent as anyone in the nation save for Kentucky and Duke, in freshman point guard Dennis Smith Jr. and power forward Omer Yurtseven, and back-from-injury senior shooting guard Terry Henderson. Our projections see Michigan (23)—and especially senior wing Zak Irvin—set up for a bounce-back year after an injury-plagued ‘15–16 sunk the Wolverines to eighth in the Big Ten. And Baylor (24), despite losing stars Taurean Prince (to the NBA draft) and Rico Gathers (to the NFL draft), still has enough offensive firepower to be the third-best team in the Big 12.
Rank Team Proj. Off. Eff. Off. Rank Proj. Def. Eff. Def. Rank Proj. Pyth. Win% Proj. Conf. Rank Proj. NCAAs seed 26 Wichita St. 110.3 70 94.7 18 0.8526 1st in MVC 7 seed 27 Cincinnati 110.4 67 94.8 20 0.8520 2nd in Amer 7 seed 28 Michigan St. 115.2 24 99.0 69 0.8513 5th in B10 7 seed 29 Butler 116.2 15 99.9 93 0.8512 4th in BE 8 seed 30 VCU 110.7 60 95.2 23 0.8503 1st in A10 8 seed 31 Florida 110.6 62 95.1 22 0.8500 2nd in SEC 8 seed 32 Rhode Island 112.6 44 96.8 33 0.8496 2nd in A10 8 seed 33 Miami FL 115.3 22 99.2 77 0.8495 7th in ACC 9 seed 34 Clemson 112.6 43 96.9 34 0.8489 8th in ACC 9 seed 35 San Diego St. 107.9 112 92.9 6 0.8481 1st in MWC 9 seed 36 Maryland 112.4 47 97.0 36 0.8447 6th in B10 9 seed 37 Texas A&M 109.0 88 94.1 12 0.8440 3rd in SEC 10 seed 38 Virginia Tech 115.4 21 99.7 90 0.8423 9th in ACC 10 seed 39 Iowa St. 115.6 18 99.9 95 0.8422 5th in B12 10 seed 40 Oklahoma 111.2 54 96.2 28 0.8418 6th in B12 10 seed 41 Notre Dame 119.5 6 103.4 172 0.8413 10th in ACC 11 seed 42 Dayton 109.5 79 94.7 19 0.8412 3rd in A10 11 seed 43 Seton Hall 108.0 108 93.5 7 0.8410 5th in BE 11 seed 44 Florida St. 114.3 30 99.0 68 0.8402 11th in ACC Play In 45 BYU 114.7 28 99.3 78 0.8397 3rd in WCC Play In 46 Georgetown 112.7 42 97.6 40 0.8395 6th in BE Play In 47 Princeton 114.9 26 99.5 84 0.8391 1st in Ivy 12 seed 48 Ohio St. 110.5 64 95.8 26 0.8389 7th in B10 Play In 49 Pittsburgh 113.5 35 98.4 55 0.8385 12th in ACC 50 USC 112.9 39 98.4 54 0.8298 5th in P12
Some of our system’s most contrarian positions appear in this section, starting with it having Michigan State—a team some human rankings have in the top 10—all the way down at 28. The model believes that the Spartans’ loss of valuable frontcourt players Matt Costello and Deyonta Davis to the pros, plus early season injuries to Ben Carter and Gavin Schilling, creates a rebounding-and-rim-protection void that drags their defense down to 69th overall in efficiency. The model sees similar issues occurring at Maryland (21st in the Coaches’ Poll, 36th here) and Iowa State (27th in Coaches, 39th here).
Meanwhile, in the Atlantic 10, Dayton (No. 42) and Rhode Island (32) were picked 1–2 in the league’s preseason poll of coaches and media, but our projections actually view VCU (30) as its best team. We’re also forecasting the Ivy League to have an at-large bid-worthy team in Princeton (47), which brings back 96% of its minutes from last season and adds talented senior power forward Hans Brase, who missed last season with an injury.
Rank Team Proj. Off. Eff. Off. Rank Proj. Def. Eff. Def. Rank Proj. Pyth. Win% Proj. Conf. Rank Proj. NCAAs seed 51 Marquette 113.2 36 98.8 63 0.8263 7th in BE 52 Texas Tech 112.9 40 98.6 58 0.8259 7th in B12 53 SMU 113.0 38 98.7 60 0.8251 3rd in Amer 54 Vanderbilt 113.1 37 98.8 65 0.8250 4th in SEC 55 Utah 112.7 41 98.7 59 0.8225 6th in P12 56 Northwestern 111.2 55 98.8 64 0.7945 8th in B10 57 Colorado 108.5 95 96.6 30 0.7917 7th in P12 58 Georgia 108.5 97 96.7 32 0.7882 5th in SEC 59 Houston 115.8 17 103.9 188 0.7770 4th in Amer 60 Illinois 109.0 90 97.8 44 0.7758 9th in B10 61 Arkansas 110.3 68 99.1 71 0.7746 6th in SEC 62 Mississippi 110.8 58 99.8 91 0.7692 7th in SEC 63 Washington 110.3 69 99.4 81 0.7682 8th in P12 64 UNC Wilmington 111.0 56 100.1 99 0.7665 1st in CAA 12 seed 65 Monmouth 108.7 92 98.0 48 0.7658 1st in MAAC 12 seed 66 Providence 108.5 96 97.9 45 0.7652 8th in BE 67 Iowa 110.7 59 100.1 100 0.7613 10th in B10 68 Mississippi St. 108.4 100 98.1 49 0.7588 8th in SEC 69 Oregon St. 109.4 83 99.1 72 0.7563 9th in P12 70 Stanford 109.3 85 99.2 75 0.7527 10th in P12 71 Davidson 113.7 32 103.2 166 0.7526 4th in A10 72 UT Arlington 109.8 76 99.7 88 0.7525 1st in SB 13 seed 73 Oklahoma St. 109.7 78 99.9 94 0.7462 8th in B12 74 UAB 111.9 50 102.0 135 0.7443 1st in CUSA 13 seed 75 Arizona St. 109.4 82 99.8 92 0.7422 11th in P12 76 Kansas St. 107.1 123 97.8 43 0.7401 9th in B12 77 South Carolina 107.7 116 98.4 53 0.7388 9th in SEC 78 Wake Forest 110.5 65 101.2 119 0.7339 13th in ACC 79 Auburn 108.8 91 99.7 87 0.7325 10th in SEC 80 Ohio 113.9 31 104.4 201 0.7321 1st in MAC 13 seed 81 Western Kentucky 109.9 74 100.8 110 0.7307 2nd in CUSA 82 Nevada 106.5 136 97.7 42 0.7287 2nd in MWC 83 New Mexico 109.8 75 100.8 112 0.7276 3rd in MWC 84 Harvard 106.7 130 98.0 47 0.7271 2nd in Ivy 85 Temple 107.2 121 98.5 57 0.7260 5th in Amer 86 Valparaiso 103.2 209 94.8 21 0.7258 1st in Horz 13 seed 87 Alabama 106.1 143 97.5 39 0.7255 11th in SEC 88 Richmond 112.3 48 103.2 165 0.7251 5th in A10 89 Penn St. 107.4 118 98.7 62 0.7248 11th in B10 90 TCU 104.9 168 96.5 29 0.7231 10th in B12 91 Long Beach St. 109.9 73 101.2 120 0.7211 1st in BW 14 seed 92 Nebraska 106.9 126 98.5 56 0.7199 12th in B10 93 Belmont 116.4 13 107.4 257 0.7161 1st in OVC 14 seed 94 George Washington 108.3 102 100.2 101 0.7102 6th in A10 95 Toledo 110.6 63 102.5 147 0.7044 2nd in MAC 96 East Tennessee St. 109.4 81 102.1 139 0.6897 1st in SC 14 seed 97 Minnesota 106.1 144 99.1 70 0.6866 13th in B10 98 South Dakota St. 106.3 140 99.4 82 0.6846 1st in Sum 14 seed 99 Tennessee 109.2 87 102.1 140 0.6843 12th in SEC 100 Old Dominion 104.1 185 97.6 41 0.6785 3rd in CUSA
This tier includes two former Duke assistant coaches trying to break through to the NCAA tournament in their relatively new jobs—but to earn at-large bids, Steve Wojciechowski’s Marquette team (whom we rank 51st) and Chris Collins’s Northwestern team (56th) will need to outperform their projections by a few wins apiece. Slightly lower, at Nos. 64 and 65, respectively, are two teams that project to be formidable 12-seeds: UNC-Wilmington, which led Duke at halftime of a 4–13, first-round tourney game in March, and Monmouth, one of the best mid-majors that didn’t make the Big Dance last season.
Rank Team Proj. Off. Eff. Off. Rank Proj. Def. Eff. Def. Rank Proj. Pyth. Win% Proj. Conf. Rank Proj. NCAAs seed 101 Memphis 107.0 124 100.5 104 0.6742 6th in Amer 102 Georgia St. 104.5 179 98.2 51 0.6718 2nd in SB 103 St. John's 105.4 158 99.1 74 0.6696 9th in BE 104 LSU 107.8 113 101.4 125 0.6680 13th in SEC 105 Middle Tennessee 105.3 162 99.1 73 0.6676 4th in CUSA 106 College of Charleston 100.5 274 94.7 17 0.6647 2nd in CAA 107 St. Bonaventure 110.9 57 104.5 204 0.6646 7th in A10 108 Boise St. 106.3 139 100.3 103 0.6611 4th in MWC 109 Yale 106.5 134 100.5 106 0.6594 3rd in Ivy 110 Northern Iowa 104.1 186 98.3 52 0.6589 2nd in MVC 111 Arkansas Little Rock 103.2 211 97.5 38 0.6585 3rd in SB 112 Siena 109.3 84 103.3 167 0.6583 2nd in MAAC 113 James Madison 104.7 176 98.9 66 0.6581 3rd in CAA 114 Akron 108.3 103 102.3 143 0.6574 3rd in MAC 115 Vermont 110.0 72 104.0 193 0.6558 1st in AE 15 seed 116 Iona 110.1 71 104.2 198 0.6533 3rd in MAAC 117 UCF 105.3 163 99.7 89 0.6516 7th in Amer 118 Eastern Michigan 108.0 110 102.3 141 0.6505 4th in MAC 119 Illinois St. 105.1 164 99.7 86 0.6488 3rd in MVC 120 Buffalo 106.6 131 101.2 121 0.6441 5th in MAC 121 Fresno St. 107.7 115 102.7 151 0.6341 5th in MWC 122 Lehigh 107.8 114 102.9 156 0.6305 1st in Pat 15 seed 123 North Dakota St. 104.7 175 100.0 98 0.6303 2nd in Sum 124 William & Mary 110.7 61 105.7 230 0.6296 4th in CAA 125 Oakland 113.6 34 108.5 273 0.6290 2nd in Horz 126 Saint Joseph's 107.5 117 102.9 157 0.6242 8th in A10 127 New Mexico St. 101.1 259 96.9 35 0.6189 1st in WAC 15 seed 128 Green Bay 108.2 104 103.8 183 0.6164 3rd in Horz 129 Chattanooga 104.9 170 100.7 109 0.6151 2nd in SC 130 Towson 105.6 153 101.4 124 0.6148 5th in CAA 131 Weber St. 105.7 147 101.5 126 0.6147 1st in BSky 15 seed 132 Hofstra 109.5 80 105.1 217 0.6141 6th in CAA 133 Sam Houston St. 107.0 125 102.8 153 0.6136 1st in Slnd 16 seed 134 Ball St. 108.0 109 103.8 184 0.6116 6th in MAC 135 Winthrop 109.8 77 105.7 228 0.6083 1st in BSth 16 seed 136 Grand Canyon 105.3 160 101.7 129 0.6002 2nd in WAC 137 Morehead St. 106.6 132 102.9 161 0.5978 2nd in OVC 138 Elon 108.6 94 104.9 213 0.5977 7th in CAA 139 Northern Illinois 104.0 189 100.6 108 0.5951 7th in MAC 140 Albany 106.7 129 103.4 173 0.5892 2nd in AE 141 UNLV 105.4 159 102.3 145 0.5840 6th in MWC 142 Mercer 108.6 93 105.5 222 0.5838 3rd in SC 143 La Salle 103.9 192 100.9 |
I think, broadly, most of people at OpenAI are worried about or at least think these issues are worth thinking about. That’s different from who is actively doing their technical work on it. I would say it’s three or four people now and hoping that that grows somewhat. We’re actively looking for really talented people. I think OpenAI as an institution has the general idea that in order to work on AI safety, you have to be at the forefront of AI. Also if you are at the forefront of AI, you have a better ability to implement AI’s safety in the final system that’s built.
Many people are interested in safety in the long run but I think until recently and even so now, I think many people here don’t know if there’s a way to work on safety right now. They’re skeptical that you’re able to work on safety right now with concrete work. I’ve been trying to change that with Concrete Problems and with this recent paper that Paul and I wrote on learning complex human preferences. We’re trying to show that there’s concrete work that can be done and that’s had a variety of reactions. Some people are like, yes, this is exactly what you meant with safety work now I see how it can be done. Some people are like, well that’s machine learning work, I don’t actually see how it connects to AGI and so then we’ll try and write another paper and say, “Okay, this is the line we’re drawing and this is how we think it gets us there.” It actually could turn out that this is mostly just ML work and the final systems we build are different enough that for whatever reason this ends up not being relevant to safety.
Again, I’m pretty happy in that world. If there was nothing concrete it was possible to work on safety and I instead ended up doing a different direction in machine learning, then that ends up being fine. Then it will turn out we couldn’t have worked on safety until later and then we’ll work on safety later. Whereas in the world where it does matter, it’s really great and really impactful to get a headstart on it.
Robert Wiblin: I’m curious to get your view on this debate that I’ve seen online. You have this contrast, some people like perhaps Bostron could be a case of this in the book SuperIntelligence of talking as though once we have a super human AI then it will get very much smarter very quickly and it could potentially just solve all of these problems, it could solve aging, like solve all of our health issues. Since the people criticizing this online saying you just think this because you’re a bunch of nerds and you think that thinking is the way to change the world, the way that everything gets done, but it’s not going to be so simple even if you had a very intelligent machine it wouldn’t necessarily be able to solve those problems. Do you have a view on that debate?
Dario Amodei: I’d rephrase the debate a little bit. I think there’s an interesting technical question of like, let’s say I built an artificial general intelligence tomorrow and because it’s software, let’s say I made a hundred thousand of them. How much does that fundamentally change our society and our technological capability? A lot of it is just, you can look at individuals throughout history that manage to discover a lot more than other individuals. You look at-
Robert Wiblin: Von Neumann.
Dario Amodei: Von Neumann or Einstein or one of these figures who just manage to be leaps and bounds ahead of others. The question is like what’s the ceiling on that. If we invented AGI tomorrow, would it take a couple of days to scan all of our brains into software, upgrade us, give us indefinite life extension, or would it just be like, “Oh, it’s more humans to talk to”. I think it’s actually complicated. I think some people act like it’s obvious one way or another but it’s not really something, I have a lot of certainty on in part because I think modern science has experienced a lot of diminishing labor like-
Robert Wiblin: Diminishing returns.
Dario Amodei: Diminishing return like depletion of low hanging fruit. It could turn out that like solving biology is just this exponentially complicated combinatorial problem or it’s limited by data and experiment. Of course, maybe the machines will allow us to do the experiments much, much faster. Then there’s some limit on the physical reaction time of the biological systems. When you put it all together, do we get zoom to do something much much faster than we ever could or do we get just some mild acceleration of what humans can be doing? I feel like many people act as if the answer’s obvious but as someone with a background in Biology, even thinking about all the directions in which machines can optimize it, my guess is machines could probably make things happen pretty fast but I think there’s huge uncertainty here and I don’t really think anyone knows what they’re talking about on this question.
Robert Wiblin: My background is in economics. I imagine if you had an incredibly smart AI and it was trying to figure out macroeconomics, like understand recessions and booms and bust cycle, I suppose it could have lots of conceptual breakthroughs but you take the measurements so quickly and you can’t really run experiments so you could end up being the, processing of the data that we get is extremely good and very fast but then the data only comes in so quickly and there’s only so much you can actually learn.
Dario Amodei: There are some simple stuff, which is like, I wouldn’t be surprised if for example a really powerful AI wouldn’t be able to understand our macroeconomic systems because this data issue but it would be able to design a better macroeconomic system. It’s weird. There are some stuff I feel like you just redesign it and you and do it much better. There’s other stuff that it’s just really difficult. I find this puzzling. I’m pretty agnostic on it. I don’t really have a good answer on the kind of like nerds think AI can solve everything question. I think there are some deep set problems in human nature and so just solving resource constraints isn’t going to solve war or probably in some ways already solved resource constraints. But maybe having true AGI will allow us to redefine what it means to be human and we’ll ultimately-
Robert Wiblin: Elevate ourselves above conflict.
Dario Amodei: Will elevate ourselves above our petty human bickering or maybe the petty human bickering will prevent us from being able to elevate ourselves so we’ll be stuck. I don’t know about that either.
Robert Wiblin: We’ll reach superhuman levels of petty bickering perhaps.
Dario Amodei: I don’t actually know. It’s actually very hard to know.
Robert Wiblin: We’ve mentioned a few times this paper, “Concrete Problems in AI Safety”, let’s dive into that. Before we discuss those problems, what was your impetus for writing it?
Dario Amodei: I had been aware of the work of the AI safety community for awhile but had in general felt that … I wasn’t particularly happy with the way they were phrasing things. It didn’t seem like what they were describing was actionable and there wasn’t a lot of ties to like … AGI was generally discussed in these very abstract terms like having the utility function and having incentives to do this or that, discussing things at these very abstract level, I couldn’t help but feel there were a lot of implicit assumptions that were not really being discussed.
At the same time, the mainstream machine learning community, which I’ve been a part of for about a year and half, having a lot of experience with speech recognition systems, one thing that I found about neural nets is that they’re very powerful but they’re very unevenly powerful. The key example I gave early on was you can train a speech recognition system on 10,000 hours of American accent of data. For someone with an American accent that gets it perfectly, then you give it someone with a British accent or an Indian accent or something, and it just does terribly on it. Of course, if you train it on enough diversity of accents then start generalizing better. Generally, when we build engineering systems, that silent, random failure, it’s not something that we see as a desirable property in systems we build particularly safety-critical systems.
The idea that fixing those problems was not just a one-by-one thing where we’re like, “Op! We’re using neural net again in this self driving car, what statistical test for everything we can get.” We’re using a neural net now in a drone, let’s make sure it doesn’t shoot someone. That we could have principles behind what gives us guarantees on the behavior of a system or at least what gives us statistical guarantees. That seems super interesting to me and it really didn’t seem like a … it seemed like very few people were actually working on it.
Me and some of my colleagues, Chris Olah at Google, Paul Christiano, who’s now at OpenAI, Jacob Steinhardt at Stanford, John Schulman here, and Dan Mané who is another Googler had all thought a little bit about this problem. We decided to get together and write down all of our ideas in a paper that would lay out an agenda for what, why we think this is a thing. In particular, I think … I felt that the machine learning community as a whole was a little bit confused. I think that they largely thought AI safety was about fears that AIs would malevolently rise up and attack their creators. Even when they didn’t think it was about that, they worry that the people who talk about AI safety will feed into fears that it’s about that.
I felt like this was a silly state of affairs and that of course we can do research on making systems safer and more reliable that doesn’t prey on these fears. In particular, we can even do research that ultimately points towards AGI. I think the important thing is that we shouldn’t go around with every other word we say being AGI in particular like the research itself shouldn’t be specific to AGI. You can’t really research AGI now because we can’t build an AGI. I think the very standard technique when doing research on a topic is if you want to think about a topic that’s abstract or in the future then come up with a short term bridge to it that lets you think about something conceptually similar in a way you can empirically test now. That was the general philosophy behind the paper and the philosophy behind the follow-ups that we and others have done to implement the research agenda described in the paper.
Robert Wiblin: What are some of the concrete problems? Do you want to tackle one or two here?
Dario Amodei: Yeah sure. I can go into them briefly. I think we made a distinction between problems that relate to, what happens if you don’t have the right objective function and what happens if you do have the right objective function but something goes wrong in the process of learning or training the system. Not having the wrong objective function, the extreme version of that is what’s talked about and the classical AGI safety stuff which is you want to specify a goal and you, for whatever reason, you know you have some simple instantiation of the goal and it ends up not quite being the right thing. We call that-
Robert Wiblin: The genie problem?
Dario Amodei: Yeah. We call that “reward hacking”. Few months ago, using an environment in the now de-emphasized Universe program. I had an example of like a boat race where the boat is supposed to go around and a few laps and what it’s trying to do is finish the race as fast as possible. The only way to be able to get points and you can’t change this because it’s the way the game is programmed is you get points as you pass targets along the way. But it turns out there is this little lagoon with all these targets and the targets also give you turbo so they make you go faster and faster. You can just loop around in this little tiny lagoon and not finish the race. In one sense, you shouldn’t be surprised it’s the correct solution, it’s how you get the most points. The idea is that the mapping from, well, this is the reward function to this is the behavior that leads to it is a very twisted mapping and so the point is that it’s-
Robert Wiblin: It’s not what you would have intended it for it to be maximize it.
Dario Amodei: It’s not what you would have intended it to be. The lesson of that is that it’s very easy to make small changes in the reward space and have that lead to big differences in the behavior space and also for the mapping to be very opaque for you to look at a reward space think you know what it means and in actuality it leads to something very different than what you would have expected. We call that generalized reward hacking. Then there was another problem called negative side effects, which is a little related to that, which is just that if your reward function relates to a few things in your environment and your environment is very big, then there’s a lot of ways for you to do destructive things. It’s one particular way in which it’s easy to specify the wrong reward function.
Robert Wiblin: Because you haven’t put in side constraints?
Dario Amodei: Yeah. You haven’t explicitly put in the 10,000 other things.
Robert Wiblin: All the things you care about.
Dario Amodei: 10,000 other things you care about. Then there was this thing called scalable supervision, which is, if you’re a human trying to specify a goal to a machine learning system even if you have a clear idea of what it is that needs to be done, then you don’t have enough time to control or give feedback on every action that an AI system does, and therefore limits to your ability to control and supervise can lead to a system behaving in a way you hadn’t intended because it interpolate in the wrong way. Those are the problems with like the classical AI safety type problems like you have the wrong … you somehow, you gave yourself the wrong goal in a way that was hard to understand. Then the more technical right problems that relate to, you know, your system was trying to do the right but something went wrong, it’s things more like this thing we called distributional shift which is when your training set is different from your testing sets.
The classical example of this is … when I was at Google there was an incident where Google’s photo captioning system had been … they had this photo captioning system that was trained on a lot of photos. It turned out that most of the photos were statistically biased to be photos of Caucasian people. There were also a lot of animals and monkeys in it. Unfortunately, this system reacted when a black person took a picture of themselves and the photo it tagged them as a gorilla because it has only seen humans with white skin so this was, of course, incredibly offensive and Google had to apologize for it. They even had … they even thought of this a little bit ahead of time but the neural net ended up being so screwed up that it didn’t even warn them that it was in a region of the state space it was dangerous.
Robert Wiblin: Because the algorithm has no concept of what’s offensive and what was not.
Dario Amodei: Yeah, the algorithm, it’s just-
Robert Wiblin: But it can produce a pretty horrifying outcome.
Dario Amodei: Exactly. It’s just a statistical learning system. It doesn’t know about racism, it doesn’t know about racial slurs. It doesn’t know about what’s offensive. It’s just a learning algorithm and it just learns from the data it was given. There turned out to be some problems with the data that it was given and there turned out to be some problems with the algorithm. It just innocently produced this extremely offensive result. This is … the world of neural net is full of this. I think something related to this distributional shift is adversarial examples, which my colleague, Ian Goodfellow, works on a lot, which is when you intentionally adversarially try to disrupt an input to a machine learning system and make a very small change to it that causes something bad to happen.
They were a little complimentary. Adversarial examples is like a small but carefully chosen, like perturbation to it, whereas [inaudible 00:39:34] of distribution is this holistic perturbation to it. Resistance against those two is … it’s separate. You’re talking about two orthogonal directions in the perturbation space. These are all issues with making sure that when you train something that it behaves in a new environment the way you would intend it to behave or if it goes wrong but it fails gracefully. We haven’t put a lot … when we put some work into this area, we cite a lot of papers in the Concrete Problems paper. I think relative to the stampede of work in mainline AI, I’d like to see more of this stuff.
Robert Wiblin: I think you did an interview with the Future of Life Institute where I think you talk about this paper for about half an hour so people who are interested can go and listen to that and you get more details on each of those different five problems. How do these problems tie together the long term concerns with the short term ones that we have today?
Dario Amodei: I think the attempt was to come up with some conceptual problems that relate to both that have long term and short term versions. With something like a distributional shift, the short term version of it is something like the gorilla. The long term version would be something like, well I’ve trained in AGI in a simulation and then I put it in the real world and a lot of things are different. Does it break a lot of stuff without meaning to? The super intelligent version of it is like whatever, it’s like the marks-
Robert Wiblin: It’s just the same but too extreme.
Dario Amodei: More extreme, it’s building a Dyson sphere, it’s never built a Dyson sphere before where like if something go wrong, whatever outlandish thing you can think of. I think the point and the explicit strategy was that people often contrast long term versus short term approaches as if working on short term safety and long term safety and like different topics and like they trade off against each other. What I’d rather do is have a thread running from long term to short term things where you identify what the fundamental problems are. Then you work on them on short term problem. Then as the systems get more powerful, you update your techniques. It creates this more symbiotic where you’re following along.
I think safety shouldn’t be anything different from reinforcement learning. Reinforcement learning is a general paradigm for learning systems. You can do something as simple as walk across a grid, all the way up to playing Go, all the way up to perhaps building a system that’s as intelligent as humans. I probably wouldn’t literally use reinforcement learning but … the reinforcement learning is a general paradigm that runs from things that are very simple, the things that are very complicated. I guess the idea was to do the same thing for safety, come up with some general principles that will carry across towards very powerful systems. I wouldn’t say these problems tell you everything that could go wrong with powerful systems. I think there are almost certainly things that are very specific to powerful systems.
My general view is I’m much less confident in our ability to identify those problems. Maybe we can, some people are trying but let’s … my view is just, it seems like there’s a lot seen on the table. Let’s identify the problems we can identify, let’s work on them, and then whatever is left, we either have to work on them very late in the process or maybe someone can identify them but that seems like the higher hanging fruit.
Robert Wiblin: The hope is that in order to solve the long term problems, you want to find cases that are similar today where you can get feedback on whether it’s actually helping.
Dario Amodei: Yeah, exactly. I think that there’s a magic of empiricism because it’s very easy to engage in long chains of reasoning about a topic that don’t get tied back to reality. Of course, the risk of working on short term stuff is that it doesn’t matter or it doesn’t generalize. The compromise I’ve come up with is try and think of things that are conceptually general and then try to tie them into empirics [00:43:48].
Robert Wiblin: To that end, has OpenAI made any noticeable progress on these problems or other problems?
Dario Amodei: Yeah. I think about three weeks ago, Paul Christiano and I and Tom Brown here, and three people at DeepMind including Jan Leike, Miljan Martic and Shane Legg came out with a paper called “Deep Reinforcement Learning from Human Preferences”. This works on the reward hacking, scalable supervision side of things. The way this paper works is normally you have a reinforcement learning algorithm it has a goal or a reward function. The agent acts to maximize that reward function. This works pretty well for something like chess or go where the behaviors are incredibly complicated but evaluating the goal is pretty easy. With go, it’s like, are you in a winning position, you have more territory? With chess, it’s have you checkmated the king or have you been checkmated?
It’s really easy to evaluate these simple goals with the script and so you can run the algorithm through millions or even hundreds of millions of games and the goal evaluation is easy. Most of the stuff that we do in real life, the goal was complicated. It’s like carry on the conversation, or be effective personal assistant to a human, which means scheduling things for them, making their life easier but not enabling all their private information to their boss or whatever. There’s a lot of like context sensitive stuff, which is part of what makes, it’s part of what leads to safety problems. If I take a complicated set of goals like that and I try and forced it into the framework of a hard-coded reward function, it’s going to lead to something that makes everyone unhappy because the two things don’t fit together.
Robert Wiblin: You said that it’s maximizing on one dimension and then fails on all of the others?
Dario Amodei: Yeah. Or just that the intrinsic number of bits of complexity in something like hold the good dialogue is very high. If I try and program that in, I might be going to be programming for a very long time in which case I’ll probably make an error. Or, if I try and make what I programmed simple, then there’s just not going to be enough bits of information to fit the actual complex nature of the goal. I’m either going to be very error prone or I’m just not going to be capable of learning what I need to learn. That’s why people talk about like strategies for absorbing values and things.
What our paper basically does to address this is it replaces the fixed reward function with a neural net based model of the human’s reward. The idea is you have a reinforcement learning agent that’s learning, and in the beginning, it starts acting randomly, and every one in a while, it gives some examples of its behavior to a human. It will come out with two video clips. The human looks of the video clips and says is the left better or is the right better? The human says left is better or right is better. If it’s playing pong something, then if the left is point got scored on you and the right is you scored a point, then the human will say the right is better. Then, the agent builds a model of what reward function would lie behind the human’s expressed preferences. The reward function becomes something implicit and learned, observed from the human’s behavior.
Then the RL [00:47:33] agent gets to work saying, “Yup! This is what I think the human’s goal is. I’m going to go and try to maximize this.” But then it comes back to you and it gives you more examples of behavior, and then, the human decides in those. Over time, the human is given more and more subtly different examples of behavior. The reward predictor in response learns to discriminate them and gets a more refined understanding of what the human prefers, and in the RL algorithm then tries to maximize that. The consequences of its behavior are then given back to the human. It’s this kind of-
Robert Wiblin: It’s kind of three steps, like the human, and then AI that’s trying to figure out what the humans are optimizing for and then the thing that does that. But then, most of time it’s asking the intermediate AI, is that right?
Dario Amodei: Yeah.
Robert Wiblin: Both is to have [crosstalk 00:48:20] intermediate model of what the human wants.
Dario Amodei: Yeah, you have three parts. You have a model of what the human wants. You have the RL algorithm that’s maximizing that model, and you have the human that feeds-
Robert Wiblin: That trains the-
Dario Amodei: That trains the model. But also the RL algorithm feeds back to the human so that it basically, whatever the RL algorithm has learned to do, it goes back to the humans. It basically says, “Okay, is this what you wanted? Of the things I’m now doing, which do you want more?”
It’s this gradual preference elicitation, which helps to get around the … if you get things wrong by a little then you get the wrong behavior. It’s unfolding behavior in real time and incrementally showing you the consequences of the behavior that you’re seen. By no means does this solve all safety problems. It’s just one little bit of progress on one.
Robert Wiblin: One brick in the wall.
Dario Amodei: Yeah, one safety problem. This is an example of this thing I’m talking about. We use this both to solve ML task that you couldn’t solve before because the reward functions were too hard to specify and then impact on safety is obvious because it allows us to specify goals more easily. There’s all kinds of other problems, you can have with it, it has to scale, there are other safety problems you don’t want AI systems tricking you. There’s so much. This thing is … there’s an example of what we did. I think we’re going to try and do a lot more it.
Robert Wiblin: How many times do you have to get feedback from the human to solve this problem? Is it a reasonable number?
Dario Amodei: Yeah. It depends on the task. On some of these ATARI games, which take about 10 million timesteps to learn, usually a human has to give feedback a few thousand times. Less than 1% or a tenth of a percent the human actually has to pay attention to. We managed to train this simulated little neural robot to do a backflip with a few hundred times steps. It’s the human clicking for about 30 minutes or so. We’re trying to get that number down because-
Robert Wiblin: This is the learning from human preferences paper?
Dario Amodei: Yes.
Robert Wiblin: We’ll put up a link to that. You can take a look at this little worm thing here that learns to, let us jump progressively from this flailing around than focusing on the ground.
Dario Amodei: It got a little bit of media coverage. My favorite headline was “What this back flipping noodle can teach you about AI safety”.
Robert Wiblin: It seems quite a bit.
Dario Amodei: I think it was “Here’s what this back flipping noodle can teach you about AI safety”.
Robert Wiblin: That’s some good click bait. Apart from those five issues that you talk about in the paper, what do you think are some other important problems or open problems in the field?
Dario Amodei: One thing we didn’t discuss in the paper is the issue of transparency of neural net. This is trying to figure out why a neural net does what it does, which you could eventually extend to why is a reinforcement learning system taking the options it takes. It just has a policy. It’s in a situation it runs a bunch of things through its neural net and it says, “I’m going to move left”, or “I’m going to bend my joint”. It doesn’t really have much explanation for what it does. If we could explain why, break down the decisions made by neural nets, then that could help with feedback, could help with making sure that systems do what we want them to do and that they’re not doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, which might mean they would do the wrong thing in another circumstance.
I think that’s a pretty important problem. My co-author on the paper, Chris Olah, did a lot of work in that area with Deep Dream, which is all of the back propagated images generated by neural nets that was originally designed to be a way to visualize what maximally activates a given neuron within a neural net. It was initially a transparency technique. That’s an area that Chris is very excited about. That’s another area I think we should work on. I mentioned before adversarial examples. I think that’s an area that’s already getting a decent amount of attention but probably should get more like everything in safety should get more. I think that’s an area we should work on, and also that has like short term safety implications. Someone could sabotage a self-driving car with adversarial examples. We certainly wouldn’t want that to happen.
Robert Wiblin: We can’t have that.
Dario Amodei: Yeah.
Robert Wiblin: Interesting. Is that a problem for a rollout of self-driving cars now? That someone might put up a word sign that confuses them?
Dario Amodei: I’m not the expert on it. I definitely don’t want to give anyone any ideas about how to do that.
Robert Wiblin: I guess it would certainly end up being criminal I would think to do that in the same way as hacking a computer system.
Dario Amodei: It’d be extremely illegal. I don’t actually know the details of whether that’s feasible or not and wouldn’t discuss them if I did.
Robert Wiblin: Of course, yeah. As we progressively work towards being able to control AIs that we’re developing, do you think it’s going to be possible for people [53:31] to understand the solutions that we have developed? You’ve discussed this three step process by which you train a machine or a reinforcement learning algorithm to understand the humans and then that trains the machine learning algorithm on the other side. I can understand that. There’s other big breakthroughs in history that you can get, like quantum physics, like it’s a particle and a half a wave and probably grasp it. Do you think it’s going to look like that? Or would it be just impossible technical details that-
Dario Amodei: The AI itself or the safety?
Robert Wiblin: I guess the way that we’re going to get machine learning or like other AI technologies to do what we want rather than flip out in some way we don’t expect.
Dario Amodei: I guess there’s two possible questions. One is are we going to understand at a very granular level every decision that’s made? Then there’s, are we going to understand the principles by which the system operates? I think we better understand the principles by which the system operates. If we don’t understand those, I don’t know how we can build them. If we did build them, I would definitely worry about their safety. I think it’s realistic to understand the basic principles on which something is built. But then there’s a question of on what level of extraction do we understand it right? The principles on which a visual neural net are built are very simple. It’s back propagation and alternating linear and non-linear components. That’s pretty much all there is to understand. Then the question is how much do we know about what goes on inside the neural net. That’s the question of transparency.
I’m optimistic that we’ll gain a better understanding of transparency inside neural nets. The question is how does that actually help us on safety, how do we actually use it? There’s a lot going on inside neural nets even if we could individually understand every piece of them. How does that actually help us? There’s more units than I can read and understand. I have to have some way of translating [00:55:17] that into something actionable like correcting bad behaviors or something. Somehow, that component of it has to fall into place as well. I don’t know yet how that’s going to happen. I don’t know if it’s possible. I think it’s urgently important research area.
Robert Wiblin: Let’s turn now to how someone might be actually able to pursue a career in AI safety. What are the natural paths to getting a job at OpenAI or other similar organizations?
Dario Amodei: I think my advice is going to be focused on the kind of AI safety work that I’m excited about. For example, MIRI does some safety work that’s more based on mathematics and formal logic. If you wanted to do that, you’d need a different background. The safety work that I’m most excited about, I think, it sounds obvious but the two things you most need are an extremely strong background in machine learning and a real deep interest in AI safety. I think to break those down, I think the first one is, certainly at OpenAI we really try hard to have a really high bar for hiring people. Just because someone wants to work on safety doesn’t mean that we lower the machine learning bar at all.
We have a lot of people here who are very good so going to get a PhD in machine learning, going to get a PhD with trying to work with the best people you can work with, doing the most groundbreaking work. There’s no ceiling to how much of this helps. My sense has been that people who have a deeper understanding of machine learning, if they’re interested in AI safety, also tend to really grasp AI safety issues better provided they think about them. That’s the second component, which is, I want people who really have a deep interest in safety not just, “Oh. it would be good if systems didn’t” … It would be good if self-driving cars didn’t crash but have a broad view of where we’re going with AI, which could be totally different from my vision, might not involve AGI but this general idea that we want to build machines that do what humans want and carry out the human will. I think that idea is a broad one and I want people working on safety to have a broad, broad view of that issue.
In the AI community, I don’t think the second one is lacking. There are many people who are passionate about the second one. I think the limiting factor is just a very strong machine learning talent.
Robert Wiblin: We just wrote a career review of doing a machine learning PhD, which we’ll put up a link to and then you can have a read. Is it machine learning or bust? Are there other options like other PhDs that people could do that it could be relevant like Computer Science or Philosophy or Data Science?
Dario Amodei: My PhD wasn’t in machine learning. We have a number of people here who have backgrounds in neuroscience or another area of computer science or mathematics or physics. It’s entirely possible if you happen to be educated in another area to go into this field. But I think going forward, if you’re a young student, I don’t particularly see a case for doing a PhD in another field if what you want to do is machine learning.
Robert Wiblin: Grab the bull by the horns.
Dario Amodei: I guess I’m saying it’s pretty easy to convert skills in related areas. Sometimes it gives you perspectives that you don’t have. If you want to do machine learning, you should get a PhD in machine learning. I think another thing I’d add is we do have some people working here who don’t have PhDs. My co-author, Chris Olah, actually never even went to college. He just straight went to Google. He had to do a lot to prove himself. The level of technical ability you need to show is not lowered, it’s even higher when you don’t have the educational background, but it’s totally possible.
I would say the most important thing is just being able to do a lot of impressive and creative machine learning work. I would even go so far as to say it’s not my expertise but even the people doing safety work that doesn’t involve machine learning, I get pretty nervous when we don’t have a strong background in machine learning because even if they think that a machine learning system can’t be made safe, they should know enough to understand why they think that’s the case and what they think the alternatives are.
Robert Wiblin: That includes, I guess, people doing mathematical research or philosophy research?
Dario Amodei: If it relates to AI safety. I would say that even those people, I would encourage them to learn as much machine learning as possible if only because they should understand approaches that they’re partaking.
Robert Wiblin: Is it fair to say that you think that the approach you’re taking where you study machine learning and try to actually improve AGIs is the best way to make AGI safe that you’d rather see someone do that than go into these other adjacent areas?
Dario Amodei: It’s a little complicated because I think that as systems get more complicated, there may be ways in which we combine neural nets for formal reasoning. There’s been some work by my friend, Geoffrey Irving, and some of his colleagues on doing theorem proving. Basically, using neural nets to select the lemmas to be used for the next theorem. If you take that far enough, you can imagine versions of reasoning systems that basically, they traverse some well-defined reasoning graph. They make logical conclusions that are tractable but it’s all driven at the bottom by neural nets driven intuition. The neural nets decide what conclusions you draw and where your thinking goes.
I think this is how humans do symbolic tasks like physics or math or anything like that. We’re neural nets at the bottom and then we have a layer on top of that that is … we use those neural nets to represent symbolic reasoning. Computer could probably do that even better because it can make sure that it never makes a mistake in this symbolic reasoning. The symbolic reasoning engine is there. You can imagine having formal guarantees on that formal reasoning. I think when we get to that it’ll look different from the way things are currently being done. I’m really not against using formal reasoning methods and using mathematics but I think it’ll be possible to do that work more productively once we understand how it fits in with current systems.
I actually don’t know. Maybe there’s stuff that’s being done now is productive but I’m pretty suspicious of anything where you can’t get that type empirical feedback loop because I |
the battle begins. Try not to get caught un-sieged by scanning ahead. You can put your banshees with your main army, or you can send them off to harass a weak position. Very few protoss know how to split their army against a mech push + 4 banshees harassing I found. 4 banshees are much stronger than a 1 medivac drop, and have insane mobility.This is my go to tvp mech build, and I found it very potent against most of my opponents. As long as I don't die early game because I didn't scout or skipped a bunker or two, I often straight up kill my opponent at the 14 minute mark. My mech army overpowers the protoss army with sheer strength, something that reminds me of the brood war days. The rumble of the seige tanks blasts are music to my terran ears =] Go out there and try it! If you have any questions feel free to ask them, I'd be happy to answer them!Notice how little damage I do with my banshees because my opponents played very safe/standard/properly. My push still comes out over 30 food ahead. Now imagine if I got more than 2-3 probes, how strong it would be =] All opponents are GMs.Opponent's Build: 1gate expansion -> 3gate -> robo -> 3rd/4th gas -> twlight/forge -> colo + charge + upgrades -> 5 gateDescription: Very standard play from my opponent. My harass does hardly any damage (3-4 probes). I push out at around 13 minutes and get into a nice position outside of the natural. My opponent has a nice arc, but I simply have too many units, and his colossus are nearly useless against the lines and lines of sieged up tanks. His army melts to mine in the final engagement and he taps out.Opponent's Build: 1gate expansion -> robo -> 3gate -> 3rd/4th gas -> forge -> colo -> 5 gateDescription: Again, very standard play from my opponent. My harass gets like 1 probe because my opponent got a fast obs into my base and scouted it. The push was a bit slow to get into the sweet spot between the natural/3rd, but eventually I was able to push there, and force an engagement. Notice when my opponents army attempts to hit from a different angle I dart into his main with 6 hellions. Also, if you are able to kill all his obs, your banshees can eat up his colossus.Opponent's Build: 1gate expansion-> 3gate -> robo -> 3rd/4th gas -> colo (2 base stalker/colo timing attack)Description: My opponent opened up fairly standard and did one of the best builds on this map, the stalker/colo 2 base timing attack. Notice how even though with only 4 factories and rallying my raven like a nublet my army is still much stronger than his. His army attempts to engage mine, but his front line evaporates in a second. He pulls back to his natural, but my tanks get a vice grip on his natural and he is forced to engage into my fortified position. He taps out after seeing his army disappear for a second time.
SCRedditor Profile Joined October 2012 United States 57 Posts #2 Nice, yet another guide. StimmedProbe, you're like the only person who still makes terran guides. I really appreciate it! =) Thanks to those that support me. For those that don't like me, please PM me. I always wish to kiss ass.
fezvez Profile Blog Joined January 2011 France 2903 Posts Last Edited: 2012-10-26 05:14:38 #3 Some more StimmedProbe guide?
To think that yesterday, I was praticing your builds (4 thors, hellion all-in, 1/1/1 contain) all day, and you provide me some more good stuff =)
I am surprised by your supply advantage, but you're GM and I'm not, so I'll believe you again!
Ordien Profile Joined January 2012 Denmark 34 Posts #4 I have been struggling so much vs protoss lately, and I'll defiantly try this out.
Thanks a lot! :D "The only real valuable thing is intuition." - Albert Einstein
theLiminator Profile Joined April 2011 Canada 54 Posts #5 How do you lose when you play this build? I don't mean when you die to an allin or something, I mean, how do you lose in the lategame? I can dance all day.
Yoshi Kirishima Profile Blog Joined July 2009 United States 9357 Posts #6 Nice guide! and it's about mech, hurray. Hopefully many people will find this useful and try out mech (or try again). Mid-master streaming MECH ONLY + commentary www.twitch.tv/yoshikirishima +++ "If all-in fails, all-in again."
StimmedProbe Profile Blog Joined October 2010 Hong Kong 98 Posts #7 On October 26 2012 14:26 theLiminator wrote:
How do you lose when you play this build? I don't mean when you die to an allin or something, I mean, how do you lose in the lategame?
If i lose late game it is normally because of an early attack from the protoss which damaged me, but didn't kill me. If I get to mid-game on even footing, I rarely lose. I have lost a base trade once, that's the only one I remember out of like 20+ games. Ultra late game you need to be careful about motherships, when you get vortexed your tanks come out in tank mode. If i lose late game it is normally because of an early attack from the protoss which damaged me, but didn't kill me. If I get to mid-game on even footing, I rarely lose. I have lost a base trade once, that's the only one I remember out of like 20+ games. Ultra late game you need to be careful about motherships, when you get vortexed your tanks come out in tank mode.
padfoota Profile Blog Joined February 2011 Taiwan 1359 Posts #8 On October 26 2012 14:26 theLiminator wrote:
How do you lose when you play this build? I don't mean when you die to an allin or something, I mean, how do you lose in the lategame?
You lose with terran mech when you make positional or compositional mistakes.
Other than that if the push didnt fully work ghosts will have to be added after to combat archon/air/mothership builds. (or maybe vikings. I dont like vikings.)
I dont actually know how protosses can counter terran mech with traditional PvT builds if its not a heavy pressure/all in builds.
Stimmedprobe will probably answer your question better
On another hand, Stimmed, since the opener is pretty much the TvZ hellion banshee into mech, whats your opinion on super heavy hellion compositions into quick 3rd base for extreme map control? to my knowledge the protoss army cant really do much against heavy hellions unless he opened blink stalkers, in which even then the aoe damage is too hard and risks his gas for collosi production You lose with terran mech when you make positional or compositional mistakes.Other than that if the push didnt fully work ghosts will have to be added after to combat archon/air/mothership builds. (or maybe vikings. I dont like vikings.)I dont actually know how protosses can counter terran mech with traditional PvT builds if its not a heavy pressure/all in builds.Stimmedprobe will probably answer your question betterOn another hand, Stimmed, since the opener is pretty much the TvZ hellion banshee into mech, whats your opinion on super heavy hellion compositions into quick 3rd base for extreme map control? to my knowledge the protoss army cant really do much against heavy hellions unless he opened blink stalkers, in which even then the aoe damage is too hard and risks his gas for collosi production Stop procrastinating
StimmedProbe Profile Blog Joined October 2010 Hong Kong 98 Posts #9 On October 26 2012 14:37 padfoota wrote:
Show nested quote +
On October 26 2012 14:26 theLiminator wrote:
How do you lose when you play this build? I don't mean when you die to an allin or something, I mean, how do you lose in the lategame?
You lose with terran mech when you make positional or compositional mistakes.
Other than that if the push didnt fully work ghosts will have to be added after to combat archon/air/mothership builds. (or maybe vikings. I dont like vikings.)
I dont actually know how protosses can counter terran mech with traditional PvT builds if its not a heavy pressure/all in builds.
Stimmedprobe will probably answer your question better
On another hand, Stimmed, since the opener is pretty much the TvZ hellion banshee into mech, whats your opinion on super heavy hellion compositions into quick 3rd base for extreme map control? to my knowledge the protoss army cant really do much against heavy hellions unless he opened blink stalkers, in which even then the aoe damage is too hard and risks his gas for collosi production You lose with terran mech when you make positional or compositional mistakes.Other than that if the push didnt fully work ghosts will have to be added after to combat archon/air/mothership builds. (or maybe vikings. I dont like vikings.)I dont actually know how protosses can counter terran mech with traditional PvT builds if its not a heavy pressure/all in builds.Stimmedprobe will probably answer your question betterOn another hand, Stimmed, since the opener is pretty much the TvZ hellion banshee into mech, whats your opinion on super heavy hellion compositions into quick 3rd base for extreme map control? to my knowledge the protoss army cant really do much against heavy hellions unless he opened blink stalkers, in which even then the aoe damage is too hard and risks his gas for collosi production
Nicely put, most of mech losses are because of composition mistakes (no ghosts late game, lack of anti-air, not enough hellions/buffer units) ect. You can also lose if you are out of position or not in siege mode.
This is a little bit different than the hellion/banshee opening. You don't get hellions out, and your banshee is much faster. There are also no double armories and the 3rd base is later. The factories are also much faster (8:30 vs 10:30). The TvZ mech build is a heavy 3-4 base macro build generally. This build is a sharp 2 base -> do damage -> continue if needed type of build. I prefer to open banshees because I can use them to scout. Hellions can't really scout. Nicely put, most of mech losses are because of composition mistakes (no ghosts late game, lack of anti-air, not enough hellions/buffer units) ect. You can also lose if you are out of position or not in siege mode.This is a little bit different than the hellion/banshee opening. You don't get hellions out, and your banshee is much faster. There are also no double armories and the 3rd base is later. The factories are also much faster (8:30 vs 10:30). The TvZ mech build is a heavy 3-4 base macro build generally. This build is a sharp 2 base -> do damage -> continue if needed type of build. I prefer to open banshees because I can use them to scout. Hellions can't really scout.
dynwar7 Profile Joined May 2011 1955 Posts #10 Thanks Stimmedprobe, at least where there is a huge deficit of terran guides, you are like a drop of water in the desert.. Regarding the imbalance, hilarious to see Zergs defending themselves....
padfoota Profile Blog Joined February 2011 Taiwan 1359 Posts Last Edited: 2012-10-26 06:03:32 #11 On October 26 2012 14:42 StimmedProbe wrote:
Show nested quote +
On October 26 2012 14:37 padfoota wrote:
On October 26 2012 14:26 theLiminator wrote:
How do you lose when you play this build? I don't mean when you die to an allin or something, I mean, how do you lose in the lategame?
You lose with terran mech when you make positional or compositional mistakes.
Other than that if the push didnt fully work ghosts will have to be added after to combat archon/air/mothership builds. (or maybe vikings. I dont like vikings.)
I dont actually know how protosses can counter terran mech with traditional PvT builds if its not a heavy pressure/all in builds.
Stimmedprobe will probably answer your question better
On another hand, Stimmed, since the opener is pretty much the TvZ hellion banshee into mech, whats your opinion on super heavy hellion compositions into quick 3rd base for extreme map control? to my knowledge the protoss army cant really do much against heavy hellions unless he opened blink stalkers, in which even then the aoe damage is too hard and risks his gas for collosi production You lose with terran mech when you make positional or compositional mistakes.Other than that if the push didnt fully work ghosts will have to be added after to combat archon/air/mothership builds. (or maybe vikings. I dont like vikings.)I dont actually know how protosses can counter terran mech with traditional PvT builds if its not a heavy pressure/all in builds.Stimmedprobe will probably answer your question betterOn another hand, Stimmed, since the opener is pretty much the TvZ hellion banshee into mech, whats your opinion on super heavy hellion compositions into quick 3rd base for extreme map control? to my knowledge the protoss army cant really do much against heavy hellions unless he opened blink stalkers, in which even then the aoe damage is too hard and risks his gas for collosi production
Nicely put, most of mech losses are because of composition mistakes (no ghosts late game, lack of anti-air, not enough hellions/buffer units) ect. You can also lose if you are out of position or not in siege mode.
This is a little bit different than the hellion/banshee opening. You don't get hellions out, and your banshee is much faster. There are also no double armories and the 3rd base is later. The factories are also much faster (8:30 vs 10:30). The TvZ mech build is a heavy 3-4 base macro build generally. This build is a sharp 2 base -> do damage -> continue if needed type of build. I prefer to open banshees because I can use them to scout. Hellions can't really scout. Nicely put, most of mech losses are because of composition mistakes (no ghosts late game, lack of anti-air, not enough hellions/buffer units) ect. You can also lose if you are out of position or not in siege mode.This is a little bit different than the hellion/banshee opening. You don't get hellions out, and your banshee is much faster. There are also no double armories and the 3rd base is later. The factories are also much faster (8:30 vs 10:30). The TvZ mech build is a heavy 3-4 base macro build generally. This build is a sharp 2 base -> do damage -> continue if needed type of build. I prefer to open banshees because I can use them to scout. Hellions can't really scout.
Hellions cant scout -> Personally when i open heavy hellions in TvP I feel if the protoss is doing something greedy/weird hes going to die/take a ton of damage when my hellions go right up his face, which signals to me hes doing something weird, and if he does something safe its going to show up to defend against my hellions, thereby allowing me to "scout" simply by forcing him to show his hand, no?
I havent met a guy who sim cities until later on when the composition is set tho
However, I do love all kinds of hellion/banshee openers simply because of how aggressive and mobile they are Hellions cant scout -> Personally when i open heavy hellions in TvP I feel if the protoss is doing something greedy/weird hes going to die/take a ton of damage when my hellions go right up his face, which signals to me hes doing something weird, and if he does something safe its going to show up to defend against my hellions, thereby allowing me to "scout" simply by forcing him to show his hand, no?I havent met a guy who sim cities until later on when the composition is set thoHowever, I do love all kinds of hellion/banshee openers simply because of how aggressive and mobile they are Stop procrastinating
Lyyna Profile Joined June 2011 France 764 Posts #12 Interesting. it looks a lot like my own 1 rax-3/4fact - 1 port push. that's a really nice attack
isnt 4 tl fact a bit overkill on 2 bases btw? http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/sc2-strategy/459600-how-to-mech-them-cry-lyynas-mech-in-hots - The 2014 Mech guide! http://www.twitch.tv/lyyna for stream and contact infos
theLiminator Profile Joined April 2011 Canada 54 Posts #13 I can see this being super strong, I guess the main thing is not dying to some sort of 2 base/3 base timing. Or maybe heavy warp prism play? (But i'm sure you'll have tons of turrets from extra min.) I can dance all day.
Moonling Profile Blog Joined May 2010 United States 986 Posts #14 Is anybody else having trouble accesing the replays? After my client starts up after saving it and opening it once i enter my password and such and get into b.net it dosen't play the replay right away like it used to? Am i missing something? 1% of koreans control 99% of starcraft winnings. #occupykorea.
Moonling Profile Blog Joined May 2010 United States 986 Posts #15 After watching the Antiga game my only question is why do you need 4 tech lab facts? At no point during that game did you produce 4 tanks at a time, generally you stuck with 3 at a time and just produced a hellion out of the 4th tech lab fact. Could you not get the same production with 3 tech facts, and 1 reactor? And maybe get an amory for +1 instead of that other factory??
My reasoning is because I feel like you are going all-in because if you don't do damage the Toss will be up in tech (He was about 3 min from Storm, and if the push fails he will have his 3rd which means multiple Robo's.
Where has you have 0 upgrades, you do have a 3rd, but not in the positon to get out vikings if he pumps out massive amounts of coli after your failed push 1% of koreans control 99% of starcraft winnings. #occupykorea.
dynwar7 Profile Joined May 2011 1955 Posts #16 I think getting 4 tl is for flexibility.
Remember a tl can also produce hellions. And when he has gas, it can be used for tanks. I am not sure but I think its just for flexibility. Regarding the imbalance, hilarious to see Zergs defending themselves....
blublub Profile Joined April 2010 Poland 18 Posts #17 This build seems to have potential. But is it possible to win againts equall oponent that goes immortal/archon? Tanks bearly do any damage to both the units. Do you incorporate some ghost or more banshes when you see alot of immortal and templar? Do you kite them with helions to lower their shields?
I always struggle with mech againts immortals. Terra nostrum!
Thezzy Profile Joined October 2010 Netherlands 2112 Posts #18 This seems similar to the TvP Mech build shown in the Day9 Daily, although this goes for tanks instead of Thors and a bit more Marines.
I'm curious to see how this would against a Stargate opening, as tanks cannot shoot up. Playing Terran is like flying down a MULE drop in a marine suit, firing a Gauss Rifle
Cyro Profile Blog Joined June 2011 United Kingdom 19163 Posts #19 On October 26 2012 17:24 Thezzy wrote:
This seems similar to the TvP Mech build shown in the Day9 Daily, although this goes for tanks instead of Thors and a bit more Marines.
I'm curious to see how this would against a Stargate opening, as tanks cannot shoot up.
You have some marines and a starport, as well as already building up to 4techlab factories. You could probably make a round of thors, and if he commits heavily to stargate, kill him with an scv pull, if he doesnt, be fine with a few marines, turrets, maybe a thor on patrol or something. You have some marines and a starport, as well as already building up to 4techlab factories. You could probably make a round of thors, and if he commits heavily to stargate, kill him with an scv pull, if he doesnt, be fine with a few marines, turrets, maybe a thor on patrol or something. "oh my god my overclock... I got a single WHEA error on the 23rd hour, 9 minutes" -Belial88
brofestor Profile Joined October 2012 Singapore 101 Posts Last Edited: 2012-10-26 08:56:56 #20 prefer a 111 with reactor hellion plus medivac drop into expand before going mech in tvp. with a dual prong hellion harass you can get a lot of probes taht allows you to play mech nicely.
in these cases it seems ur opponents arent used to dealing with mech (all going herp derp colossus as if expecting mmm all the time), with correct scouting chargelots/immortals/archons/templar shld stop this push.
1 2 3 4 5 6 Next AllSHARE
Top 25 Breakdown: No. 11 Louisville
2014 Record: 50-17. RPI: 18.
Coach (Record at school): Dan McDonnell (359-159, 8 years).
Postseason History: 8 regionals (active streak: 3), 3 CWS trips (active streak: 2).
Louisville's Projected Lineup
2015 Lineup Pos. Name, Yr. AVG/OBP/SLG HR RBI SB C Will Smith, So..221/.333/.273 0 12 3 1B Danny Rosenbaum, Jr..295/.396/.411 2 24 3 2B Nick Solak, So..351/.455/.464 2 25 9 3B Zach Lucas, Sr..270/.333/.405 5 44 7 SS Sutton Whiting, Sr..216/.369/.289 2 18 37 LF Colin Lyman, So..263/.348/.333 0 16 10 CF Mike White, RS Fr..235/.273/.275 0 3 7 RF Corey Ray, So..325/.416/.481 1 17 4 DH Colby Fitch, Fr. HS -- Rocheport, Mo.
Pos. Name, Yr. W-L ERA IP SO BB SV RHP Kyle Funkhouser, Jr. 13-3 1.94 120.1 122 65 0 RHP Anthony Kidston, Jr. 9-1 3.40 76.2 69 36 0 LHP Josh Rogers, So. 3-3 3.63 52 47 12 0 RP Zack Burdi, So. 1-0 4.35 10.1 6 7 0
SEE ALSO: Five Questions With Louisville’s Dan McDonnell
Hitting: 60. Though the Cards aren’t expected to be loaded with power bats, this is an offense that should be very productive, using aggressive baserunning, extra-base hits, and much more to get the job done. The athleticism throughout the lineup is impressive, with spark plug Whiting leading things off atop the lineup. Rosenbaum, Solak and Lucas give the Cards three talented and experienced bats, while the UL staff feels Lyman and especially Ray are destined to have very productive seasons. The Cards also have a pair of young bats to watch in Brendan McKay and Colby Fitch. McKay has good strike zone recognition, a good swing and potential gap power, while Fitch showed good plate discipline during fall workouts and has the potential to hit for a good average and power from the start.
Power: 40. The Cardinals could very well have some power production this spring, but it’s certainly not a given with some of their personnel losses. The Cards enter the season without 20 of their 32 homers from last year’s club, including hard-hitting veteran outfielder Jeff Gardner, who finished the year with nine homers and 68 RBIs. With that said, the Cards have some guys back with some pop. Solak has a flat swing with some pop, Rosenbaum and talented freshman McKay both could provide some pop, White and Ryan Summers have some power potential, and it’s a very safe bet Ray hits for more power than his one home run last season. The silver lining with this club is McDonnell’s teams always tend to hit doubles. UL finished the ’14 campaign 22nd nationally in doubles with 115, and perhaps the Cards can emulate that performance.
Sutton Whiting (UL athletics)
Speed: 70. It’s safe to say the Cardinals won’t lack athleticism. The Cards welcome back several key speedsters from a team that reached the CWS last year. Whiting is a spark plug in many ways, and is back after recording 43 stolen bases, while Solak and Lyman each had double-digit stolen base totals last season, too. Lucas and Ray are other athletes who run well, while the platoon guys in center field, White and Summers, are athletic and can make things go. As usual, UL should be a fun team to watch in this regard.
Defense: 60. Since his arrival at Louisville, McDonnell has taken great pride in having offenses and defenses that are versatile and athletic. That once again is the case this season, as the Cards welcome back several premier defenders. The middle infield should be stout this season with Whiting, who has good range and instincts at shortstop, leading the way. Third baseman Lucas is a versatile defender who can play all over the infield. The outfield is in good shape with Ray, a premier athlete, leading the way, while White and Summers display good athleticism and speed in the outfield. Though he still has room to grow offensively, the Cards also like catcher Will Smith, who’s athletic with good arm strength.
Starting pitching: 60. Though the Cards might have some question marks in some areas, the weekend rotation looks to be in good shape. Funkhouser has a chance to be the top overall pick in the 2015 draft, and has a big, sturdy frame, to go with nasty overall stuff. Funkhouser has a fastball into the mid-90s, and features a high-quality four-pitch arsenal, highlighted by his power slider. Fellow junior righty Kidston doesn’t have the same overpowering stuff as Funkhouser, but his stuff took a jump in the fall and he has two good pitches in his changeup and curveball. Lefties Rogers and Drew Harrington will serve as starters Nos. 3 and 4. Rogers improved toward the end of last season and showed a good slider and command of a solid fastball. Meanwhile, Harrington is up to 92 mph with his fastball, has a physical build, and has good command. No matter how the Cards set things up on the weekend, they should feel good about this rotation.
Bullpen: 55. Replacing Nick Burdi, Kyle McGrath and Cole Sturgeon in the bullpen won’t be easy, and it’s a reason this unit is a question mark. With that said, the Cards have some real potential with this group, and look for pitching coach Roger Williams to really have this group rolling toward the middle and last half of the season. Zack Burdi, the younger brother of Nick, didn’t have a huge role last year, but blossomed in the fall, getting up to 97 mph with his fastball, while also showing better feel for his changeup and slider. Meanwhile, the Cards like fellow sophomore righty Jake Sparger, who competes with three pitches, including a sinking fastball and slider combination. The rest of the bullpen roles still are very much up in the air, but this group has potential, and the Cards really like their group of freshman arms.
Experience/Intangibles: 60. The Cardinals definitely will miss some departed veterans from a leadership standpoint, but they are still in excellent shape entering the 2015 campaign. For instance, the Cards must replace one of the more fiery and dominant closers in college baseball in second-round pick Nick Burdi, while offensively, they must replace Gardner and two-way talent Sturgeon, among others. With that said, the Cards have smartly recruited over the past few years, and still return enough key cogs from a production and leadership perspective to get back to Omaha. There are no guarantees in college baseball, but McDonnell, as usual, will have his club ready.Please use a JavaScript-enabled device to view this slideshow
On Monday, Romney released a TV advertisement endorsing Mourdock -- the only such video he has cut for a Senate campaign since being nominated as the Republican presidential standard-bearer.
Mourdock has tried to walk back his remarks to some extent while defending his hard-line anti-abortion views. "Are you trying to suggest that somehow I think God ordained or pre-ordained rape? No, I don't think that anyone could suggest that. That's a sick, twisted -- no, that's not even close to what I said," he told reporters immediately following the debate, according to the Evansville Courier & Press.
"It is a fundamental part of my faith that God gives us life. God determines when life begins," Mourdock said. "I believe in an almighty God who makes those calls.... There are some things in life that are above my pay grade."
The Romney campaign has tried to distance itself from the Indiana conservative without alienating its own base, which has left it in the awkward position of disavowing Mourdock's views without in any way stepping away from him. "Gov. Romney disagrees with Richard Mourdock, and Mr. Mourdock's comments do not reflect Gov. Romney's views," Romney spokesperson Andrea Saul said. "We disagree on the policy regarding exceptions for rape and incest but still support him."
Summarizing the views of many frustrated pro-choice women, comedian Tina Fey told an audience at a benefit for the Center for Reproductive Rights Wednesday night: "if I have to listen to one more gray-faced man with a two-dollar haircut explain to me what rape is, I'm gonna lose my mind!"
While the Democrats push the issue to turn out pro-choice women -- President Obama tweeted about it three times Wednesday and told Jay Leno "I don't know how these guys come up with these ideas.... rape is rape," then returned to the topic Thursday in remarks and in tweets (at right) -- and the Romney campaign stands by its anti-abortion man out of its own need for the anti-abortion base to turn out on November 6, it's worth taking a step back to examine what it is we're really talking about and why it is that rape and abortion have become such flashpoints during campaign 2012.
* * *
Coerced and not entirely voluntary mating have occurred throughout human history. I had a friend many years ago whose mother was a prize of war in a national conflict; it made for complicated family dynamics. But one sees rape, forced marriage and war go hand in hand throughout the ages, including our own; it is another form of conquest to create the next generation in your image from the bodies of the conquered. Violating women is a way of subjugating a population -- sowing fear among the women, blocking the men from access to the future, and rupturing and weakening all the social bonds that made up the society that fought and lost. But for this to work there must also be children of rape. "If one group wants to control another they often do it by impregnating women of the other community because they see it as a way of destroying the opposing community," former head of the Gender Unit at Amnesty International Gita Sahgal has explained. Women must learn to love the image of their conquerors written in the faces of the children they suckle, and to despise themselves, and their weakness. If captives come to identify with those who hold them, it is only a tale as old as our ability to survive by orienting our beings around whoever has power over us.As the opening of the summer transfer window approaches, managers are working hard identifying targets and lining-up potential deals so we’ll bring you all the news and gossip. Today, Arsenal are in pole position to sign Julian Draxler….
Arsenal are in pole position ahead of Manchester United to sign Julian Draxler this summer but Schalke have slapped a £30m asking price on the playmakers head, according to the Express.
Draxler has long been linked with a move to the Premier League with Arsenal in particular strongly linked with the player during recent transfer windows.
The 21-year-old claimed to the BBC that he had turned down an approach from the North Londoners in January 2014 before signing a new five-year contract with Schalke.
It appears the Gunners could be about to try their luck again as the Express suggest that Arsenal are ready to renew their interest in the German international this summer.
The newspaper says that Draxler wants to move abroad after a frustrating campaign in the Bundesliga with Arsenal understood to be in pole position to secure his signature.
However, it’s far from a ‘done deal’ as the Express claim that Arsene Wenger may not be willing to pay the £30m Schalke are demanding for his services which could open the door for Manchester United to swoop in and lure Draxler to Old Trafford.
The playmaker has been with Schalke his entire professional career having joined the clubs youth set up as an eight year old in 2001 and he developed into one of the most highly-rated young attackers in European football.
But his stock has fallen over the past year after a serious hamstring injury restricted him to making just 11 starts in all competitions last season, which resulted in just 2 goals and 2 assists.
READ MORE –> Arsenal transfer news | Man Utd transfer news
Draxler returned to play some part in the final few games of last season but it remains to be seen how long it will take him to get back to the level he was at before his injury, so I’d be surprised if the likes of Wenger or van Gaal agreed to spend £30m on him any time soon.
He’s no doubt a huge talent but it would be a big risk to spend such an amount on a young player before we see how well his hamstring has recovered, so unless Schalke reduce their demands I don’t think we’ll be seeing him come to the Premier League this summer.The gender-free British passport: UK travellers may no longer have to declare their sex, to spare feelings of 'transgender people'
Changes: A UK passport could soon be gender-free
Britain is preparing to rip up centuries-old rules by introducing passports which do not contain details of the holder’s sex.
The move, following pressure from the Lib Dems, is designed to spare transgender people and those who have both male and female sexual organs from having to tick ‘male’ or ‘female’ on their travel papers.
Currently, everybody must identify themselves as a man or woman, even when they are undergoing a sex-change operation or if they are considered ‘intersex’.
But with the Lib Dems promising to be ‘fierce champions of equality’, the Home Office has begun a consultation on changing the rules.
To satisfy international laws, the passport would still list a category titled ‘sex’, but would then contain a simple ‘X’ for everybody.
Supporters say it will solve the problem of embarrassing situations at border controls, where people whose sex appears to differ from that in their passport are grilled for long periods by guards.
But some Home Office officials are concerned the change could make life harder for the already stretched UK Border Agency by giving them one fewer piece of information to work from.
Last night, the Home Office said: ‘We are exploring with international partners and relevant stakeholders the security implications of gender not being displayed in the passport.’
Home Office Minister Lynne Featherstone is under pressure to act from her fellow Lib Dem MPs.
On your side: Home Office Minister Lynne Featherstone is said to be under pressure to agree to the controversial plans
One backbench MP, Julian Huppert, said: ‘There does not seem to be a need for identity documents of any kind to have gender information. It is not a very good biometric; it is roughly a 50:50 split.
Military ID, such as the MOD90, which obviously can have quite a high security clearance, contains no gender information. That might be what we should look at.’
Mrs Featherstone – who has just announced plans for gay weddings – has made a string of promises committing the Government to do more for transgender people.
While on my travels as a champion for women’s rights, I am and will be a champion for gay rights too. Britain must not get complacent. We are a world leader for gay rights, but… there is still more that we must do.
Home Office Minister Lynne Featherstone
She said: ‘The UK Government is totally committed to creating a society that is fair for everyone.
‘We are committed to tackling prejudice and discrimination against transgender people at home and around the world. We need concerted government action to tear down barriers |
the geeky audience by featuring astronaut Buzz Aldrin and including fun facts and activities to do with science in their Snaps. Some of the biggest names in Snapchat include DJ Khaled, Cyrene Quiamco, Shaun McBride, Kristina Bazan, and Arnold Schwarzennegger.
Providing exclusive content:
Bargaining on the appeal of exclusivity, NARS showed a special preview of their newest collection to their Snapchat followers. Other beauty and fashion brands like Rebecca Minkoff and Free People followed suit, frequently offering fans sneak peeks.
Using humour:
Taco Bell created silly food-themed valentine cards on Snapchat to appeal to their younger audience. Taco Bell were also one of the first brands to take advantage of Snap Stories with their launch for the Spicy Chicken Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Tacos (ain’t that a mouthful?) by creating a mini-movie.
Taking advantage of large events
Doing a Snapchat campaign to coincide with a major event like the Super Bowl is what put companies like Audi ahead of the game with their fun collaboration with The Onion. The result? Over 5,000 new Snapchat followers,100,000+ views, and 37 million Twitter impressions.
How can marketers make use of this tech?
The new features are ideal for mobile apps with a simple call to action and quick direction to the app store. It will also encourage brands to stretch their creative muscles. Users are also less likely to skip these ads. A study by Media Science Labs found that Snapchat ads were more interesting to users than ads on other platforms, gaining double the visual attention of Facebook, 1.5x of Instagram, and 1.3x of YouTube.
Snapchat seamlessly integrates sponsored content with their regular features, including geofilters that pop up when users are Snapping in a location near a business and sponsored lenses (like the delicious Taco face) to enhance the selfie experience. The chat feature also allows instant communication with consumers.
As we have seen from some of the successful Snapchat campaigns, the possibilities are truly endless and, especially when combined with cross-promotion on other platforms, lead to particularly effective and unique campaigns.
What’s the big takeaway?
Snapchat is the latest example of a new age of advertising that is interactive, fun, and non-intrusive. Why is this noteworthy? Last year, the use of adblocking software lead to an estimated $22 billion loss for brands, with the number of adblock users growing41% in one year.
Adblock on mobile is also starting to become more popular, with over 400 million users using some type of adblocking software on their smartphones, threatening what we have come to think of as traditional mobile advertising. With smartphone penetration expected to reach half the global population by 2018, this is significant news and heralds the need for a new approach.
Smart and creative integration of marketing content is paramount to the continued success of the idea of ads in general. The new bevy of tools offered at Snapchat also comes at a time when live video in general is being welcomed as the next big thing in marketing. This combination of factors makes it the perfect time for Snapchat to experiment and win big on advertiser revenue.
Don’t put all your eggs in the Snap basket yet – as the update is only now rolling out – but Snapchat seems to be at the forefront of the constantly evolving digital landscape. It might be time to embrace the new era.
This post was originally published on TFM Insights.Senior UK government ministers held secret talks with rival Labour members of parliament to secure bipartisan support for a soft Brexit, British broadsheet "The Daily Telegraph" revealed on Tuesday.
Senior figures in Prime Minister Theresa May's team discussed with their Labour counterparts how to force May to make concessions on immigration, the customs union and the single market, it reported.
They also discussed the formation of a cross-party Brexit Commission to agree common ground between the parties and ensure an orderly withdrawal from the European Union, the paper reported.
The MPs involved in the secret talks were mostly believed to be those who campaigned to remain in the EU, who had already forged alliances when they campaigned together in the lead-up to the referendum.
Michael Gove, former Brexit leave campaigner and now Environment Secretary, later confirmed to BBC television that he had discussed Brexit with Labour politicians.
"I talk to politicians from every party in order to make sure that we get the right approach," he told the show.
"Of course I talk to people from different parties, that's what governing in the national interest is all about."
Gove said he rejected the terms "soft" and "hard" Brexit because [he is] "never sure what they mean" and that the term "hard Brexit" was invented by people who want Brexit to be seen as "some sort of punishment."
On Monday, Labour Party politician and former shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper called for a cross-party commission on Brexit, in an article for "The Guardian" newspaper in an article for "The Guardian" newspaper.
"After the referendum last year, I called for the government to approach this in a cross-party way to get the best deal. Now it is more important than ever. There is neither strength nor stability in a narrow, bunkered one-party approach; you need to include people with different ideas to get the best deal and widest support," she wrote.
"So we should set up a small cross-party commission to conduct the negotiations, and have a clear and transparent process to build consensus behind the final deal. It should be accountable to parliament but avoid getting caught up in the inevitable hung parliament political rows."
A similar call was made by William Hague, the former Conservative leader, who outlined a plan in the "Daily Telegraph" as to how a cross-party commission would work, saying it would have to include business leaders, the first ministers of devolved governments and "the leaders of all the opposition parties - yes, even Corbyn."
Tuesday's "Daily Telegraph" report said May had been "aware" of the secret talks for days but that she had so far done nothing to stop them.
Theresa May has been in damage control since a disastrous snap election result lost the Conservative Party its majority in parliament. They have since been negotiating a potential coalition with the hardline Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), as May's "hard brexit" position slips into a precarious position.
The DUP are deeply euroskeptic, but they have balked at some of the practical implications of a hard Brexit - including a potential loss of a "frictionless border" with the Republic of Ireland. Leaders planned to discuss efforts to minimize the potential damage to Northern Ireland during talks on Tuesday.
A deal with the DUP could also risk destabilizing the political balance in Northern Ireland by increasing the influence of pro-British unionists who have struggled for years with Irish Catholic nationalists who want Northern Ireland to join a united Ireland.
The European Parliament's chief Brexit negotiator Brexit Guy Verhofstadt said the EU wanted clarity from London as soon as possible on whether it intended to stick to its stance towards negotiations or alter it.
"We await... the position of the United Kingdom," the former Belgian premier told a news conference on Tuesday.
"It's unclear if the UK government will stick to the line that they had announced in the letter of the 29th of March or if they will change it... taking into account the outcome of the election."
EU Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier warned May not to waste time in naming a date for talks, lamenting that it was already three months since May had formally triggered the two-year exit process.
"My preoccupation is that time is passing, it is passing quicker than anyone believes because the subjects we have to deal with are extraordinarily complex... I can't negotiate with myself," Barnier was quoted as saying by the "Financial Times."
Formal negotiations between Barnier and British Brexit minister David Davis had been due to start next week but that timetable was thrown into doubt by May's catastrophic election result.Amgen Tour of California
To observe the 10th anniversary edition of the Amgen Tour of California, organizers of the race announced that the first two stages of the expanded women’s portion of the race would be hosted by Tahoe South, “America’s Best Lake,” (USA Today, Aug. 2012) May 8 - 9, 2015. The competition will continue in Sacramento, May 10, 2015, with a third racing stage, the same day as the overall men’s start of the Amgen Tour of California.
The women's race will expand from a one-day circuit race that was held in Sacramento and an individual time trial that was held in Folsom to a three-day stage race from May 8-10 followed by the annual time trial, for a total of four days of racing.
"AEG has always been proud to support women's cycling and is pleased to once again expand its women's competition to four days," said Kristin Bachochin Klein, Executive Director, Amgen Tour of California. "Hosting four days of women's cycling, fans will have the opportunity to watch the immense talents and achievements of the best women cyclists from around the world."
"It's America's largest cycling event at America's Best Lake," said Carol Chaplin, executive director of the Lake Tahoe Visitors Authority. "Hosting the women's race and time trial for the Amgen Tour of California's 10th anniversary provides an opportunity to challenge these athletes with our natural environment and help to elevate awareness of women's racing as a prestigious sport. Tahoe South and our partners are looking forward to hosting the competitors, sponsors, fans and media to an area where the local culture enthusiastically supports, inspires, embraces and appreciates the sport."
Sign up to volunteer.
Friday, May 8, 2015 - Stage 1 Route PDF
Saturday, May 9, 2015 - Stage 2 Route PDFHostingDude Free and Cheap Domains!! *How it works. Easy savings, clearly explained... For All Promos and Regular Pricing ICANN fee of $0.18 (18 cents) per domain applies on most TLDs. Taxes may apply based on purchaser's location. Some discounts, sales and promotions cannot be combined ("stacked") in the same transaction with others. All offers subject to limitations, modifications, and termination without prior notice. Many discounts not applicable to renewals, HOWEVER, Promo Code HDX 15%-OFF Discount will apply to almost all renewals so long as the renewal transaction does not contain sale items which are not combinable with a Promo Code.
15% Discount with Promo Code: HDX For lowest pricing displayed in cart Plus 15% OFF virtually everything we sell that's not already on sale. Yes, you can often combine this discount with the Free.COM Domain Offers or our occasional $1.99 Domain Name Offers, although it may not lower the prices of all items. Just enter Promo Code: HDX in your Shopping Cart to apply these discounts, and look at your Cart Total to see the lower total pricing which governs. Applying 15%-OFF Promo Code: Having Issues? Here are the quick fixes: Domains and some Non-Domain Produts already on sale or promo sometimes cannot combine discounts in the same cart transactions, so if you have special-sale priced domains in your cart (these vary by sale offers), often you can still get lowest price on everything by temporarily removing any special sale items and purchase them next in a separate transaction. Now your HDX 15%-OFF promo code will usually work, reducing the price on your non-sale domains, hosting, website-builders, and other non-discounted products by 15%.
RENEWALS TOO! Always add Promo Code: HDX to your cart for new and renewal items. Then check your cart's total because that's where the discount shows. It usually won't appear in the line-item cost of a specific item, but, whoa, you'll see the DEAL in the TOTAL at the bottom of the cart. Free.COM Domain Name: WHEN ACTIVE... Just select and add the qualifying Website Builder or Hosting or Shopping Cart Website or whatever products we show as qualifying you for a FREE.COM or other domain name with your purchase. (See a product's description for offers, and take note of any minimum length purchase.) Add that desired item to your cart for the qualifying term length -- often a year, but sometimes as little as just one month. At that point the shopping cart may prompt you to select a FREE.COM (or $1.99.COM Domain Name, see below) and from there you can choose your free domain name. When these are offered, you get a full 1-Year Registration, with the same benefits and features as a fully purchased domain name. Other domain names besides.COM may qualify, such as, at the time of this most recent update,.ORG,.NET,.CO, and.IN also qualified as a free domain. Sometimes more, sometimes fewer -- see product description. In the event you believe you have properly added a qualifying product to get a FREE.COM during an active sale, but you are not prompted by the shopping cart to select your free or discounted domain name, just keep your qualifying item in the cart and go to the DOMAINS menu, select and add a qualifying domain type (.COM is almost always among the free offerings if you're unsure which one to add) to the cart, and then add any promo codes if required by the offer. Make sure no conflicting sale items might be causing the cart to give you a different discount or freebie offer perhaps by buying only these items in one transaction together: Domain and Qualifying Product. Your cart will change the total amount of the purchase to reflect the discount, and usually also show the qualifying domain at the free/discounted rate. $1.99.COM Domain Names: WHEN ACTIVE... Many other products we offer often qualify purchaser to buy a superb domain name (such as.COM) for $1.99/year. Qualifying purchases may often include full-featured, popular and useful products such as hosting, business growth, website building, group-collaboration, marketing and other web-presence and productivity items. As with Free.COM Domain Names described above, your cart will adjust pricing when all qualifying items are added, and sometimes prompt you to add any missing item. Follow instructions for FREE.COM Domains above if you have any questions or problems on the $1.99.COM domain names, when offered. Our Free Domains are Usually the "Good Ones"
Full 1-Year Registration. All features included. No strings. Eligible premium domain names (TLDs) on most offered Free and $1.99 or similar promotions are the very best. HostingDude does not give out cheap TLDs and claim they're "premium" or "high-value." C urrently, when a promotion is active, you may choose your free or $1.99 promotional domain from:.COM,.NET,.ORG,.CO, or.IN with these promotions. ELIGIBLE DOMAIN NAMES FOR ANY GIVEN PROMOTION ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE, AND THIS TEXT WILL NOT BE UPDATED WITH CURRENT QUALIFYING TLDs FOR EVERY NEW PROMOTION, WHICH ARE TOO NUMEROUS, AND MAY HAVE DIFFERENT QUALIFYING DOMAINS -- THEREFORE, PLEASE SEE THE PRODUCT FOR QUALIFYING DOMAIN NAMES FOR THAT PROMO. Other Qualifying Extensions: On some items you may also have the choice of :.biz,.info,.me, and.mobi, and perhaps others. Again, see the product carrying the promotion for the list of qualifying free or reduced price domains. No matter the qualifying domain, you always receive a full 1-Year Registration, and you'll receive included with your domain every free feature we include with fully-paid, purchased domain names of the same TLD. Free Domain Name (WHOIS) Privacy: What It Does: Hides ownership identity of your domain names from official WHOIS registry - keeping you clear of spammers who get your email from those records; helps prevent hack attempts, domain name theft, site or server compromise, and identity theft.
You Can Add Domain Name Privacy to domain name(s) in your cart when buying, transferring-in, or renewing domains, or at any time from within your HostingDude Domain Control Center.
Domain Name Privacy is FREE when you add it to the purchase of 5 or more domains in the same cart transaction on new or transferred-in domains, and sometimes you'll see it offered free when added to 5+ domains when renewing.
And, It's Cheap to Add Domain WHOIS Privacy at any other time as well -- it's still only $1.67/year with Promo Code HDX when it so qualifies, or $1.99/year when it does not, or if you don't use it. (Subject to restrictions on combining/stacking discounts as shown above.) Stuff our Legal Department Makes Us Print: As always, "See cart for details" where final terms and conditions apply. (But probably the most detailed explanation of how to be sure to get your discount or free-offer is usually right here in this box - just read above.) In any and all cases, the shopping cart pricing is the final arbiter of any conficts, unclear discounts, expired (or newly-started) promotions, and final pricing. ICANN fee of 18 cents [$0.18] may apply on some domain names. Taxes may apply depending on your location and applicable law. We may remove or modify any and all prices, sales, discounts, offers, specials, included features, offer terms, etc., terminate or change these and other offer(s) as well as any regular or sale or promo features and prices at any time, without prior notice, prior to sale, without prior notice or posting. But the HostingDude is crazy about keeping you happy with the lowest-price domains and best free domain offers you can find. Lock-In Sale Discounts with Longer Terms:
Add Extra Years to Registrations for Lowest Possible Rates. Your shopping cart will almost always allow you to lengthen your term of registration on Domain Names, Instant Websites, Hosting and almost every product we offer. These prices are almost always the lowest rates possible because net costs of domain name registration have, on average, more than tripled over the last ten years alone. But during its pre-paid term, a domain's cost cannot go up -- your payment of a longer term grants you that price for the full term. Because a deal's a deal, and if you pay for 5 years, you're getting 5 years registration without our coming back to you hat-in-hand for more. You're locked-in for the term you paid for, and there's no better security than that. And if bought a longer-term Hosting or Website Builder product, and you want something better later, no problem, because for non-domain items, most can be upgraded during your term at pro-rated price differences so you won't lose credit for pre-purchased terms. Just call us when you need to upgrade in such cases. Save Wisely: Lock in your discounts with longer registrations at time of initial purchase -- Get the best rates for the long-term.A little over four years ago, before I joined Ars Technica (and while I was working as a freelance writer), I started a Google Group called "Game Journalism Professionals." As I stated in an introductory post at the time, the group was intended as "a semi-private way to connect and talk" with colleagues based well outside my home base of Pittsburgh and whom I saw in person only a few times a year.
Yesterday, that group came under fire for being a secret clearinghouse where "elite" journalists discuss how best to collude on covering the video game industry to "shape industry-wide attitudes to events." In reality, the group was and is simply a place for business competitors (and journalists are definitely competitive!) to discuss issues of common professional interest.
Unfortunately, in the wake of initial attacks on game developer Zoe Quinn, I wrote one message to the group in which I said several things that I soon came to regret. In private conversation, we've all had the experience of throwing out ideas, only to realize after further thought that they weren't appropriate or productive—and life moves on. The bad ideas are forgotten. Thanks to the Internet, though, such conversations can now be archived and then dredged up for display to the public weeks or months later.
Since that's now happening, let me explain a bit more about what this not-so-"secret" group is and why I started it, then address some more specific concerns about the post in question.
A place to chat
GameJournoPros, as the group is known, was created as a place to "talk about that awful PR person that's giving you trouble and ask for a way around the problem," as my introductory post says. It was to be "a place to discuss your impressions of that embargoed game you're reviewing and maybe find a multiplayer partner to help test it. A place to bounce ideas for editorials before committing them to digital paper or discuss possible angles for a news piece." It was meant as a way to spread the word about reliable freelance writers looking for work or to discuss ethical conundrums. And for the last four years, that's exactly what GameJournoPros has been.
The group is "private" so that posts are only viewable by other group members. Members are encouraged not to share internal material outside the group in order to create the safe environment needed for professional discussions among peers. That said, everyone in the group knows that anything could be easily copy/pasted and made public at any time—as the list's introductory post noted explicitly.
I didn't do much to promote the group after initially sending invites to dozens of colleagues I've known and respected over my career, but neither was the group a secret. Indeed, GameJournoPros has grown from 52 members in that first month to 150 members today; if someone met the "professional" criteria (i.e. they made all or part of their living writing about or publicly discussing games) and asked to join, they were in, with practically no questions asked. The group has never had litmus tests, partisan slant, or other viewpoint-based membership criteria. Many group members have mentioned its existence on Twitter and other discussion forums in the past.
(Ars Technica management did not know of the list's existence, and while a few other writers at Ars were nominally members of the list, they rarely participated in discussions—and as far as I know, none participated in group discussions of Zoe Quinn or "GamerGate.")
This led to a diverse membership that I'd like to think engenders a sense of camaraderie and plenty of friendly (and sometimes less-than-friendly) arguments between peers. Far from colluding on some kind of coverage agenda, the 2,000+ threads and many thousands of posts in the group are more often heated arguments about issues like the correct way to handle the very kinds of ethical and coverage dilemmas that have been so in focus in recent weeks, and which I had already been writing about publicly and frequently since 2003.
The death of print media was a frequent topic of discussion. So was the rise of popular video content, various media monetization methods, how to handle tricky embargoes, how to handle tricky interviews, how to handle anonymous sources, comment moderation approaches, layoffs and hires at game journalism outlets, job opportunities, the rise of Kickstarter, the rise of Polygon, what to do with swag donated by publishers (Ars gives it away), links to quality examples of writing around the Web, efforts to organize multiplayer sessions for pre-release game builds, and—much to my chagrin—pro wrestling. (Game journalists who are not me seem to love pro wrestling.)
In other words, the group fosters the kinds of "inside baseball" discussions that colleagues in almost every field have over drinks at various conferences.
Members don't share coordinated roadmaps for coverage or discuss how to best present a unified front for or against any product or person. Members often make suggestions of what they think "should" be done regarding some issue or another, but these are rightly taken as off-the-cuff opinions to be considered or ignored, not marching orders from some grand cabal. The group is made up of opinionated people in competition for the same scoops and the same reader eyeballs—not people usually inclined to share secret information or undercut their own independence.
I won't betray the group members' trust by sharing their messages or their membership, but they should feel free to discuss their own involvement in any way they wish. There are no dark secrets here.
Regarding Zoe Quinn
As far as the specific allegations and interpretations that a Breitbart writer made based on one of my posts, a few comments of explanation are in order (along with a mea culpa or two):
The post in question was written in the immediate aftermath of Eron Gjoni's lengthy blog post detailing many alleged and quite salacious details of developer Zoe Quinn's private life.
At the time, I was skeptical that there was any merit to the actual journalism ethics question raised in the blog post regarding Quinn's relationship with Kotaku writer Nathan Grayson, who never reviewed her game and only mentioned it in passing as part of a "game jam roundup." I was appalled, however, at the kinds of doxxing attacks and threats Quinn said she was already receiving, and about the publication of intimate details from her life.
I did want to write about these kinds of attacks on a game developer but decided it couldn't be done at the time without drawing undue attention to Quinn's private life—which seemed unfair, as she was far from an important public figure. (Recall that this was well before #GamerGate was a thing and exploded into a million different directions, many unrelated to Quinn.) These are the kinds of tough coverage decisions journalists make every day, and this was the issue being discussed with colleagues in the thread.
In the heat of the moment, I suggested that gaming journalists organize a "public letter of support" for Quinn. Later in the discussion thread, cooler heads prevailed and made me realize that this would be overstepping our primary role as reporters and observers (which is exactly the kind of productive, self-correcting debate the group engenders). No such note was ever sent.
I had been playing Depression Quest, with the intention of reviewing it, a few days before the Zoe Quinn saga broke online (as I said in the thread, "I've been meaning to review Depression Quest since its Steam release"). As I wrote in our review, I was inspired to take a look at a game dealing directly with depression in the wake of Robin Williams' suicide the week before, which coincided with Depression Quest's Steam release. I had no plans to spike the review once the Quinn allegations surfaced.
, with the intention of reviewing it, a few days before the Zoe Quinn saga broke online (as I said in the thread, "I've been meaning to review since its Steam release"). As I wrote in our review, I was inspired to take a look at a game dealing directly with depression in the wake of Robin Williams' suicide the week before, which coincided with Depression Quest's Steam release. I had no plans to spike the review once the Quinn allegations surfaced. However, suggesting that Quinn's work deserved extra attention because she had been attacked was, again, overstepping my proper role as a critic and journalist. It was an emotional reaction. No one else in the group took this suggestion seriously, as the game still has only one scored review on Metacritic. While I was wrong to suggest it, the utter lack of response clearly disproves allegations of "collusion" among game journalists. Instead, it shows the independent spirit of those who participate in the group.
In short, some of the private thoughts I shared in the wake of Gjoni's blog post crossed the line, and I apologize for airing them. It was an error in judgment.
I want to be clear that none of this affected Ars' other coverage. I don't have any kind of final say about what gets published on Ars Technica, and the two posts that Ars did on the "GamerGate" controversy were separately suggested by Culture Editor Casey Johnston, who had tracked the issue on her own and worked directly on her pieces with senior Ars editors. As noted above, the decision to review Depression Quest had already been made before any controversy had arisen. (Due to my lapse in judgment on this matter, going forward I will refrain from writing about or providing editorial support to any further pieces published on "GamerGate," Quinn, or Depression Quest at Ars.)
As to the broader issue, though, allegations of "collusion" among group members are badly misplaced. Indeed, I see nothing wrong with or even particularly interesting about discussing matters of professional importance in a private Google Group with competing peers. GameJournoPros has been a healthy, robust forum for debate among a community of competitors who can rarely agree on anything—much less collude to alter the course of the game industry.Al Iaquinta steps in to face local lightweight Ryan Couture at UFC 164
Related Content All fighting coverage
Ryan Couture will still make his second appearance in the UFC on Aug. 31 in Milwaukee despite losing his announced opponent Tuesday afternoon.
The local lightweight, and son of former champion Randy Couture, now meets “The Ultimate Fighter Live” veteran Al Iaquinta on the preliminary card of UFC 164. A UFC official confirmed the new pairing.
Quinn Mulhern, originally slated to meet Couture, announced he was hurt on twitter earlier in the day and posted a picture of a fractured hand. Four hours later, Iaquinta stepped up to fill the vacancy.
Iaquinta (6-2 MMA, 0-1 UFC) hasn’t fought since getting upset by Michael Chiesa in the finals of their “TUF” season more than a year ago. Couture (6-2 MMA, 0-1 UFC) was knocked out by Ross Pearson in his UFC debut in April.
UFC 164 is headlined by a lightweight title fight between Benson Henderson (19-2 MMA, 7-0 UFC) and Anthony Pettis (16-2 MMA, 3-1 UFC).
Case Keefer can be reached at 948-2790 or [email protected]. Follow Case on Twitter at twitter.com/casekeefer.Scrape the web for football play-by-play data, part 2
UPDATE: Part three of this series introduces the R package pbp, which contains the most up-to-date version of this software.
Last things first: here’s an extremely quick look at the distribution of rushing gains by Wisconsin’s running backs in that game, based on the script we’re developing in this series:
library ( ggplot2 ) #Get the plays where one of Wisconsin's running backs carried the ball: rbs = c ( "Melvin Gordon", "James White", "Corey Clement" ) subset = play_table [ play_table $ carrier %in% rbs & play_table $ rush,] #Make a ggplot2 boxplot: p = ggplot ( subset, aes ( carrier, gain )) p + geom_boxplot ( aes ( fill = carrier ))
This is part two in a series. It will make more sense if you begin with part one, or at least part 1.5.
####The story thus far At this point we have a list in R called plays, with an entry for each play in a given college football game. Each item in the list is itself a list, with the elements poss, indicating possession; down for the down; togo for the yards to go; dist, the distance to the goal line; time, the approximate game time remaining (in seconds); and pbp, the narrative play-by-play text for this play.
An example play-by-play string:
Stacey Bedell rush for no gain, fumbled, forced by Brendan Kelly, recovered by Wisc Ethan Armstrong at the UMass 35.
Obviously, that’s information we want to be able to analyze, but the computer is dumb and can’t understand a simple, non-grammatical sentence like that one.
Once again, we turn to regular expressions. We’ll divide all possible football plays into a few types and compare the play-by-play for each play to a regex for each type of play. When the play matches a type, we can extract the roles that are relevant to that play typ (e.g. pass plays have a passer and a receiver but rush plays only have a ball-carrier). I’ve chosen to break plays into these categories (each bullet point will get its own regular expression):
#####Special teams:
kickoff
punt
extra point (PAT)
field goal
#####Scrimmage plays:
rush
pass
interception
#####Results:
fumble
penalty
touchdown
first down
#####Other:
timeout
In each case, we’re going to use the utility function regex from the earlier post to extract named groups matching the play’s roles.
Note that college football scores a sack as a rush, which is silly. But negative rush plays are not uncommon, so in order to reclassify sacks as pass plays we need to figure out who are the quarterbacks and then call any quarterback run for negative yardage a sack. IFor tis purpose, I’ve chosen to call any player who throws at least two passes in a game a quarterback.
Some scorers record tacklers but most don’t. I haven’t bothered trying to catch tacklers here.
Here’s the code. It should work if appended to the code from part 1.5:
#Special teams plays: kickoff_regex = "(?<kicker>[-a-zA-Z\\. ']+) kickoff for (?<kickdist>\\d{1,3}) yards? (returned by (?<returner>[-a-zA-Z\\. ']+) for ((?<retgain>\\d{1,3}) yards|(a )?loss of (?<retloss>\\d+) yards?|(?<retnogain>no gain))|.*(?<touchback>touchback)).*" punt_regex = "(?<punter>[-a-zA-Z\\. ']+) punt for (?<kickdist>\\d{1,3}) yards?(.*(?<touchback>touchback).*|.*out[- ]of[- ]bounds at|.*fair catch by (?<catcher>[-a-zA-Z\\. ']+) at|.*returned by (?<returner>[-a-zA-Z\\. ']+) (for ((?<retgain>\\d{1,3}) yards|(a )?loss of (?<retloss>\\d+) yards?|(?<retnogain>no gain)))?)?" fg_regex = "(?<kicker>[-a-zA-Z\\. ']+) (?<kickdist>\\d{1,3}) yards? field goal (?<made>GOOD|MADE)|(?<missed>MISSED|NO GOOD).*" pat_regex = "(?<kicker>[-a-zA-Z\\. ']+) extra point (?<made>GOOD|MADE)|(?<missed>MISSED|NO GOOD)" #Scrimmage plays rush_regex = "(?<player>[-a-zA-Z\\. ']+) rush [\\s\\w]*for ((?<gain>\\d+) yards?|(a )?loss of (?<loss>\\d+) yards?|(?<nogain>no gain))" pass_regex = "(?<QB>[-a-zA-Z\\. ']+) pass (((?<complete>complete)|(?<incomplete>incomplete))( to (?<receiver>[-a-zA-Z\\. ']+).*(?(complete) for ((?<gain>\\d+) yards?|(a )?loss of (?<loss>\\d+) yards?|(?<nogain>no gain))))?)?" #Turnovers/timeouts/penalties: fumble_regex = "fumbled?.*(forced by (?<forcer>[-a-zA-Z\\. ']+))?.*(recovered by (?<team>[a-zA-Z]+) (?<recoverer>[-a-zA-Z\\. ']+))?" interception_regex = "intercept(ed|ion)? by (?<intercepter>[-a-zA-Z\\. ']+) at (the )?(?<side>[a-zA-Z]+) (?<yardline>\\d{1,2})[\\.,]?( returned for ((?<retgain>\\d{1,3}) yards|(a )?loss of (?<retloss>\\d+) yards?|(?<retnogain>no gain)))?" penalty_regex = "(?<team>[-a-zA-Z\\. ']+) penalty (?<dist>\\d{1,3}) yards? (?<penalty>[-a-zA-Z\\. ']+)( on (?<player>[-a-zA-Z\\. ']+))? (?<decision>accepted|declined)" timeout_regex = "Timeout (?<team>[-a-zA-Z\\. ']+).* (?<min>\\d{1,2})?:(?<sec>\\d\\d)" #Results: first_regex = "(?<first>1st down|first down)" td_regex = "(?<touchdown>touchdown)" #Establish the columns: rush = pass = sack = td = first = punt = kickoff = fg = pat = INT = fumble = penalty = timeout = FALSE poss = down = togo = time = dist = passer = carrier = kicker = returner = touchback = faircatch = kick_dist = kick_return = gain = fumble_return = int_return = made = intercepter = forced_by = recovered_by = penalized_team = penalized_player = penalty_dist = complete = NA default_row = data.frame ( poss, down, time, togo, dist, gain, rush, pass, complete, sack, td, first, punt, kickoff, fg, pat, INT, fumble, penalty, timeout, passer, carrier, kicker, returner, touchback, faircatch, kick_dist, kick_return, fumble_return, made, intercepter, int_return, forced_by, recovered_by, penalized_team, penalized_player, penalty_dist ) play_table = data.frame ( matrix ( NA, ncol = length ( default_row ), nrow = 0 )) colnames ( play_table ) = colnames ( default_row ) for ( k in 1 : length ( plays )) { #Get the already-established metadata: this = default_row this $ poss = plays [[ k ]][[ 'poss' ]] this $ down = plays [[ k ]][[ 'down' ]] this $ time = plays [[ k ]][[ 'time' ]] this $ togo = plays [[ k ]][[ 'togo' ]] this $ dist = plays [[ k ]][[ 'dist' ]] pbp = plays [[ k ]][[ 'pbp' ]] if ( length ( grep ( fg_regex, pbp, perl = TRUE, fixed = FALSE, ignore.case = TRUE )) > 0 ) { match = regex ( fg_regex, pbp, perl = TRUE, fixed = FALSE, ignore.case = TRUE ) this $ fg = TRUE this $ kicker = match [['result' ]][ 1, 'kicker' ] this $ dist = match [['result' ]][ 1, 'kickdist' ] if (! is.na ( match [['result' ]][ 1,'made' ])) { this $ made = TRUE } else { this $ made = FALSE } } else if ( length ( grep ( punt_regex, pbp, perl = TRUE, fixed = FALSE, ignore.case = TRUE )) > 0 ) { match = regex ( punt_regex, |
- 35 - 76 - Luna Blaster Neo Ink Mine Suction-Bomb Launcher 24 170 Increases high-damage radius of explosions. B 110 High High 13600 9 30 - - 70 - - - - Kensa Undercover Brella Torpedo Ink Armor 24 180 Speeds up Brella canopy regeneration. B 118 Middle High 14800 50 - - 25 - - - 30 - Kensa.52 Gal Splash Wall Booyah Bomb 25 180 Increases shot accuracy when firing while jumping. B 133 Middle Middle 15600 55 25 - - - - - 75 - Splash-o-matic Toxic Mist Inkjet 25 170 Increases damage. B 117 Middle High 11200 42 75 - - - - - 22 - Ballpoint Splatling Toxic Mist Inkjet 25 200 Increases damage. B 245 Middle Middle 11600 85 - 18 - - 60 - - - Gold Dynamo Roller Splat Bomb Ink Armor 25 190 Increases damage. B 185 High Low 29000 76 - - - - - 25 - 20 Firefin Splatterscope Splash Wall Suction-Bomb Launcher 25 210 Increases damage. B 280 Middle Middle 13900 91 - 50 - - 30 - - - Foil Squeezer Splat Bomb Bubble Blower 25 180 Increases damage. B 200 Middle Middle 10900 77 30 - - - - - 52 - Zink Mini Splatling Curling Bomb Ink Storm 26 180 Increases duration of firing in a burst. E 150 Middle Middle 15400 62 - 80 - - 90 - - - Dapple Dualies Squid Beakon Suction-Bomb Launcher 26 180 Increases damage. B 95 Middle High 14700 24 - - - - 80 - 47 - Nautilus 47 Point Sensor Baller 26 180 Increases duration of firing in a burst. C 180 Middle Middle 14700 74 - 37 - - 70 - - - Custom E-liter 4K Squid Beakon Bubble Blower 26 170 Slightly increases range. B 310 High Low 17300 96 - 20 - - 15 - - -.96 Gal Deco Splash Wall Splashdown 26 170 Increases damage. B 180 Middle Middle 16200 74 10 - - - - - 80 - Kensa Luna Blaster Fizzy Bomb Ink Storm 26 180 Increases high-damage radius of explosions. B 110 High High 16600 9 30 - - 70 - - - - Kensa L-3 Nozzlenose Splash Wall Ultra Stamp 27 180 Increases damage. B 135 Middle Middle 17700 62 65 - - - - - 25 - Kensa Glooga Dualies Fizzy Bomb Ink Armor 27 190 Increases damage. B 160 Middle Middle 17000 66 - - - - 35 - 76 - Custom Jet Squelcher Burst Bomb Sting Ray 27 180 Slightly increases range. B 225 Middle Middle 15900 82 30 - - - - - 35 - Hydra Splatling Autobomb Splashdown 27 170 Increases damage. D 245 High Low 18500 85 - 10 - - 20 - - - Neo Splash-o-matic Burst Bomb Suction-Bomb Launcher 27 210 Increases damage. B 117 Middle High 16800 42 75 - - - - - 22 - Custom Blaster Autobomb Inkjet 27 190 Increases shot accuracy when firing while jumping. B 133 Middle Middle 15300 27 20 - - 70 - - - - Foil Flingza Roller Suction Bomb Tenta Missiles 28 180 Increases damage. B 140 Middle Middle 21300 58 - - - - - 45 - 45 Aerospray RG Sprinkler Baller 28 170 Increases ink coverage. B 110 Middle High 16900 35 90 - - - - - 10 - Tenta Sorella Brella Splash Wall Curling-Bomb Launcher 28 170 Increases Brella canopy durability. B 150 High Low 18600 62 - - 85 - - - 85 - Kensa Splatterscope Sprinkler Baller 28 190 Increases damage. B 280 Middle Middle 20400 91 - 50 - - 30 - - - Custom Goo Tuber Curling Bomb Inkjet 28 170 Increases damage. B 210 Middle Middle 19300 78 - 38 - - 70 - - - Ballpoint Splatling Nouveau Squid Beakon Ink Storm 28 230 Increases damage. B 245 Middle Middle 15800 85 - 18 - - 60 - - - Dapple Dualies Nouveau Toxic Mist Ink Storm 29 180 Increases damage. B 95 Middle High 17500 24 - - - - 80 - 47 - Custom Hydra Splatling Ink Mine Ink Armor 29 190 Increases damage. D 245 High Low 33300 85 - 10 - - 20 - - - Kensa Dynamo Roller Sprinkler Booyah Bomb 29 180 Increases damage. B 185 High Low 32300 76 - - - - - 25 - 20 Kensa Mini Splatling Toxic Mist Ultra Stamp 29 180 Increases duration of firing in a burst. E 150 Middle Middle 18800 62 - 80 - - 90 - - - H-3 Nozzlenose Point Sensor Tenta Missiles 29 180 Increases damage. B 170 High Middle 17200 70 30 - - - - - 58 - E-liter 4K Scope Ink Mine Ink Storm 30 170 Slightly increases range. B 330 High Low 23200 100 - 20 - - 5 - - - Clash Blaster Splat Bomb Sting Ray 30 180 Increases shot accuracy when firing while jumping. B 110 Middle High 18200 21 65 - - 25 - - - - Custom E-liter 4K Scope Squid Beakon Bubble Blower 30 170 Slightly increases range. B 330 High Low 29900 100 - 20 - - 5 - - - Clash Blaster Neo Curling Bomb Tenta Missiles 30 180 Increases shot accuracy when firing while jumping. B 110 Middle High 20500 21 65 - - 25 - - - - H-3 Nozzlenose D Suction Bomb Ink Armor 30 210 Increases damage. B 170 High Middle 18400 70 30 - - - - - 58 - Nautilus 79 Suction Bomb Inkjet 30 180 Increases duration of firing in a burst. C 180 Middle Middle 27900 74 - 37 - - 70 - - - Image Name Ink Saver Type Splat Bomb C Suction Bomb C Burst Bomb A Curling Bomb C Autobomb B Ink Mine D Sprinkler D Toxic Mist B Point Sensor D Splash Wall C Squid Beakon D Fizzy Bomb B Torpedo C Image Name Common Uncommon SquidForce Zink Krak-On Rockenberg Zekko Forge Firefin Skalop Splash Mob Inkline Tentatek Takoroka Annaki Enperry Toni Kensa Grizzco Cuttlegear amiibo Image Name Main Brand Stars White Headband Ink Recovery Up SquidForce 1 Urchins Cap Sub Power Up Skalop 1 Lightweight Cap Swim Speed Up Inkline 1 Takoroka Mesh Bomb Defense Up DX Takoroka 1 Streetstyle Cap Ink Saver (Sub) Skalop 1 Squid-Stitch Cap Opening Gambit Skalop 3 Squidvader Cap Special Charge Up Skalop 1 Camo Mesh Swim Speed Up Firefin 1 Five-Panel Cap Comeback Zekko 2 Zekko Mesh Quick Super Jump Zekko 1 Backwards Cap Quick Respawn Zekko 1 Two-Stripe Mesh Special Saver Krak-On 1 Jet Cap Special Saver Firefin 1 Cycling Cap Sub Power Up Zink 1 Cycle King Cap Bomb Defense Up DX Tentatek 2 Long-Billed Cap Ink Recovery Up Krak-On 3 King Flip Mesh Run Speed Up Enperry 2 Hickory Work Cap Special Power Up Krak-On 3 Woolly Urchins Classic Comeback Krak-On 2 Jellyvader Cap Ink Saver (Sub) Skalop 3 House-Tag Denim Cap Special Charge Up Splash Mob 2 Blowfish Newsie Quick Super Jump Firefin 2 Do-Rag, Cap, & Glasses Main Power Up Skalop 3 Pilot Hat Ink Resistance Up Splash Mob 3 Bobble Hat Quick Super Jump Splash Mob 2 Short Beanie Ink Saver (Main) Inkline 1 Striped Beanie Opening Gambit Splash Mob 1 Sporty Bobble Hat Tenacity Skalop 1 Special Forces Beret Opening Gambit Forge 3 Squid Nordic Comeback Skalop 3 Sennyu Bon Bon Beanie Ink Saver (Sub) Splash Mob 3 Knitted Hat Ink Resistance Up Firefin 1 Annaki Beret Ink Resistance Up Annaki 3 Yamagiri Beanie Main Power Up Inkline 1 Sneaky Beanie Swim Speed Up Skalop 2 Retro Specs Quick Respawn Splash Mob 1 Splash Goggles Bomb Defense Up DX Forge 2 Pilot Goggles Sub Power Up Forge 2 Tinted Shades Last-Ditch Effort Zekko 1 Black Arrowbands Tenacity Zekko 2 Snorkel Mask Ink Saver (Sub) Forge 2 White Arrowbands Special Power Up Zekko 3 Fake Contacts Special Charge Up Tentatek 2 18K Aviators Last-Ditch Effort Rockenberg 3 Full Moon Glasses Quick Super Jump Krak-On 1 Octoglasses Last-Ditch Effort Firefin 3 Half-Rim Glasses Special Power Up Splash Mob 2 Double Egg Shades Run Speed Up Zekko 2 Zekko Cap Opening Gambit Zekko 2 SV925 Circle Shades Swim Speed Up Rockenberg 3 Annaki Beret & Glasses Ink Saver (Main) Annaki 3 Swim Goggles Last-Ditch Effort Zink 1 Ink-Guard Goggles Run Speed Up Toni Kensa 3 Toni Kensa Goggles Comeback Toni Kensa 1 Sennyu Goggles Ink Resistance Up Forge 3 Sennyu Specs Swim Speed Up Splash Mob 3 Safari Hat Last-Ditch Effort Forge 2 Jungle Hat Ink Saver (Main) Firefin 3 Camping Hat Special Power Up Inkline 1 Blowfish Bell Hat Ink Recovery Up Firefin 1 Bamboo Hat Ink Saver (Main) Inkline 2 Straw Boater Quick Super Jump Skalop 1 Classic Straw Boater Special Power Up Skalop 2 Treasure Hunter Ink Recovery Up Forge 2 Bucket Hat Special Saver SquidForce 1 Patched Hat Main Power Up Skalop 2 Tulip Parasol Ink Resistance Up Inkline 1 Fugu Bell Hat Quick Respawn Firefin 2 Seashell Bamboo Hat Quick Respawn Inkline 2 Hothouse Hat Ink Resistance Up Skalop 2 Mountie Hat Special Charge Up Inkline 3 Studio Headphones Ink Saver (Main) Forge 2 Designer Headphones Ink Saver (Sub) Forge 2 Noise Cancelers Quick Respawn Forge 3 Squidfin Hook Cans Ink Resistance Up Forge 2 Squidlife Headphones Ink Recovery Up Forge 3 Studio Octophones Ink Recovery Up Cuttlegear 3 Sennyu Headphones Ink Saver (Main) Forge 3 Golf Visor Run Speed Up Zink 1 FishFry Visor Special Charge Up Firefin 1 Sun Visor Sub Power Up Tentatek 2 Takoroka Visor Quick Super Jump Takoroka 3 Face Visor Bomb Defense Up DX Toni Kensa 3 Bike Helmet Ink Recovery Up Skalop 2 Stealth Goggles Swim Speed Up Forge 3 Skate Helmet Special Saver Skalop 2 Visor Skate Helmet Last-Ditch Effort Skalop 3 MTB Helmet Tenacity Zekko 3 Hockey Helmet Main Power Up Forge 3 Matte Bike Helmet Sub Power Up Zekko 3 Octo Tackle Helmet Deco Bomb Defense Up DX Forge 3 Moist Ghillie Helmet Run Speed Up Forge 3 Deca Tackle Visor Helmet Sub Power Up Forge 3 Gas Mask Tenacity Forge 3 Paintball Mask Comeback Forge 3 Paisley Bandana Ink Saver (Sub) Krak-On 1 Skull Bandana Special Saver Forge 3 Painter's Mask Main Power Up SquidForce 2 Annaki Mask Opening Gambit Annaki 2 Octoking Facemask Tenacity Enperry 1 Squid Facemask Ink Saver (Main) SquidForce 1 Firefin Facemask Run Speed Up Firefin 1 King Facemask Ink Saver (Sub) Enperry 1 Motocross Nose Guard Special Charge Up Forge 3 Forge Mask Main Power Up Forge 1 Digi-Camo Forge Mask Swim Speed Up Forge 2 Koshien Bandana Swim Speed Up SquidForce 3 B-ball Headband Opening Gambit Zink 1 Squash Headband Special Saver Zink 1 Tennis Headband Comeback Tentatek 1 Jogging Headband Ink Saver (Sub) Zekko 1 Soccer Headband Tenacity Tentatek 2 FishFry Biscuit Bandana Special Power Up Firefin 1 Black FishFry Bandana Bomb Defense Up DX Firefin 1 Eminence Cuff Ink Saver (Main) Enperry 3 Headlamp Helmet Quick Respawn Grizzco 3 Dust Blocker 2000 Quick Respawn Grizzco 3 Welding Mask Quick Respawn Grizzco 3 Beekeeper Hat Quick Respawn Grizzco 3 Octoleet Goggles Quick Respawn Grizzco 3 Cap of Legend Quick Respawn Grizzco 3 Oceanic Hard Hat Quick Respawn Grizzco 3 Worker's Head Towel Quick Respawn Grizzco 3 Kyonshi Hat Run Speed Up SquidForce 3 Li'l Devil Horns Ink Saver (Sub) SquidForce 3 Hockey Mask Ink Recovery Up SquidForce 3 Anglerfish Mask Ink Saver (Main) SquidForce 3 Festive Party Cone Main Power Up SquidForce 3 New Year's Glasses DX Special Charge Up SquidForce 3 Twisty Headband Special Power Up SquidForce 3 Eel-Cake Hat Quick Respawn SquidForce 3 Squid Hairclip Swim Speed Up amiibo 2 Samurai Helmet Quick Super Jump amiibo 2 Power Mask Bomb Defense Up DX amiibo 2 Squid Clip-Ons Opening Gambit amiibo 2 Squinja Mask Quick Respawn amiibo 2 Power Mask Mk I Ink Resistance Up amiibo 2 Pearlescent Crown Bomb Defense Up DX amiibo 2 Marinated Headphones Special Saver amiibo 2 Enchanted Hat Ink Saver (Main) amiibo 2 Steel Helm Special Charge Up amiibo 2 Fresh Fish Head Comeback amiibo 2 Hero Headset Replica Run Speed Up Cuttlegear 2 Armor Helmet Replica Tenacity Cuttlegear 2 Hero Headphones Replica Special Saver Cuttlegear 2 Octoling Shades Last-Ditch Effort Cuttlegear 2 Null Visor Replica Special Power Up Cuttlegear 2 Old-Timey Hat Comeback Cuttlegear 2 Conductor Cap Sub Power Up Cuttlegear 2 Golden Toothpick Special Charge Up Cuttlegear 3 Image Name Main Brand Stars Basic Tee Quick Respawn SquidForce 1 Fresh Octo Tee Ink Saver (Sub) Cuttlegear 1 White Tee Ink Saver (Sub) SquidForce 1 Black Squideye Run Speed Up Tentatek 1 Sky-Blue Squideye Main Power Up Tentatek 1 Rockenberg White Ink Recovery Up Rockenberg 2 Rockenberg Black Respawn Punisher Rockenberg 1 Black Tee Special Power Up SquidForce 1 Sunny-Day Tee Special Charge Up Krak-On 1 Rainy-Day Tee Ink Saver (Main) Krak-On 1 Reggae Tee Special Saver Skalop 3 Fugu Tee Swim Speed Up Firefin 1 Mint Tee Bomb Defense Up DX Skalop 1 Grape Tee Ink Recovery Up Skalop 1 Red Vector Tee Ink Saver (Main) Takoroka 1 Gray Vector Tee Quick Super Jump Takoroka 1 Blue Peaks Tee Ink Saver (Sub) Inkline 1 Ivory Peaks Tee Haunt Inkline 1 Squid-Stitch Tee Swim Speed Up Skalop 1 Pirate-Stripe Tee Special Power Up Splash Mob 1 Sailor-Stripe Tee Run Speed Up Splash Mob 1 White 8-Bit FishFry Sub Power Up Firefin 1 Black 8-Bit FishFry Bomb Defense Up DX Firefin 1 White Anchor Tee Ninja Squid SquidForce 2 Black Anchor Tee Respawn Punisher SquidForce 2 Carnivore Tee Bomb Defense Up DX Firefin 1 Pearl Tee Ink Saver (Sub) Skalop 1 Octo Tee Haunt Cuttlegear 3 Herbivore Tee Ninja Squid Firefin 1 Black V-Neck Tee Thermal Ink SquidForce 2 White Deca Logo Tee Ink Resistance Up Zink 1 Half-Sleeve Sweater Ink Saver (Sub) Toni Kensa 2 King Jersey Respawn Punisher Enperry 2 Gray 8-Bit FishFry Special Charge Up Firefin 1 White V-Neck Tee Special Saver SquidForce 2 White Urchin Rock Tee Ink Saver (Main) Rockenberg 1 Black Urchin Rock Tee Ink Recovery Up Rockenberg 1 Wet Floor Band Tee Swim Speed Up Rockenberg 1 Squid Squad Band Tee Ink Resistance Up Rockenberg 1 Navy Deca Logo Tee Ink Saver (Main) Zink 1 Mister Shrug Tee Ink Resistance Up Krak-On 3 Chirpy Chips Band Tee Main Power Up Rockenberg 1 Hightide Era Band Tee Thermal Ink Rockenberg 1 Red V-Neck Limited Tee Quick Respawn SquidForce 2 Green V-Neck Limited Tee Quick Super Jump SquidForce 2 ω-3 Tee Respawn Punisher Firefin 1 Annaki Polpo-Pic Tee Run Speed Up Annaki 3 Firewave Tee Special Charge Up Skalop 1 Takoroka Galactic Tie Dye Thermal Ink Takoroka 1 Takoroka Rainbow Tie Dye Quick Super Jump Takoroka 1 Missus Shrug Tee Ink Saver (Sub) Krak-On 3 League Tee Special Power Up SquidForce 2 Friend Tee Thermal Ink SquidForce 1 Tentatek Slogan Tee Special Charge Up Tentatek 2 Icewave Tee Ninja Squid Skalop 1 Octoking HK Jersey Special Charge Up Enperry 2 Dakro Nana Tee Quick Respawn Zink 1 Dakro Golden Tee Thermal Ink Zink 1 Black Velour Octoking Tee Main Power Up Enperry 2 Green Velour Octoking Tee Special Saver Enperry 1 SWC Logo Tee Swim Speed Up SquidForce 3 White Striped LS Quick Respawn Splash Mob 2 Black LS Quick Super Jump Zekko 2 Purple Camo LS Sub Power Up Takoroka 1 Navy Striped LS Ink Recovery Up Splash Mob 1 Zekko Baseball LS Bomb Defense Up DX Zekko 1 Varsity Baseball LS Haunt Splash Mob 1 Black Baseball LS Swim Speed Up Rockenberg 1 White Baseball LS Quick Super Jump Rockenberg 1 White LS Ink Recovery Up SquidForce 1 Green Striped LS Ninja Squid Inkline 1 Squidmark LS Haunt SquidForce 1 Zink LS Special Power Up Zink 1 Striped Peaks LS Quick Super Jump Inkline 1 Pink Easy-Stripe Shirt Quick Super Jump Splash Mob 2 Inkopolis Squaps Jersey Main Power Up Zink 1 Annaki Drive Tee Thermal Ink Annaki 2 Lime Easy-Stripe Shirt Ink Resistance Up Splash Mob 2 Annaki Evolution Tee Respawn Punisher Annaki 3 Zekko Long Carrot Tee Ink Resistance Up Zekko 2 Zekko Long Radish Tee Haunt Zekko 1 Black Cuttlegear LS Swim Speed Up Cuttlegear 2 Takoroka Crazy Baseball LS Ninja Squid Takoroka 2 Red Cuttlegear LS Bomb Defense Up DX Cuttlegear 2 Khaki 16-Bit FishFry Ink Recovery Up Firefin 2 Blue 16-Bit FishFry Special Saver Firefin 2 White Layered LS Special Saver SquidForce 1 Yellow Layered LS Quick Super Jump SquidForce 1 Camo Layered LS Special Charge Up SquidForce 1 Black Layered LS Ink Saver (Main) SquidForce 1 Zink Layered LS Respawn Punisher Zink 1 Layered Anchor LS Run Speed Up SquidForce 2 Choco Layered LS Ink Saver (Sub) Takoroka 1 Part-Time Pirate Respawn Punisher Tentatek 1 Layered Vector LS Special Saver Takoroka 1 Green Tee Special Saver Forge 1 Red Tentatek Tee Swim Speed Up Tentatek 2 Blue Tentatek Tee Quick Respawn Tentatek 2 Octo Layered LS Ink Saver (Main) Cuttlegear 3 Squid Yellow Layered LS Swim Speed Up SquidForce 2 Shrimp-Pink Polo Ninja Squid Splash Mob 1 Striped Rugby Run Speed Up Takoroka 2 Tricolor Rugby Quick Respawn Takoroka 1 Sage Polo Main Power Up Splash Mob 1 Black Polo Ninja Squid Zekko 1 Cycling Shirt Main Power Up Zink 2 Cycle King Jersey Bomb Defense Up DX Tentatek 3 Slipstream United Bomb Defense Up DX Takoroka 2 FC Albacore Respawn Punisher Takoroka 1 Olive Ski Jacket Run Speed Up Inkline 3 Takoroka Nylon Vintage Thermal Ink Takoroka 3 Berry Ski Jacket Special Power Up Inkline 2 Varsity Jacket Ink Saver (Sub) Zekko 3 School Jersey Ninja Squid Zink 2 Green Cardigan Ink Saver (Sub) Splash Mob 2 Black Inky Rider Sub Power Up Rockenberg 3 White Inky Rider Special Power Up Rockenberg 3 Retro Gamer Jersey Quick Respawn Zink 3 Orange Cardigan Special Charge Up Splash Mob 1 Forge Inkling Parka Run Speed Up Forge 2 Forge Octarian Jacket Haunt Forge 2 Blue Sailor Suit Sub Power Up Forge 3 White Sailor Suit Ink Saver (Main) Forge 2 Squid Satin Jacket Quick Respawn Zekko 3 Zapfish Satin Jacket Special Charge Up Zekko 2 Krak-On 528 Run Speed Up Krak-On 1 Chilly Mountain Coat Swim Speed Up Inkline 3 Takoroka Windcrusher Main Power Up Takoroka 3 Matcha Down Jacket Ninja Squid Inkline 3 FA-01 Jacket Ink Recovery Up Forge 3 FA-01 Reversed Quick Super Jump Forge 3 Pullover Coat Thermal Ink Toni Kensa 3 Kensa Coat Respawn Punisher Toni Kensa 3 Birded Corduroy Jacket Run Speed Up Zekko 3 Deep-Octo Satin Jacket Main Power Up Zekko 3 Zekko Redleaf Coat Haunt Zekko 2 Eggplant Mountain Coat Special Saver Inkline 3 Zekko Jade Coat Respawn Punisher Zekko 2 Light Bomber Jacket Quick Super Jump Toni Kensa 3 Brown FA-11 Bomber Bomb Defense Up DX Forge 2 Gray FA-11 Bomber Bomb Defense Up DX Forge 2 Milky Eminence Jacket Run Speed Up Enperry 3 Navy Eminence Jacket Ink Saver (Main) Enperry 3 Tumeric Zekko Coat Thermal Ink Zekko 2 Custom Painted F-3 Ink Resistance Up Forge 3 Dark Bomber Jacket Special Power Up Toni Kensa 3 Moist Ghillie Suit Ink Saver (Sub) Forge 3 White Leather F-3 Respawn Punisher Forge 3 Chili-Pepper Ski Jacket Ink Resistance Up Inkline 3 Whale-Knit Sweater Run Speed Up Splash Mob 3 Rockin' Leather Jacket Sub Power Up Annaki 3 Kung-Fu Zip-Up Ninja Squid Toni Kensa 3 Panda Kung-Fu Zip-Up Sub Power Up Toni Kensa 3 Sennyu Suit Ninja Squid Cuttlegear 3 B-ball Jersey (Home) Special Saver Zink 2 B-ball Jersey (Away) Ink Saver (Sub) Zink 1 White King Tank Haunt Enperry 1 Slash King Tank Thermal Ink Enperry 1 Navy King Tank Ink Resistance Up Enperry 1 Lob-Stars Jersey Sub Power Up Tentatek 2 Gray College Sweat Swim Speed Up Splash Mob 1 Squidmark Sweat Sub Power Up SquidForce 1 Retro Sweat Bomb Defense Up DX SquidForce 3 Firefin Navy Sweat Sub Power Up Firefin 2 Navy College Sweat Ink Resistance Up Splash Mob 1 Reel Sweat Special Power Up Zekko 1 Anchor Sweat Main Power Up SquidForce 2 Negative Longcuff Sweater Haunt Toni Kensa 3 Short Knit Layers Ink Saver (Main) Toni Kensa 3 Positive Longcuff Sweater Swim Speed Up Toni Kensa 3 Annaki Blue Cuff Special Saver Annaki 2 Annaki Yellow Cuff Quick Respawn Annaki 2 Annaki Red Cuff Haunt Annaki 2 N-Pacer Sweat Thermal Ink Enperry 3 Octarian Retro Respawn Punisher Cuttlegear 2 Takoroka Jersey Special Power Up Takoroka 3 Lumberjack Shirt Ink Saver (Main) Rockenberg 1 Rodeo Shirt Quick Super Jump Krak-On 1 Green-Check Shirt Sub Power Up Zekko 2 White Shirt Ink Recovery Up Splash Mob 3 Urchins Jersey Run Speed Up Zink 1 Aloha Shirt Ink Recovery Up Forge 1 Red-Check Shirt Ink Saver (Main) Zekko 2 Baby-Jelly Shirt Bomb Defense Up DX Splash Mob 1 Baseball Jersey Special Charge Up Firefin 3 Gray Mixed Shirt Quick Super Jump Zekko 2 Vintage Check Shirt Haunt Rockenberg 3 Round-Collar Shirt Ink Saver (Sub) Rockenberg 2 Logo Aloha Shirt Ink Recovery Up Zekko 2 Striped Shirt Quick Super Jump Splash Mob 2 Linen Shirt Sub Power Up Splash Mob 1 Shirt & Tie Special Saver Splash Mob 3 Hula Punk Shirt Ink Saver (Main) Annaki 2 Octobowler Shirt Ink Saver (Main) Krak-On 2 Inkfall Shirt Special Charge Up Toni Kensa 2 Crimson Parashooter Special Charge Up Annaki 3 Baby-Jelly Shirt & Tie Main Power Up Splash Mob 2 Prune Parashooter Ninja Squid Annaki 3 Red Hula Punk with Tie Ink Resistance Up Annaki 3 Chili Octo Aloha Bomb Defense Up DX Krak-On 2 Annaki Flannel Hoodie Bomb Defense Up DX Annaki 3 Ink-Wash Shirt Ink Recovery Up Toni Kensa 2 Dots-On-Dots Shirt Quick Super Jump Skalop 3 Toni K. Baseball Jersey Special Charge Up Toni Kensa 3 Online Jersey Swim Speed Up Grizzco 3 Mountain Vest Swim Speed Up Inkline 3 Forest Vest Ink Recovery Up Inkline 3 Dark Urban Vest Main Power Up Firefin 3 Yellow Urban Vest Haunt Firefin 2 Squid-Pattern Waistcoat Special Power Up Krak-On 1 Squidstar Waistcoat Main Power Up Krak-On 1 Fishing Vest Quick Respawn Inkline 2 Front Zip Vest Ink Resistance Up Toni Kensa 2 Silver Tentatek Vest Thermal Ink Tentatek 2 Camo Zip Hoodie Quick Respawn Firefin 3 Green Zip Hoodie Special Power Up Firefin 2 Zekko Hoodie Ninja Squid Zekko 2 Shirt with Blue Hoodie Special Power Up Splash Mob 2 Grape Hoodie Quick Respawn Enperry 1 Gray Hoodie Sub Power Up Skalop 2 Hothouse Hoodie Run Speed Up Skalop 2 Pink Hoodie Bomb Defense Up DX Splash Mob 2 Olive Zekko Parka Swim Speed Up Zekko 2 Black Hoodie Ink Resistance Up Skalop 2 Octo Support Hoodie Main Power Up SquidForce 3 Squiddor Polo Quick Respawn Grizzco 3 Anchor Life Vest Quick Respawn Grizzco 3 Juice Parka Quick Respawn Grizzco 3 Garden Gear Quick Respawn Grizzco 3 Crustwear XXL Quick Respawn Grizzco 3 North-Country Parka Quick Respawn Grizzco 3 Octoleet Armor Quick Respawn Grizzco 3 Record Shop Look EP Quick Respawn Grizzco 3 Dev Uniform Quick Respawn Grizzco 3 Office Attire Quick Respawn Grizzco 3 School Uniform Ink Recovery Up amiibo 2 Samurai Jacket Special Charge Up amiibo 2 Power Armor Quick Respawn amiibo 2 School Cardigan Run Speed Up amiibo 2 Squinja Suit Special Saver amiibo 2 Power Armor Mk I Ink Resistance Up amiibo 2 Pearlescent Hoodie Respawn Punisher amiibo 2 Marinated Top Special Power Up amiibo 2 Enchanted Robe Thermal Ink amiibo 2 Steel Platemail Ink Saver (Sub) amiibo 2 Fresh Fish Gloves Quick Super Jump amiibo 2 Splatfest Tee Ability Doubler SquidForce 3 Hero Jacket Replica Swim Speed Up Cuttlegear 2 Armor Jacket Replica Special Charge Up Cuttlegear 2 Hero Hoodie Replica Ink Recovery Up Cuttlegear 2 Neo Octoling Armor Haunt Cuttlegear 2 Null Armor Replica Ink Resistance Up Cuttlegear 2 Old-Timey Clothes Thermal Ink Cuttlegear 2 Image Name Main Brand Stars Cream Basics Special Saver Krak-On 1 Blue Lo-Tops Bomb Defense Up DX Zekko 1 Banana Basics Bomb Defense Up DX Krak-On 1 LE Lo-Tops Ink Saver (Sub) Zekko 3 White Seahorses Ink Recovery Up Zink 1 Orange Lo-Tops Swim Speed Up Zekko 1 Black Seahorses Swim Speed Up Zink 2 Clownfish Basics Special Charge Up Krak-On 1 Yellow Seahorses Bomb Defense Up DX Zink 2 Strapping Whites Ink Saver (Sub) Splash Mob 3 Strapping Reds Ink Resistance Up Splash Mob 1 Soccer Shoes Bomb Defense Up DX Takoroka 3 LE Soccer Shoes Ink Resistance Up Takoroka 3 Sunny Climbing Shoes Special Saver Inkline 2 Birch Climbing Shoes Special Charge Up Inkline 1 Green Laceups Main Power Up Splash Mob 1 White Laceless Dakroniks Run Speed Up Zink 2 Blue Laceless Dakroniks Stealth Jump Zink 1 Suede Gray Lace-Ups Ink Recovery Up Zekko 1 Suede Nation Lace-Ups Ink Saver (Main) Zekko 2 Suede Marine Lace-Ups Ink Resistance Up Zekko 1 Toni Kensa Soccer Shoes Ink Saver (Main) Toni Kensa 3 Red Hi-Horses Ink Saver (Main) Zink 1 Zombie Hi-Horses Special Charge Up Zink 1 Cream Hi-Tops Stealth Jump Krak-On 1 Purple Hi-Horses Special Power Up Zink 1 Hunter Hi-Tops Ink Recovery Up Krak-On 1 Red Hi-Tops Ink Resistance Up Krak-On 2 Gold Hi-Horses Run Speed Up Zink 3 Shark Moccasins Sub Power Up Splash Mob 1 Mawcasins Ink Recovery Up Splash Mob 2 Chocolate Dakroniks Ink Resistance Up Zink 2 Mint Dakroniks Drop Roller Zink 1 Black Dakroniks Main Power Up Zink 2 Piranha Moccasins Stealth Jump Splash Mob 3 White Norimaki 750s Swim Speed Up Tentatek 2 Black Norimaki 750s Special Charge Up Tentatek 3 Sunset Orca Hi-Tops Drop Roller Takoroka 2 Red & Black Squidkid IV Special Charge Up Enperry 3 Blue & Black Squidkid IV Quick Super Jump Enperry 3 Gray Sea-Slug Hi-Tops Bomb Defense Up DX Tentatek 3 Orca Hi-Tops Special Saver Takoroka 2 Milky Enperrials Swim Speed Up Enperry 3 Navy Enperrials Ink Saver (Main) Enperry 3 Amber Sea Slug Hi-Tops Drop Roller Tentatek 3 Yellow Iromaki 750s Special Saver Tentatek 1 Red & White Squidkid V Run Speed Up Enperry 3 Honey & Orange Squidkid V Ink Saver (Sub) Enperry 2 Sun & Shade Squidkid IV Main Power Up Enperry 3 Orca Woven Hi-Tops Ink Saver (Sub) Takoroka 2 Green Iromaki 750s Special Power Up Tentatek 1 Purple Iromaki 750s Swim Speed Up Tentatek 1 Red Iromaki 750s Ink Saver (Sub) Tentatek 1 Blue Iromaki 750s Ink Saver (Main) Tentatek 1 Orange Iromaki 750s Drop Roller Tentatek 1 Red Power Stripes Run Speed Up Takoroka 2 Blue Power Stripes Quick Respawn Takoroka 2 Toni Kensa Black Hi-Tops Sub Power Up Toni Kensa 3 Sesame Salt 270s Quick Super Jump Tentatek 2 Black & Blue Squidkid V Special Saver Enperry 3 Orca Passion Hi-Tops Quick Super Jump Takoroka 2 Truffle Canvas Hi-Tops Special Power Up Krak-On 1 Online Squidkid V Stealth Jump Enperry 3 Pink Trainers Sub Power Up Tentatek 1 Orange Arrows Ink Saver (Main) Takoroka 1 Neon Sea Slugs Ink Resistance Up Tentatek 1 White Arrows Special Power Up Takoroka 2 Cyan Trainers Stealth Jump Tentatek 1 Blue Sea Slugs Special Charge Up Tentatek 1 Red Sea Slugs Special Saver Tentatek 3 Purple Sea Slugs Run Speed Up Tentatek 2 Crazy Arrows Stealth Jump Takoroka 2 Black Trainers Quick Respawn Tentatek 1 Violet Trainers Object Shredder Tentatek 1 Canary Trainers Quick Super Jump Tentatek 1 Yellow-Mesh Sneakers Main Power Up Tentatek 1 Arrow Pull-Ons Drop Roller Toni Kensa 3 Red-Mesh Sneakers Special Power Up Tentatek 2 N-Pacer CaO Object Shredder Enperry 2 N-Pacer Ag Ink Recovery Up Enperry 2 N-Pacer Au Quick Respawn Enperry 3 Sea Slug Volt 95s Ink Saver (Sub) Tentatek 2 Athletic Arrows Object Shredder Takoroka 1 Oyster Clogs Run Speed Up Krak-On 1 Choco Clogs Quick Respawn Krak-On 2 Blueberry Casuals Ink Saver (Sub) Krak-On 1 Plum Casuals Object Shredder Krak-On 2 Neon Delta Straps Sub Power Up Inkline 2 Black Flip-Flops Object Shredder Zekko 1 Snow Delta Straps Swim Speed Up Inkline 3 Luminous Delta Straps Main Power Up Inkline 2 Red FishFry Sandals Object Shredder Firefin 2 Yellow FishFry Sandals Main Power Up Firefin 2 Musselforge Flip-Flops Ink Saver (Sub) Inkline 1 Trail Boots Ink Recovery Up Inkline 3 Custom Trail Boots Special Power Up Inkline 2 Pro Trail Boots Ink Resistance Up Inkline 3 Moto Boots Quick Respawn Rockenberg 2 Tan Work Boots Sub Power Up Rockenberg 2 Red Work Boots Quick Super Jump Rockenberg 3 Blue Moto Boots Ink Resistance Up Rockenberg 3 Green Rain Boots Stealth Jump Inkline 2 Acerola Rain Boots Run Speed Up Inkline 1 Punk Whites Special Charge Up Rockenberg 2 Punk Cherries Bomb Defense Up DX Rockenberg 3 Punk Yellows Special Saver Rockenberg 2 Bubble Rain Boots Drop Roller Inkline 1 Snowy Down Boots Quick Super Jump Tentatek 3 Icy Down Boots Stealth Jump Tentatek 3 Hunting Boots Bomb Defense Up DX Splash Mob 3 Punk Blacks Main Power Up Rockenberg 3 Deepsea Leather Boots Ink Saver (Sub) Rockenberg 3 Moist Ghillie Boots Object Shredder Forge 3 Annaki Arachno Boots Swim Speed Up Annaki 3 New-Leaf Leather Boots Drop Roller Rockenberg 2 Tea-Green Hunting Boots Quick Respawn Splash Mob 3 Blue Slip-Ons Sub Power Up Krak-On 1 Red Slip-Ons Quick Super Jump Krak-On 1 Squid-Stitch Slip-Ons Bomb Defense Up DX Krak-On 2 Polka-dot Slip-Ons Drop Roller Krak-On 2 White Kicks Swim Speed Up Rockenberg 1 Cherry Kicks Stealth Jump Rockenberg 2 Turquoise Kicks Special Charge Up Rockenberg 2 Squink Wingtips Quick Respawn Rockenberg 1 Roasted Brogues Bomb Defense Up DX Rockenberg 1 Kid Clams Special Power Up Rockenberg 3 Smoky Wingtips Object Shredder Rockenberg 3 Navy Red-Soled Wingtips Ink Saver (Main) Rockenberg 2 Gray Yellow-Soled Wingtips Quick Super Jump Rockenberg 2 Annaki Habaneros Sub Power Up Annaki 3 Annaki Tigers Special Power Up Annaki 3 Inky Kid Clams Ink Recovery Up Rockenberg 3 Sennyu Inksoles Stealth Jump Rockenberg 3 Angry Rain Boots Quick Respawn Grizzco 3 Non-slip Senseis Quick Respawn Grizzco 3 Octoleet Boots Quick Respawn Grizzco 3 Flipper Floppers Quick Respawn Grizzco 3 Wooden Sandals Quick Respawn Grizzco 3 School Shoes Ink Saver (Sub) amiibo 2 Samurai Shoes Special Power Up amiibo 2 Power Boots Ink Saver (Main) amiibo 2 Fringed Loafers Bomb Defense Up DX amiibo 2 Squinja Boots Swim Speed Up amiibo 2 Power Boots Mk I Bomb Defense Up DX amiibo 2 Pearlescent Kicks Special Charge Up amiibo 2 Marinated Slip-Ons Ink Recovery Up amiibo 2 Enchanted Boots Run Speed Up amiibo 2 Steel Greaves Object Shredder amiibo 2 Fresh Fish Feet Quick Respawn amiibo 2 Hero Runner Replicas Quick Super Jump Cuttlegear 2 Armor Boot Replicas Ink Saver ( |
information will be developed and propagated collaboratively, something like what we already do with the combination of Twitter, Facebook, blogs, Wikipedia, and various other websites.
3. The classics, being books, are also outmoded. They are outmoded because they are often long and hard to read, so those of us raised around the distractions of technology can’t be bothered to follow them; and besides, they concern foreign worlds, dominated by dead white guys with totally antiquated ideas and attitudes. In short, they are boring and irrelevant.
4. The digitization of information means that we don’t have to memorize nearly as much. We can upload our memories to our devices and to Internet communities. We can answer most general questions with a quick search.
5. The paragon of success is a popular website or well-used software, and for that, you just have to be a bright, creative geek. You don’t have to go to college, which is overpriced and so reserved to the elite anyway.
If you are the sort of geek who loves all things Internet uncritically, then you’re probably nodding your head to these. If so, I submit this as a new epistemological manifesto that might well sum up your views:
You don’t really care about knowledge; it’s not a priority. For you, the books containing knowledge, the classics and old-fashioned scholarship summing up the best of our knowledge, the people and institutions whose purpose is to pass on knowledge–all are hopelessly antiquated. Even your own knowledge, the contents of your mind, can be outsourced to databases built by collaborative digital communities, and the more the better. After all, academics are boring. A new world is coming, and you are in the vanguard. In this world, the people who have and who value individual knowledge, especially theoretical and factual knowledge, are objects of your derision. You have contempt for the sort of people who read books and talk about them–especially classics, the long and difficult works that were created alone by people who, once upon a time, were hailed as brilliant. You have no special respect for anyone who is supposed to be “brilliant” or even “knowledgeable.” What you respect are those who have created stuff that many people find useful today. Nobody cares about some Luddite scholar’s ability to write a book or get an article past review by one of his peers. This is why no decent school requires reading many classics, or books generally, anymore–books are all tl;dr for today’s students. In our new world, insofar as we individually need to know anything at all, our knowledge is practical, and best gained through projects and experience. Practical knowledge does not come from books or hard study or any traditional school or college. People who spend years of their lives filling up their individual minds with theoretical or factual knowledge are chumps who will probably end up working for those who skipped college to focus on more important things.
Do you find your views misrepresented? I’m being a bit provocative, sure, but haven’t I merely repeated some remarks and made a few simple extrapolations? Of course, most geeks, even most Internet boosters, will not admit to believing all of this manifesto. But I submit that geekdom is on a slippery slope to the anti-intellectualism it represents.
So there is no mistake, let me describe the bottom of this slippery slope more forthrightly. You are opposed to knowledge as such. You contemptuously dismiss experts who have it; you claim that books are outmoded, including classics, which contain the most significant knowledge generated by humankind thus far; you want to memorize as little as possible, and you want to upload what you have memorized to the net as soon as possible; you don’t want schools to make students memorize anything; and you discourage most people from going to college.
In short, at the bottom of the slippery slope, you seem to be opposed to knowledge wherever it occurs, in books, in experts, in institutions, even in your own mind.
But, you might say, what about Internet communities? Isn’t that a significant exception? You might think so. After all, how can people who love Wikipedia so much be “opposed to knowledge as such”? Well, there is an answer to that.
It’s because there is a very big difference between a statement occurring in a database and someone having, or learning, a piece of knowledge. If all human beings died out, there would be no knowledge left even if all libraries and the whole Internet survived. Knowledge exists only inside people’s heads. It is created not by being accessed in a database search, but by being learned and mastered. A collection of Wikipedia articles about physics contains text; the mind of a physicist contains knowledge.
3. How big of a problem is geek anti-intellectualism?
Once upon a time, anti-intellectualism was said to be the mark of knuckle-dragging conservatives, and especially American Protestants. Remarkably, that seems to be changing.
How serious am I in the above analysis? And is this really a problem, or merely a quirk of geek life in the 21st century?
It’s important to bear in mind what I do and do not mean when I say that some Internet geeks are anti-intellectuals. I do not mean that they would admit that they hate knowledge or are somehow opposed to knowledge. Almost no one can admit such a thing to himself, let alone to others. And, of course, I doubt I could find many geeks who would say that students should not graduate from high school without learning a significant amount of math, science, and some other subjects as well. Moreover, however they might posture when at work on Wikipedia articles, most geeks have significant respect for the knowledge of people like Stephen Hawking or Richard Dawkins, of course. Many geeks, too, are planning on college, are in college, or have been to college. And so forth–for the various claims (1)-(5), while many geeks would endorse them, they could also be found contradicting them regularly as well. So is there really anything to worry about here?
Well, yes, there is. Attitudes are rarely all or nothing. The more that people have these various attitudes, the more bad stuff is going to result, I think. The more that a person really takes seriously that there is no point in reading the classics, the less likely he’ll actually take a class in Greek history or early modern philosophy. Repeat that on a mass scale, and the world becomes–no doubt already has become–a significantly poorer place, as a result of the widespread lack of analytical tools and conceptual understanding. We can imagine a world in which the humanities are studied by only a small handful of people, because we already live in that world; just imagine the number of people getting smaller.
But isn’t this just a problem just for geekdom? Does it really matter that much if geeks are anti-intellectuals?
Well, the question is whether the trend will move on to the population at large. One does not speak of “geek chic” these days for nothing. The digital world is now on the cutting edge of societal evolution, and attitudes and behaviors that were once found mostly among geeks back in the 1980s and 1990s are now mainstream. Geek anti-intellectualism can already be seen as another example. Most of the people I’ve mentioned in this essay are not geeks per se, but the digerati, who are frequently non-geeks or ex-geeks who have their finger on the pulse of social movements online. Via these digerati, we can find evidence of geek attitudes making their way into mainstream culture. One now regularly encounters geek-inspired sentiments from business writers like Don Tapscott and education theorists like Ken Robinson–and even from the likes of Barack Obama (but not anti-intellectualism, of course).
Let’s just put it this way. If, in the next five years, some prominent person comes out with a book or high-profile essay openly attacking education or expertise or individual knowledge as such, because the Internet makes such things outmoded, and if it receives a positive reception not just from writers at CNET and Wired and the usual suspects in the blogosphere, but also serious, thoughtful consideration from Establishment sources like The New York Review of Books or Time, I’ll say that geek anti-intellectualism is in full flower and has entered the mainstream.
UPDATE: I’ve posted a very long set of replies.
UPDATE 2: I’ve decided to reply below as well–very belatedly…Cyprus' Central Bank Chief Panicos Demetriades told the German business daily Handelsblatt that the eurozone country needs an EU bailout "as quickly as possible" to stabilize its ailing system.
Expressing his "strong hope" for bailout talks to be completed in October, Demetriades said in the interview published Monday that it is "extremely important" that the financial lifeline be provided by January 2013.
In June, the government requested assistance in efforts to shore up its struggling banks, which are hugely exposed to debt-stricken Greek lenders and suffered heavy losses in the wake of its neighbor's debt haircut.
The government in Nicosia has so far kept the exact sum of money its banks need under wraps. But the credit ratings agency Standard & Poor's estimated that the figure could amount to as much as 15 billion euros (about $20 billion).
The funding is to come through a new bailout plan in exchange for a strict austerity program, controlled by the so-called troika of lenders - the European Commission, The European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
The troika reportedly wants to slash the national payroll by 15 percent, cut welfare benefits by 10 percent and roll back state-subsidized housing finance under a program lasting three years.
The central bank chief said, however, that the small Mediterranean nation needs more time.
"A three-year program may probably be not enough," Demetriades said. "We may well need four to five years, before we can return to international capital markets."
uhe/mkg (Reuters, dpa, AFP)I'm categorically rejecting the 2to3 approach--for myself anyway. If you think it would help, feel free to:
"upgrade" CP to 2.6, which AFAICT means ensuring it will no longer work in 2.5 or previous versions turn on the 3k warning import-and-fix until you don't get any warnings run-tests-and-fix until you don't get any warnings run 2to3 import-and-fix until you don't get any errors run-tests-and-fix until you don't get any errors wait for bug reports
Me, I'd rather just drop cherrypy/ into 3k and skip steps 1-5.
Changes I had to make so far (http://www.cherrypy.org/changeset/2029):
(4) urlparse -> urllib.parse
(24) "except (ExcA, ExcB):" -> "except ExcA, ExcB:"
(30) "except ExcClass, x:" -> "except ExcClass as x"
(22) u"" -> ""
(1) BaseHTTPServer -> http.server
(1) rfc822 -> email.utils
(4) md5.new() -> hashlib.md5()
(3) sha.new() -> hashlib.sha1()
(3) urllib2 -> urllib
(28) StringIO -> io
(1) func.func_code -> func. code
(6) Cookie -> http.cookies
(3) ConfigParser -> configparser
(1) rfc822._monthnames -> email._parseaddr._monthnames
(105) print -> print()
(35) httplib -> http.client
(22) basestring -> (str, bytes)
(12) items() -> list(items())
(46) iteritems() -> items()
(11) Thread.get/setName -> get/set_name
(1) exec "" -> exec("")
(1) 0777 -> 0o777
(1) Queue -> queue
(1) urllib.unquote -> urllib.parse.unquote
At the moment, I'm a bit blocked importing wsgiserver--we had a nonblocking version of makefile that subclassed the old socket._fileobject class. Looks like the whole socket implementation has changed (and much of it pushed down into C). Not looking forward to reimplementing that.Let's pretend the Federal Reserve can force the financialization lifecycle back into expansion. Why do we need to pretend this can happen? Because the entire U.S. economy and its expansionist Central State now depends on ever-expanding financialization for its survival.
Financialization is like the bubonic plague--it constantly needs new victims as it kills off its existing hosts. Housing? Dead, killed by financialization, aided, abetted and powered by the Federal Reserve. Now the Fed wants to "save" what it already killed via financialization--housing--by buying $1 trillion in plague-infested mortgages and brute-force efforts to keep interest rates below inflation, i.e. negative rates.
Interestingly, plague, financialization and the power of the Fed all follow the same curve of emergence, expanion, maturity, stagnation and collapse. Natural systems follow S-curves, as described in this seminal paper: A Simple Model for Complex Systems.
What is financialization? Simply put, it is finance infecting and hollowing out all levels of an economy by incentivizing leverage, debt, opacity, speculation, financial fraud, collusion and the perfection of crony capitalism, i.e. financial Elites' ownership of the government's regulatory and legislative bodies. Here is another less pungent description via Wikipedia: "Financial leverage overrides capital (equity) and financial markets dominate traditional industrial economy and agricultural economics."
Here is a chart of the financialization lifecycle. Just as the plague reaches a point of maximum infection, levels off and then eventually disappears into protected pockets, financialization reached its maximum penetration in the housing bubble.
Being an intrinsically destabilizing force, financialization led to the global financial crisis of 2008. Central banks went into panic mode, printing and injecting trillions of dollars of new infectious material into the global economy in the hopes of sparking a new even grander cycle of financialization.
But you can't create a new cycle of plague when the hosts are either dead or already infected. The world has run out of sectors that can be financialized; that plague has already killed or infected every corner of the global economy.
Ironically, all the central banks' attempts to reinflate the speculative leverage-debt bubble are only hastening the disease's decline and collapse. The global markets are cheering today because the plague-riddled corpse of Greek debt has been turned into a grotesque marionette that is being made to "dance" by the European Central Bank before an audience that has been told to applaud loudly, even though the ghastly, bizarre spectacle is transparently phony.
Greek debt is already dead; it can't be reinfected and killed again, and neither can the debts of Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Italy et al. Housing is also already dead, though the still-warm body is still twitching in certain markets around the world.
Why does this cruel stage-show have to continue? Because the Federal Reserve and the other central banks will decay and disappear if financialization can't be revived. But since it can't be revived, then we are stuck with a multi-year process of decline that will inevitably end with a massive fireworks-lit finale of collapse.
One week special: 15% off MaxiPack of vegetable garden seeds: a 3.5 gallon bucket of non-hybrid seeds, enough to share with neighbors, friends and fellow farmers!
If this recession strikes you as different from previous downturns, you might be interested in my new book An Unconventional Guide to Investing in Troubled Times (print edition) or Kindle ebook format. You can read the ebook on any computer, smart phone, iPad, etc. Click here for links to Kindle apps and Chapter One. The solution in one word: Localism.
Readers forum: DailyJava.net.
Order Survival+: Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation (free bits) (Kindle) or Survival+ The Primer (Kindle) or Weblogs & New Media: Marketing in Crisis (free bits) (Kindle) or from your local bookseller.
Of Two Minds Kindle edition: Of Two Minds blog-Kindle
"This guy is THE leading visionary on reality. He routinely discusses things which no one else has talked about, yet, turn out to be quite relevant months later."
--Walt Howard, commenting about CHS on another blog.
Thank you, Deward L.T. ($5/mo), for your excellently generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership. Thank you, Peter C. ($50), for your awesomely generous contribution to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.
Subscribers ($5/mo) and contributors of $50 or more this year will receive a weekly email of exclusive (though not necessarily coherent) musings and amusings.
At readers' request, there is also a $10/month option.
The "unsubscribe" link is for when you find the usual drivel here insufferable.× Former Tacoma teacher pleads guilty to sex acts with underage students
TACOMA — A 25-year-old former Lincoln High School teacher pleaded guilty Wednesday to having engaged in sex acts with two students and texting nude photos to a third student.
Meredith Powell, a former math teacher, pleaded guilty in Pierce County Superior Court to two counts of third-degree child rape and one count of communicating with a minor for immoral purposes.
Sentencing was set for Aug. 29.
She faces a standard sentencing range of three years, 10 months to five years in prison on the charges, but her attorney told The News Tribune of Tacoma that lawyers would recommend she be sentenced to six months in jail and three years of sex offender treatment.
Powell was arrested in February, shortly after the Tacoma School District got an anonymous tip that she was engaging in sexual contact with several students. She resigned shortly after her arrest.
On Wednesday, she admitted she had engaged in sex acts with two boys between the ages of 14 and 16 who were students at Lincoln High School.
According to court documents, the mother of an 18-year-old student at the high school told police her son confessed to having sexual contact with Powell in the 2012-2013 school year as the initial allegations against Powell came to light.
The male student told his mother he went to Powell’s classroom when he was a 17-year-old junior in the 2012-13 school year for some “extra help with math” after class, court documents show.
Powell allegedly gave the student extra math problems and sat at the corner of his desk while he worked on the problems. Toward the end of the session, the student told Powell he would do anything to help get his grade up in math, as he was struggling in Powell’s class.
Powell allegedly asked, “You’ll do anything?” And then reached over and unzipped the student’s pants. Powell grabbed the student’s groin and engaged in a sexual act, documents said.
After the incident, Powell allegedly told the student, “This stays between us.”
The student’s mother told police she noticed behavioral changes in her son following the incident, and the son even requested to change schools during his junior year.The video above was removed from YouTube after publication of this commentary. There are versions of the video uploaded by others, including one here.
By A.L. Bailey, a writer, magazine copy editor, and online editor who lives in Hoover
Remember all those bikini-clad, sashaying, glitter-blowing, and spontaneous piggyback-riding days of college? Me either. But according to a new video, it's a whirlwind of glitter and girl-on-girl piggyback rides at the University of Alabama's Alpha Phi house.
No, it's not a slick Playboy Playmate or Girls Gone Wild video. It's a sorority recruiting tool gaining on 500,000 views in its first week on YouTube. It's a parade of white girls and blonde hair dye, coordinated clothing, bikinis and daisy dukes, glitter and kisses, bouncing bodies, euphoric hand-holding and hugging, gratuitous booty shots, and matching aviator sunglasses. It's all so racially and aesthetically homogeneous and forced, so hyper-feminine, so reductive and objectifying, so Stepford Wives: College Edition. It's all so... unempowering.
Are they recruiting a diverse and talented group of young women embarking on a college education? Upon first or even fifth glance, probably not. Hormonal college-aged guys? Most assuredly yes. Older, male YouTube creepers? A resounding yes.
Like the many other videos of its ilk found online for sororities far and wide, it's supposed to work as a sales tool to draw in potential new members (PNMs). But unlike many other videos, Alpha Phi's video stands out in the "beauty and bounce" category and in its production value. Yes, sororities are known for being pretty and flirty; they aren't bastions of feminist ideologies. But perhaps they shouldn't completely sabotage them either.
Just last week during the GOP debate, Megyn Kelly of Fox News called out Donald Trump for dismissing women with misogynous insults. Mere hours later, he proved her point by taking to Twitter to call her a "bimbo." He also proved the point that women, in 2015, must still work diligently to be taken seriously. The continued fight for equal pay, the prevalence of women not being in charge of their own healthcare issues, and the ever-increasing number of women who are still coming out against Bill Cosby after decades of fearful silence show that we are not yet taken seriously.
Meanwhile, these young women, with all their flouncing and hair-flipping, are making it so terribly difficult for anyone to take them seriously, now or in the future. The video lacks any mention of core ideals or service and philanthropy efforts. It lacks substance but boasts bodies. It's the kind of thing that subconsciously educates young men on how to perceive, and subsequently treat, women in their lives. It's the kind of thing I never want my young daughters to see or emulate.
To the incoming PNMs, this video has a clear sales pitch: beauty, sexuality, and a specific look above all. They're selling themselves on looks alone, as a commodity. Sadly, commodities don't tend to command much respect.
So who is buying what they're selling?
Men, from Donald Trump on down to fraternity pledges, are buying it over and over again with devastating results.
The Alpha Phi house, grandiose and imposing, claims to sleep 72 young women. That's 72 women who surely must be worth more than their appearances and who can ask themselves if the messages they're sending are the best and most accurate depictions of who they are.
That's 72 women who will potentially launch careers on the merit of their education and work among men who were once the frat brothers watching their video.
And that's 72 women who will want to be taken seriously rather than be called bimbos by those male coworkers.
That's 72 women who could be a united front for empowerment, not poster children for detrimental stereotypes and cliches.
During filming, did any of them stop to think about what they'd be selling? Did they think they were selling a respectable set of sorority chapter ideals? Did they think they were selling the kind of sisterhood that looks out for all women? Or were they focused on having the hottest video in the popularity contest that is sorority recruitment? Were they satisfied with being perceived as selling a gorgeous party-girl, cookie-cutter commodity? Were they satisfied with being the commodity?
Most importantly, did they realize they are a group of young women blessed with potential who are selling themselves, and each other, short?A Beginner’s Guide to Cryptocurrency Wallets
Bitcoin is a digital currency, so it is necessary to have a piece of software to manage your coins and facilitate transactions. The community refers to these programs as ‘Bitcoin wallets.’ There are numerous different wallets available, each of which operate in slightly different ways and subscribe to different philosophies and principles. Finding the right one for you can be overwhelming. This guide overviews some of the most distinguished wallets to help find the one that suits you best, weighing both usability and security, foregoing hardware and paper wallets.
Airbitz
Airbitz is a user-friendly, intuitive Bitcoin wallet available for Android and iOS devices. The app is extremely rich in features, offering not only basic wallet functionality like sending and receiving bitcoin, but also capabilities such as hierarchical deterministic wallets, where a parent key can generate and control a number of child keys. This has a number of use cases for power users, particularly in a business setting.
From within the app, it is possible to exchange bitcoin and fiat currencies. A directory of local businesses that accept bitcoin as payment can also be found within the app, allowing you to find shops, restaurants and cafés where you can spend your bitcoin.
If you’re looking for a feature rich, well integrated wallet that’s well optimised for use in the real world, Airbitz is a good choice.
Coinomi
Coinomi is a mobile wallet available for Android, but an iOS app is planned alongside desktop implementations of the wallet. Coinomi describes itself as a free, secure, source-available, multi-asset and multi-coin wallet. It has native support for more than 60 altcoins/tokens, meaning that the wallet can manage a diverse portfolio of alternative cryptocurrencies and digital assets, not just bitcoin. The developers strive to continually integrate key altcoins and tokens as they win favor.
As well as supporting a vast range of currencies, Coinomi has inbuilt functionality allowing its users to convert between altcoins through their strategic partner ShapeShift.
Coinomi also prides itself on privacy and security. Private keys never leave the user’s device, and instead are kept secure locally through strong cryptography. The company claims that its servers do not make use of IP association and that all requests are anonymized appropriately.
The source code is available on GitHub under the Coinomi Software License Agreement.
If you’re a trader who manages multiple different currencies in their portfolio or a privacy conscious user, Coinomi is a great choice.
Copay
Copay describes itself as a ‘secure, shared Bitcoin wallet’. Like a joint checking account, a Copay wallet can support multiple users through a multisignature M of N scheme. In simple terms, usually when a transaction is broadcasted to the Bitcoin network it requires a single signature from the owner of the private key. However, Copay makes it possible to set up a multisignature wallet where funds are shared in a group account and can only be spent if a configurable proportion of owners sign a transaction. For example, if we set up a multisignature wallet for a child’s savings account, we can configure it such that confirmation from either (or both) of the parents is required for the child to spend funds.
Multisignature wallets have numerous use cases and Copay makes sharing a wallet exceptionally simple and secure. Of course, Copay also offers single-user wallets for personal finance and other useful features such as hierarchical deterministic backups, where you only need to back the wallet up once to have guaranteed access to all of your funds.
Copay is open source on both the client side and the server side and is published under the MIT license. It is available on many platforms, including iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and all modern desktop operating systems. Many people like Copay because it is a ‘pure bitcoin wallet’ rather than an account service, meaning it isn’t necessary to register with their services in order to use the wallet.
Copay currently only supports Bitcoin wallets and has shown no plans to support any altcoins. Copay is ideal if you would like to share a bitcoin wallet, or if you’re looking for a wallet which is streamlined and functional.
Electrum
Electrum is one of the most venerable and actively used client-side Bitcoin wallets. Initiated by Thomas Voegtlin in November 2011, Electrum is free software under the MIT License and sees active development from contributors all over the world. Electrum qualifies as a Bitcoin thin client, meaning that it relies on distributed servers to manage the more complex parts of the Bitcoin protocol such as broadcasting transactions and indexing the blockchain. Under this configuration, your computer is responsible for the management of your private keys but downloading the entire blockchain to your device is not a requirement. This saves a tremendous amount of space.
Electrum is known for being a forgiving wallet; it allows deterministic wallet generation from a seed. When you create your wallet, Electrum will give you a 12 word mnemonic phrase which can be used to regenerate the wallet in the future. A seed of this length is secure; it has 138 bits of entropy, providing the same level of security as the private key itself. If you lose your private keys, you can easily re-acquire by entering seed.
Installing Electrum is quick and easy on all modern operating systems. However, it is slightly more difficult to use. Electrum focuses on functionality rather than user experience. It exposes some of the lower level aspects of the protocol, so for the non-technically-inclined user, Electrum might not be the best choice.
That said, if you’re looking for a simple, slim and functional Bitcoin wallet with a good security track record, Electrum is a great option.
Mycelium
Mycelium, the self-titled ‘Default Bitcoin Wallet’, offers a beautiful user interface with the intent of ‘making Bitcoin useful for everybody’. It is exclusively a mobile wallet, and is available for both Android and iOS. As well as offering basic wallet functionality, the app provides advanced features for power-users such as hierarchical deterministic wallets, watch only accounts and cold storage. Mycelium also allows the user to maintain multiple wallets at once, making identity management easy.
Mycelium is published under the Apache 2.0 and MS-RSL software licenses. The source code is available on GitHub. Since its inception, Mycelium has been one of the longest running and most widely used wallets in the cryptocurrency atmosphere. Many third party providers, such as exchanges and blockchain engineering companies, are partnering with the Mycelium project to integrate their services. An example of such a company is Coinapult, who provide a secure and easy way to use the Bitcoin platform. Most notably their service offers ‘locking’, where you can peg a desired amount of bitcoin to the US dollar, the euro or the British Pound so that the contents of your wallet are always worth a certain amount in fiat. This feature is integrated into Mycelium and is useful if you plan to use bitcoin as a currency rather than an investment. However, only use this feature if you plan on locking to a fiat value for a substantial amount of time, as the locking process can be quite slow and you may lose dollars in the process if you lock and unlock within a short timeframe, even if you were anticipating a gain.
As well as offering a multitude of third party services, Mycelium also facilitates local in-person trading, allowing for easy exchange of fiat for bitcoin and vice-versa. This feature is baked into the wallet and makes the trading process seamless and uncomplicated; it is as simple as choosing a trader and arranging an in-person meetup.
Mycelium has plans to evolve into a full-fledged financial management suite, allowing seamless control over digital assets. If you’re looking for a feature rich, open source and forward-thinking thinking wallet/financial management suite, Mycelium is a great choice.
Summary
Each of the aforementioned wallets have their different strengths and weaknesses. If you’re new to the scene and you’re still not sure what you’re looking for, the list below is an effective summary:
Airbitz is a good real-world wallet that is heavily integrated with exchanges and services. Airbitz is a useful wallet for spending Bitcoin in the real world.
Coinomi supports an abundance of different altcoins and tokens. It is a useful wallet for managing a portfolio of digital assets.
Copay offers unrivaled support for multisignature shared wallets, and is a ‘pure wallet’, meaning it is not necessary to register with any external services.
Electrum is an acclaimed Bitcoin thin client with a good security track record. It is perhaps more suited to the user who is familiar with the Bitcoin protocol.
Mycelium is a feature rich, forward-thinking wallet with plans to expand into a full-fledged financial management suite. The wallet has numerous industry backers, many of whom have already integrated their services into the wallet.CyanogenMod 10 Final for Various Devices
There comes a time in life, when everything must evolve and better itself. This does not happen overnight and certainly not by itself. Apparently, this seems to be the case for the infamous CyanogenMod ROM. The latest installment, known as CM10, is finally getting to a point where the CM team has deemed the release as highly stable and almost bug free. This is great news for anyone using AOSP-based ROMs. as many of them share parts of the CM code as well.
The best part about this is that it allows anyone to try Jelly Bean 4.1, despite not being able to due to lack of updates coming from device manufacturers or because the device may no longer be supported/ineligible for updates. They can now enjoy the improved experience that is offered by the newly revamped OS. Having said that, and going back to the ever evolving nature of our devices’ firmware, you may want to keep an eye out for newer versions of CM (10.1 maybe?) because as of yesterday, 4.2 source code was released to the AOSP, and it comes loaded with all the goods we talked about earlier.
One last thing worth mentioning is that, while the list of supported devices under the CM umbrella is huge, it does not mean that every device supported will receive CM10 final just yet. Only a few of the most popular devices have gotten the green light to label the release as “Final,” including most variants of the SGS3, several variants of the SGS2, HTC One X, Motorola Xoom, and of course the Nexus devices, as well as a few others. So, keep your eyes peeled to see if your device is in the “chosen” list.
You can find if your device is included in the list or not by visiting the CM downloads page, and by visiting your local device forum here on XDA.
Want something published in the Portal? Contact any News Writer.
[Thanks willverduzco for the tip!]It seems that Shonda Rhimes will not be satisfied until fans of "Grey's Anatomy" are reduced to nothing more than blubbering sad sacks buried under a mountain of tissues.
Spoiler Alert: if you aren't caught up on Season 11 of "Grey's Anatomy," do not continue reading.
With the incredible loss of beloved character Derek Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey), who was killed off this season, it's hard to believe that Rhimes would even think of breaking up another "Grey's" couple -- and yet here we are.
On Thursday's Season 11 finale, fans should likely prepare themselves for Jackson (Jesse Williams) and April (Sarah Drew) to call it quits. The split isn't shocking given what they've been through this season (deciding to induce April's pregnancy early after discovering the baby would be born with a rare bone disease), but how much are fans really expected to handle?!After proposing the idea of a "bicycle-centric" festival for the 2016 My Top Festival competition, Andy Fry is gearing up with his fellow bicycle enthusiasts to prepare for the second annual Cyclovia festival in Topeka.
The three-day event features all things bicycle, food trucks and live entertainment.
"I think an event like this helps showcase that bicycling can be whatever you want it to be, and it puts people in a comfortable place in regards to bikes in their neighborhood and the community; it makes it approachable," Fry said.
Fry is the director of operations for the Topeka Community Cycling Project, one of the partners with Visit Topeka to put on this three-day event Aug. 11-13.
Friday night the event begins with a glow ride, where bicycles will be decked out in neon glowsticks and begin their night ride on the south steps of the Capitol building.
The event continues Saturday with a breakfast ride, a kids ride and obstacle course downtown, an ice cream ride, and the showing of a bike film from the Filmed by Bike festival in Portland, Ore.
"We’re also helping coordinate bike donations they’re bringing in from Lansing Correctional Facility," Fry said. "Since our move we don’t have a lot of bikes to give out, so we’re utilizing a program where inmates work on bikes and fix up used bikes so we’re helping with that, and Safe Kids Shawnee County with helmet fittings, and we also have a grant through KDOT where we have $5,000 a year to give out head- and taillight kits, so we’re going to give those out Friday evening and Saturday when we’re helping with the glow ride."
From 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, Safe Kids Shawnee County will host a Kid’s Bike Rodeo during Cyclovia. The rodeo will include several stations, including rules of the road, bicycle maintenance, helmet fitting and a bike obstacle course.
"We are very excited about the increase in bicycling activities in Topeka," said Teresa Taylor, the SKSC coordinator with Stormont Vail Health. "Cycling is a wonderful activity for families and individuals to stay active, explore the community and connect with others. Our coalition wants to teach kids and families how to be as safe as possible while having fun on their bikes."
Through the Cyclovia festival, the organizers hope to explain bike safety in Topeka, accessibility to bicycling, and provide bikes and safety equipment to as many riders as possible.
"I think it (the festival) was needed because we have our bike ways, we have Topeka Metro Bikes, we’ve influences some of the changing of ordinances and laws related to bikes, but I think Topeka needs an approachable inclusive event that shows everybody that bicycling is what you make it," Fry said.
Unofficially, TCCP held a bike festival two years ago in North Topeka, where Karl Fundenberger helped organize a smaller version of Cyclovia. After the event won the My Top Festival contest, Visit Topeka has grown it and even includes five neighborhood events to increase awareness and provide bikes to as many neighborhoods as possible.
Also new this year was the film festival screening. Topeka was one of seven cities to screen the film, which Fry said is called "Bike Packing."
"It’s a mixture of bike adventure movies and people go on these excursions on bikes, so it’s called Bike Packing and basically it’s like backpacking on bikes, and it’s a documentary, there’s like six or seven of them and they’re one and a half to two hours long," Fry said.
Fry also said it was notable that Topeka would be listed among other major metropolitan cities screening the film, such as |
acids. The more natural the structure the better. Sustainability: The fish should be harvested in a sustainable manner and species that are under threat should be avoided. Cost: the product must be relatively affordable to be practical for most people.
Purity
Many species of fish are known to concentrate toxic chemicals like heavy metals, PCBs, and dioxins which can cause serious disease, especially in children and developing fetuses. In a previous article I explained how these chemicals are typically not a concern when eating whole fish, because fish also contains selenium. Selenium binds to mercury and makes it unavailable to tissues, thus protecting against any damage it may cause.
And while fish constitute only 9% of our dietary intake of dioxins and PCBs, high doses of fish oils taken every day (as is often recommended) may raise this percentage significantly and expose us to undesirable levels of these toxins.
To address this, fish oil manufacturers use a process called molecular distillation to remove the toxins from the oil. When done correctly, molecular distillation is capable of reducing the toxins in fish oil to levels considered to be safe by the EPA and other agencies.
Although almost any fish oil manufacturer will tell you their product is free of these toxins, independent lab analyses tell a different story. Just last month (March, 2010), a lawsuit was filed in California court against the manufacturers of ten popular fish oils because they contained undisclosed and (possibly) unsafe levels of contaminants.
Unfortunately, this kind of deception is all too common in the supplement industry. That’s why it’s essential that you ask for something called a Certificate of Analysis (COA) from the manufacturer before you buy their product. A COA is an analysis performed by an independent lab to measure the ingredients of a product and confirm whether it lives up to the claims made by the manufacturer.
If the manufacturer won’t provide a COA, I start to get suspicious. This is standard practice in the industry and there’s no reason they shouldn’t be happy to show you theirs. Make sure that the independent lab they use is in fact independent and is preferably accredited, sponsored by a government agency, or has a solid reputation in the field.
This may seem like unnecessary paranoia, but when it comes to the possibility of ingesting powerful neurotoxins, it pays to do your homework.
In general, fish that are lower on the food chain like sardines and anchovies naturally have a lower concentration of contaminants. For this reason, it may be wise to look for a product made from these fish.
So what levels of these toxins are safe? As you might imagine, there is some disagreement on this question since there is no single governing body that determines acceptable levels. However, the standards that are most often followed by fish oil manufacturers are summarized in the table below.
* ppt = parts per trillion
* ppb = parts per billion
In a previous article we discussed selenium’s protective effect against mercury toxicity. If you are taking large doses of fish oil, and not eating any whole fish, it may be wise to ensure another regular source of selenium. Brazil nuts are by far the highest dietary source, with 1917mcg of selenium per 100g. (But they are also very high in n-6, so watch out!)
Freshness
I have written extensively about the dangers of oxidized, rancid oils. They promote oxidative damage and increase inflammation, both of which are risk factors for nearly every modern disease.
The more unsaturated an fat is, the more vulnerable it is to oxidation. Long-chain, omega-3 fats found in fish oil are the most unsaturated of the fats, and thus the most susceptible to being damaged.
This is why it’s absolutely crucial to ensure that the fish oil you select is fresh and not rancid. Once it has gone rancid, it will have the exact opposite effect on your body than you want it to.
The first thing to do is to check something called the “peroxide value” on the COA. This is a measure of rancidity reactions in the oil that have occurred during storage. and should be less than 5 meq/kg.
If this checks out, and you decide to order that product, break open a capsule once you receive it. There should be no “fishy” odors. They should smell like the ocean, but not like a rotten fish. They should also not have a strong lemon or lime scent, which could be an indicator that the manufacturer is trying to mask the rancidity.
A common misconception is that you can determine the quality of a fish oil by freezing it. The theory goes that if you freeze the oil and it is cloudy, it’s rancid. That is not the case. All fish contain saturated and monounsaturated fatty acids, albeit in small amounts. These fatty acids make the capsules appear cloudy when frozen in products that contain whole fish oil (i.e. Vital Choice’s Wild Salmon Oil).
Potency
This is another area surrounded by significant controversy. Some argue the levels of individual constituents in fish oil aren’t paramount. Scientists discovered the healthful effects of omega-3s by studying people with fish-heavy diets, before supplemental fish oil even existed. Clinical trials using supplemental fish oils over the past few decades have contained widely variable levels of both long-chain omega-3 derivatives (EPA and DHA), and not super-high concentrations of either or both.
However, due to poor conversion of ALA to EPA and DHA, unless you are eating fish it is very likely you are deficient in long-chain omega-3s.
Following this line of reasoning, the DHA content in particular of fish and fish oils does seem important if we wish to obtain the best possible therapeutic effect. Many recent studies demonstrating the anti-inflammatory potential of fish oil used a daily dosage of DHA in the range of 1-3 grams. What’s more, foods like salmon roe that have been prized by traditional cultures for their nourishing and healing effects contain large amounts of DHA. A single 6 oz. serving of salmon roe contains 1 g of DHA. (In fact, this would be the best way by far of supplementing with DHA if money were no object. (Unfortunately, wild salmon roe goes for about $28/serving.)
The suggested DHA dose will of course depend upon the condition being treated. If you have a chronic inflammatory condition (heart disease, arthritis, Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis, etc.) I would suggest taking between 1 and 2 grams per day. If you are taking it simply for health maintenance, 500 mg is probably sufficient.
Unfortunately, many fish oils do not have significant amounts of DHA. This means you’d have to take an impractically high number of capsules each day to obtain the therapeutic dose. This is not desirable, since all unsaturated oils (including fish oils) are subject to oxidative damage. We don’t want to take large quantities of them for this reason.
Remember to check the label and ensure that your product has approximately 200-300 mg of DHA per capsule. This will allow you to achieve the therapeutic dose by taking no more than 3 capsules twice a day.
Nutrients
All fish oils contain some amount of EPA and DHA, the long-chain omega-3 derivatives that provide the majority of the anti-inflammatory benefits seen in studies. However, fish liver oils (from cod, skate or shark) contain significant amounts of vitamins A and D in addition to EPA and DHA. Vitamins A and D are fat-soluble nutrients that are crucial to human health. Vitamin D, in particular, is difficult to obtain from commonly eaten foods – especially now that eating seafood carries a much higher risk of contamination with toxins.
Fermented cod liver oil is even more beneficial, because it contains vitamin K2. Vitamin K2 has been called “the missing nutrient” because it was only recently discovered, and many people are deficient in it.
It has been commonly believed that the benefits of vitamin K are limited to its role in blood clotting. Another popular misconception is that vitamins K1 and K2 are simply different forms of the same vitamin – with the same physiological functions.
New evidence, however, has confirmed that vitamin K2’s role in the body extends far beyond blood clotting to include protecting us from heart disease, ensuring healthy skin, forming strong bones, promoting brain function, supporting growth and development and helping to prevent cancer – to name a few.
Cod liver oil was traditionally processed by fermentation, which is likely to make it more absorbable and bio-available. Processing by fermentation also avoids the use of heat, which can damage the fragile fatty acids and cause fish oils to go rancid. Unfortunately, I am aware of only one company that sells fermented cod liver oil at this time (see below).
Bio-availability
The ability to absorb the beneficial components of fish oil is based on the molecular shape of the fatty acids. In short, the more natural the structure and the less it is chemically altered, the better.
This is true for any nutrient, of course, and it explains why I am always in favor of obtaining nutrients from food or food-based sources when possible. Each additional step in processing from the natural state of a food to extract or isolate nutrients introduces the potential of damaging the nutrient, or changing it’s chemical form so that it’s more difficult to absorb or affects the body in a different way.
When it comes to fish oils, there are three forms currently available on the market:
Natural triglyercide oil. This is what you get when you “squeeze” the whole fish and extract the natural oil from it. It is the closest to eating fish oil in its natural form, and is highly bioavailable. The drawback of this form is that, because it’s not concentrated, it usually has low levels of EPA and DHA. And because it isn’t purified, it can have high levels of contaminants such as heavy metals, PCBs, and dioxins. Ethyl ester oil. Occurs when natural triglyceride oil is concentrated and molecularly distilled to remove impurities. The ester form is still in a semi-natural state because it is the result of a process that naturally occurs in the body. The advantage to this form is that it can double or triple the levels of EPA and DHA. Synthetic triglyceride oil. This form occurs when natural triglycerides are converted to ethyl esters for concentration (as above), but then re-converted into synthetic triglycerides. The original position of the triglyceride’s carbon bonds change and the molecule’s overall structure is altered, which impacts the bioavailability of the oil.
Studies on absorption of the various types of fish oil suggest that, unsurprisingly, the natural triglyceride form is absorbed better than the ethyl ester form, which in turn is absorbed better than the synthetic triglyceride form.
One study by Lawson & Hughes in 1988 showed that 1 gram of EPA and 0.67 grams of DHA as natural triglycerides were absorbed 3.4 and 2.7 fold as well as the ethyl ester triglycerides.
In the previous article we saw that fish oils were better absorbed when taken with a high-fat meal. In another study by Lawson & Hughes later the same year, they showed that the absorption of EPA & DHA from natural triglycerides improved from 69% with a low-fat meal (8g total fat) to 90% with a high-fat meal (44g total fat). Absorption of both EPA and DHA from ethyl ester oils was increased three-fold from 20% with a low-fat meal to 60% with a high fat meal.
What about krill oil?
In addition to the three types of fish oil listed above, there is another type of oil that provides EPA & DHA: krill oil. Krill oil (KO) is extracted from Anarctic krill, Euphausia superba, a zooplankton crustacean rich in phospholipids carrying EPA and DHA. Krill oil also contains various potent antioxidants, including vitamins A & E, astaxanthin, and a novel flavonoid whose properties are not yet fully understood.
Krill oil has a unique biomolecular profile that distinguishes it from other fish oils. While EPA and DHA in fish oils comes in the form of triglycerides, the EPA and DHA is already incorporated into phospholipids, which facilitates the passage of the fatty acids through the intestinal wall. This increases the bioavailability of the EPA and DHA and improves absorption and assimilation.
Werner et al demonstrated essential fatty acids in the form of phospholipids were superior to essential fatty acids as triglycerides in significantly increasing the phospholipid concentrations of EPA and DHA in mice.
In a human study, Bunea et al compared the effect of krill oil and fish oil on blood lipids, specifically total cholesterol, triglycerides, LDL, and HDL. Krill oil was given at dosages of 1g/d, 1.5g/d, 2g/d or 3g/d, and fish oil was given at a single dose of 3g/d. The authors found the following:
KO at a daily dose of 1g, 1.5g, 2g or 3g achieved significant reductions of LDL of 32%, 36%, 37% and 39% respectively. Patients treated with 3g fish oil daily did not achieve a significant reduction in LDL.
HDL was significantly increased in all patients receiving KO. HDL increased 44% at 1g/d, 43% at 1.5g/d, 55% at 2g/d and 59% at 3g/d. Fish oil taken at 3g/d increased HDL by only 4%.
in all patients receiving KO. HDL increased 44% at 1g/d, 43% at 1.5g/d, 55% at 2g/d and 59% at 3g/d. Fish oil taken at 3g/d increased HDL by only 4%. KO did not decrease triglycerides significantly at 1g and 1.5g. However, KO reduced triglycerides by 28% at 2g/d and 27% at 3g/d. Fish oil at 3g/d did not achieve a significant reduction of triglycerides.
Blood glucose levels were reduced by 6.3% in patients receiving 1g/d and 1.5g/d of KO, and 5.6% in patients receiving 2g/d and 3g/d of KO. A daily dose of 3g of fish oil reduced blood glucose by 3.3%.
Thus, in this study krill oil led to a significantly greater improvement in blood lipids compared to fish oil.
Note that the dosage of KO that obtained the best results, either 2g/d or 3g/d, is quite high. However, study participants received a maintenance dose of 0.5g/d for another 12 weeks after the therapeutic period of the study ended. These patients maintained the reductions in total cholesterol they attained in the study, and LDL, triglycerides and blood glucose were further reduced from baseline. There was a moderate decrease (of 3%) in HDL, but HDL was still significantly increased from baseline.
There is also unpublished research suggesting that 300 mg/d of KO reduces biochemical and subjective measures of inflammation and improves joint function and mobility in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA).
However, as this research is not published or peer-reviewed, and was sponsored by Neptune Technologies (the manufacturer of Neptune Krill Oil (NKO), I am cautious about interpreting its results.
So what does all of this information about bio-availability tell us?
Taking fish oil capsules with a high-fat meal is essential to improve absorption of EPA and DH. Even when taken with a high-fat meal, ethyl ester oils are absorbed only 66% as well as natural triglyceride oils. Krill oil appears to significantly improve blood lipids when compared to fish oils, possibly because of its unique phospholipid structure.
Sustainability
The sustainability of fish oil production is difficult to gauge. Some oils are produced as a byproduct of fish harvesting, and manufacturers claim that they are simply making use of something that would normally be discarded. While this is certainly better than harvesting fish solely for their oil, it still supports harmful fishing practices.
The safest bet is to only use fish oil that is made from fish that are certified by MSF or a similar organization, such as the Environmental Defense Fund. Vital Choice Wild Salmon Oil is one example, as is Jarrow Max DHA (which is made from anchovies and sardines, both of which are generally regarded as safe to eat from an environmental standpoint).
Cost
I cover cost in the recommendations section below.
Recommendations
Note: I have no affiliation with any of these companies. These are simply the products I recommend based on my research. It’s very likely that there are other good products that I missed in my search. This is not an exhaustive list.
Which product you might choose from this list depends in large part upon what your goals are.
I have provided product recommendations in two different categories: baseline, and supplemental. Those wishing to to maintain health and ensure adequate nutrient intake should choose a product from the “baseline” category. Those who are dealing with a chronic inflammatory condition should also choose a product from the baseline category, but should consider adding a product from the “supplemental” category.
However, keep in mind that the absorption of the natural triglyceride oils (like the Wild Salmon Oil and Fermented Cod Liver Oil below) will be 1.5 times greater than the ethyl ester oils in the supplemental section. As a rule of thumb, all purified and molecularly distilled oils are ethyl esters.
This means you have to take 1.5 times as much of the ethyl ester oils to get the same dose of DHA that you’d get from the natural triglyceride oils. For example, Vital Choice Wild Salmon Oil has 220 mg DHA per serving. To get the same amount of DHA from Jarrow Max DHA, which is an ethyl ester oil, you’d have to take a serving that provides 333 mg of DHA.
Baseline
Green Pastures Fermented Cod Liver Oil and Butter Oil Blend (GP FCLO)
Ingredients: about 270 mg omega-3 (about 139 mg EPA, 83 mg DHA), about 1,100 IU vitamin D, about 2,300 IU vitamin A. Values listed are approximate (see disadvantages).
Price: $47.00 for 120 capsules, 2 capsules per serving. $0.78/serving.
Advantages: a whole-food product in its natural form, rather than a supplement. Is relatively low in EPA & DHA compared to other products, but contains high levels of vitamin D, as well as vitamins A & K. The fat soluble vitamins A, D & K2 are important co-factors and likely improve the absorption and assimilation of EPA & DHA. Addition of grass-fed butter oil increases levels of K2. Cold-processed with fermentation, which means this is the least oxidized product available.
Disadvantages: levels of PCBs are posted on Green Pastures’ website here, but I’ve been unable to obtain information on heavy metals or dioxins. The EPA and DHA levels are what would be expected in a whole food product, but may not be high enough for a significant anti-inflammatory effect. Values for vitamins A, D, EPA and DHA are approximate and vary batch to batch due to fermentation processing method. Peroxide values are not provided, but because it is processed without heat they are likely to be very low.
Notes: because fermented cod liver oil contains vitamins A, D and K2 in addition to EPA and DHA, and because most people are deficient in some or all of these nutrients, this is currently the only product I recommend to everyone – patients, family and friends – regardless of their health status.
Vital Choice Wild Salmon Oil (VC WSO)
Ingredients: 600 mg of omega-3 (240 mg EPA, 220 mg DHA), 340 IU vitamin D, 2,060 IU vitamin A (per 3 1,000 mg softgels).
Price: $40 bottle, 180 capsules. 3 capsules/serving, $0.68/serving.
Advantages: processed without heat using micro-filtration, which retains naturally occurring vitamins A and D. Fatty acids are in their natural triglyceride form, which makes them more absorbable. Also contains astaxanthin, which protects the oil from oxidative damage and rancidity. Contains more EPA and DHA than GP FCLO. Nutrient levels are more consistent from batch to batch and certification is performed by independent, not-for-profit organization (NSF International).
Disadvantages: when compared to GP FCLO, does not have vitamin K2 and the dose of vitamin D is significantly lower. Otherwise no disadvantages.
Supplemental
Jarrow Max DHA
Ingredients: 600 mg of omega-3 (250 mg DHA, 36 mg EPA) per capsule; one capsule is one serving.
Price: $14.85 (at Vitacost) for 180 capsules. $0.08/serving.
Advantages: even after considering the differences in absorptions between Jarrow Max (an ethyl ester) and the two natural triglyceride oils listed above, Jarrow Max is significantly cheaper. It’s possible to get 1g/d of DHA for $0.32. Made with anchovies and sardines, both of which are naturally low in contaminants. Jarrow faxed me their certificate of analysis, which checked out fine. This is a good choice for those wishing a high-dose of DHA in addition to eating fish or taking one of the natural triglyceride oils above.
Disadvantages: has a 7:1 ratio of DHA to EPA. Although I believe DHA to be more beneficial than EPA, the research is mixed on this and some people report that they do better with EPA.
V-Pure Vegetarian DHA
Ingredients: 350 mg DHA, 50 mg EPA per serving, 2 capsules per serving.
Price: $21.95 for 60 capsules. $0.73 per serving.
Advantages: I received several emails from vegetarians asking me what I recommended they do to meet DHA needs. This is a DHA/EPA blend derived from marine algae, which is where oily fish get EPA & DHA in the first place. The algae in this product is organically grown and 100% free of toxins and contaminants. The capsules are quite small and can be easily swallowed.
Disadvantages: I haven’t seen much research on the marine-algae DHA/EPA blends. Although it’s plausible to assume their effects would be similar to fish oils, I’d like to see some studies backing that up. Likewise, I don’t know much about V-Pure as a company. Another potential issue is that the capsules have carrageenan in them, which has been shown to exacerbate intestinal inflammation in several studies. People with gut problems like IBS and IBD may want to avoid this product. Finally, at $0.73/serving this product is expensive. To get a therapeutic dose of 1g/d taking this alone, you’d have to take 9 capsules per day which be 4.5 bottles/month, or almost $100!
Tentatively Recommended
Neptune Krill Oil
Ingredients: 300 mg of omega-3 (90 mg DHA, 150 mg EPA) per serving, two capsules per serving.
Price: $16.86 for 60 capsules. $0.56/serving, 2 capsules per serving.
Advantages: KO has a unique phospholipid structure that appears to improve the absorption of EPA & DHA. At least one study suggests that KO is superior to fish oil in improving blood lipids. KO also contains vitamins E & A, as well as astaxanthin, an antioxidant claimed to be 10 times more potent than other carotenoids. KO capsules are much smaller than fish oil capsules, are easier to swallow, and many report they don’t cause the burping common with other fish oil capsules. Several anecdotal reports suggest that krill oil can be more effective than fish oil in reducing inflammation for some people.
Disadvantages: there are few studies demonstrating the effectiveness of KO, whereas fish oil has decades of research behind it. Most of the studies that do exist on KO were sponsored by Neptune, the largest manufacturer of KO. The dosages used in the study on KO and blood lipids were very high, and taking KO at those dosages would be expensive. (However, the therapeutic dose of 2-3g/d would only be necessary for 12 weeks, as the maintenance dose of 0.5g seemed to maintain the benefits attained during the therapeutic period.) The sustainability of krill harvesting is controversial.
The reason KO gets a tentative recommendation is that there’s still comparatively little research supporting its use, and because I am still uncertain about the environmental impact of harvesting the krill for the oil. If you have information to share on either of these questions, I’m all ears!3
3
Prema odlukama MINGO-a, koja su trenutno u pripremi, nove cijene počet će vrijediti od 1. travnja i bit će aktualne od 1. listopada ove godine ili do 1. travnja iduće godine, rečeno nam je. Vrijeme trajanja ovakvog državnog utjecaja na cijene plina ovisit će o obrazloženom mišljenju koje je Hrvatskoj nedavno poslala Europska komisija. Naime, EK je Hrvatskoj još lani prigovorila na kršenje pravila na tržištu plina, između ostalog zbog "neopravdanih prepreka za izvoz domaćeg plina", jer se Ini nalaže da sav plin proizveden u Hrvatskoj tu i prodaje. Dakle, INA-i treba dati mogućnost da sama na tržištu formira cijenu domaćeg plina pa i da taj plin izvozi, što je vrlo škakljivo s obzirom na odnose države i MOL -a.
Ono što je Hrvatska 2015. odgovorila na prigovor, Komisiji se nije dopalo pa je poduzela još jedan korak, odnosno poslala je obrazloženo mišljenje. Ako MINGO u roku od dva mjeseca ne ispravi nepravilnosti Hrvatska bi mogla biti tužena Europskom sudu, a tu slučaj postaje ozbiljniji jer Komisija može zatražiti od suda izricanje financijske kazne i obaveznu primjenu EU legislative, što će označiti kraj ovakve prakse određivanja cijena i početak stvarne liberalizacije tržišta i na najnižoj razini. Cijene plina kućanstvima lani su pale za pet do sedam posto, a u zadnje tri godine plin je industriji pojeftinio 17% zahvaljujući otvaranju tržišta. U procesu liberalizacije može se očekivati samo porast cijena plina jer se plin više neće za kućanstva dobavljati po ugovorenoj cijeni a velik je disparitet između cijene za kućanstva i poduzetništvo, koja je među višima u Europi.
3 plina, a prosječna cijena za Europu za 2015. iznosila je 237 do 242 USD za tisuću m3. Isporuke u Njemačku porasle su za 17,1%, u Italiju 12,6%, u Francusku za 36,8%, za Austriju za 11,5%. Cijene u okruženju zbog niske cijene nafte al i pritiska EU na Gazprom znatno su se smanjile. Ruski plin kojim se trži u Europi znatno je jeftiniji. 2015. Gazprom je u zemlje koje ne pripadaju središnjoj i istočnoj Europi izvezao 8% više plina ili 159,4 milijarde mplina, a prosječna cijena za Europu za 2015. iznosila je 237 do 242 USD za tisuću m. Isporuke u Njemačku porasle su za 17,1%, u Italiju 12,6%, u Francusku za 36,8%, za Austriju za 11,5%.
Ina je do travnja 2015. HEP-u plin za potrebe kućanstava prodavala po 1,71 kn/mda bi to odlukom Vlade zatim palo na 1,59 kn/m. Iako su cijene plina u Europi u međuvremenu dosta pale, ta cijena plina nije se mijenjala iako je bivši ministar Vrdoljak u predizborno vrijeme najavljivao manje cijene za kućanstva. Dakle, INA je na prodaji plina HEP-u ostvarivala solidan profit. Naime, HEP sada od Ine plin kupuje po 21,5 euro/MWh, dok je cijena na centralnom europskom plinskom hubu 14 eura/MWh, pri čemu treba naglasiti da je riječ isključivo o cijeni robe, bez transportnih troškova.Users of apps expect that their interactions are reflected throughout all areas of the interface. For example, after a user deletes their photo, it should no longer be visible in other areas such as their profile or feed. Achieving this can be problematic for views retained in memory, where the data the views present can become stale or outdated. Consistency is something users take for granted. If you don’t have it, it will be noticeable and will reduce the confidence users have in your app. In this post, we’ll discuss our approach to managing consistency on Android.
To go back to the example above, when a user deletes one of their photos, we want to remove it from the feed and their profile. FeedFragment and ProfileFragment are retained in memory while the app is running using a standard ViewPager embedded within the single instance of our main Activity. The important thing to note here is that these fragments are instantiated only once for the duration of the app’s lifetime. As a result, the underlying data that they each present can be become stale in the event that the data is modified elsewhere. In order to keep the fragments up to date with the newest data models available, some further action is required. There are a few approaches to achieving this:
Define interfaces, allowing views to communicate with each other
Global notification mechanism (centralized event bus)
Publish-subscribe system
The first solution that may come to mind is to simply use an interface to allow FeedFragment and ProfileFragment to listen for changes made in PhotoFragment. In this solution, PhotoFragment holds a reference to each of the listeners and notifies them of the deletion. Each listening fragment is then responsible for removing the item from its internal state and updating its interface accordingly. However, there are a few issues with this approach. For one, PhotoFragment now has responsibility beyond its initial scope of simply presenting a photo. It should not be concerned with coordinating updates in surrounding fragments, let alone know of their existence. Another drawback to this solution is the lack of elegant scaling. Whenever a new section of the app needs to respond to photo deletions, we must add more extraneous code to PhotoFragment. For common actions in a large app, this can quickly lead to tightly coupled code where there is no clear separation of concerns.
Another solution is to use a global notification mechanism, or an event bus. In this approach, changes are represented as event objects and are broadcasted to a receiver. The receiver then determines the event type, dissects any necessary information, and handles it accordingly. This was the route taken previously on our iOS app, using NSNotificationCenter. Although this loosens the coupling between views, we found it had some drawbacks. The number of event types quickly became difficult to manage, especially when trying to relay specific information about each event such as failure, success, and completion. Another annoyance we encountered with NSNotificationCenter was that notifications (events) are identified by strings. This led to the app being polluted with string constants, in an attempt to workaround the loss of type safety.
The last approach we’ll discuss is the publish-subscribe model. The idea here is that publishers send messages without knowing specifically where they will be received. Subscribers then subscribe to the types of messages that they’re interested in receiving. This system allows data producers to be almost entirely decoupled from data consumers. Scalability is another benefit of this model. Adding support for additional data types simply requires writing new publishers and subscribers, and doesn’t interfere with the existing ones. For these reasons we decided to use the pub-sub model at the core of our solution.
Enter Jackie
Jackie is a consistency cache for Android that we built at 500px. At a high level, Observers subscribe to DataItems (model objects) and are notified of changes. Jackie maintains a centralized cache of your data and lets you easily circulate updates of the data throughout your application. DataItem is a simple interface that requires classes to implement the getId() method as a unique identifier of the item’s instance. Unique identifiers let us pass around immutable copies of objects, rather than modify a single object instance, so that we don’t have to worry about multiple threads mutating the same object. In order to conveniently update an object in an immutable manner, we make use of Lombok’s Wither annotation. This lets us clone an object while changing a single field. This can be thought of as an immutable setter. Here’s a basic example to illustrate this:
// A class implementing DataItem
User user = new User("Bob", 25);
ItemObserver<User> observer = nextUser -> {
// Updates to user will be received here
};
Jackie.chan().subscribe(observer).to(user);
User updatedUser = user.withAge(26);
Jackie.chan().update(updatedUser);
Now let’s have a look at how we would handle the photo deletion example discussed above using Jackie:
ProfileFragment & FeedFragment
ListObserver<Photo> observer = removedPhotos -> {
mPhotosAdapter.unbind(removedPhotos);
};
List<Photo> photos = PhotoProvider.fetchPhotos();
Jackie.chan().subscribe(observer).to("photos", photos);
First we define observers in each of the fragments where we want to listen for changes to photos. ListObserver provides a few other callbacks for more granular updates, but for the sake of simplicity, we’ve only implemented onItemsRemoved(). Inside of this method, we can update our fragment to reflect the removal of the given photos. Typically this would be notifying a list adapter of the changes; however, the implementation is entirely up to you. After the observers have been set up, all that’s left is to subscribe them to an identifier with some initially bound items.
There are a few things to note here. In order for all of this to work, Photo must have implemented the DataItem interface. As do most resources coming from a data store, Photos on 500px each have a unique identifier, so implementing getId() is as simple as returning it. Another thing to remember is to unsubscribe observers when necessary. In the realm of Android, this should be done when the fragment or activity is destroyed, to avoid leaking the observer:
@Override public void onDestroy() {
super.onDestroy()
Jackie.chan().unsubscribe(observer).from(photos);
}
Finally, in PhotoFragment we simply inform Jackie of the photo deletion when it occurs. Jackie takes care of notifying all subscribed observers.
PhotoFragment
void deletePhoto(Photo photo) {
Jackie.chan().remove(photo);
...
}
The beauty of this solution is the fact that PhotoFragment does not need to manually update other areas of the application. Leveraging Jackie to manage data consistency allows for concise and decoupled UI code and eliminates the need for communication between unrelated pieces of the interface.
Binding Endpoints to Views
We noticed that most of our fragments and activities had essentially the same behaviour. They all fetched data from an API, bound the data to views, and sometimes handled pagination. These tasks, while not very difficult, required lots of boilerplate code which was duplicated across many areas of our app. We took this as an opportunity to build an abstraction we call RestBinder to reduce the amount of setup and glue code needed in our views.
RestBinder lets us bind fragments and activities to an API endpoint we’re interested in accessing and uses Jackie under the hood to cache the incoming data. It also handles common use cases, such as pagination and refreshing, and accounts for the Android lifecycle by providing methods to easily subscribe and unsubscribe listeners, as well as save and restore state during configuration changes. From the listeners defined in our fragments and activities, we delegate presentation of the received data models to custom views. This is done via a method exposed on our views, <A> void bind(A a), where A is the data type which the view displays. This pattern lets us tuck away the often uninteresting presentation code and provides an explicit way of interacting with the view from the outside.
With these abstractions in place, our fragments and activities become extremely lean and their intentions are made clear. The responsibility of networking and presenting data is neatly contained, while the fragment or activity simply serves as a thin layer to handle delegation.
The Future of Jackie
Currently Jackie is used internally by the 500px Android team, allowing us to easily tackle consistency issues and make our code easier to maintain. Plans are in the works to polish the API and add features including RxJava bindings. We hope to eventually open source the project so that other Android developers can benefit from the power of Jackie!Production is under way for “Game of Thrones” season 3, and we now at least know how long the filming period is going to last for one of the characters who saw some of his story take pace alongside Aria Stark earlier this year.
In a new interview with Wonderland Magazine, former “Skins” actor Joe Dempsie — who you may better know for his role of Gendry — had the following to say about just how long he is going to be working on the show this year:
“Filming Game Of Thrones is going |
activation was measured during −10 mV voltage pulses following a series of 1 s prepulses ranging from −110 to 60 mV in 10 mV increments. Voltage-dependent inactivation was quantified as I / I max, with I max occurring at the voltage pulse following a −110 mV prepulse. Adrα2A-associated experiments were carried out using a protocol that consisted of 10 s holding voltage at −60mV followed by a 500 ms ramp from −100 mV to +100 mV that returned to −60 for an additional 10 s, and this protocol was repeated consecutively for ∼10 min or more. For 5HT 3 R biosensor recordings, whole-cell configuration was achieved and cells were lifted from coverslips and moved immediately adjacent to GFP-labeled EC cells. Voltage has held constant at −80 mV as solutions were washed on and off with local perfusion. Responses were normalized to peak current induced by mCPBG.
Calcium imaging EC and HEK were loaded with 10 μM Fura-2-AM (Invitrogen) and 0.01% Pluronic F-127 (wt/vol, Invitrogen) for 1 h in Ringer’s solution. 340 nm to 380 nm ratio was acquired using MetaFluor software. EC cells were identified by GFP expression and responses were normalized to increased fluorescence ratio elicited by high extracellular K+ (K+, 140 mM) at the end of the experiment. In most experiments, only one EC cell was identified in the field of view, thus we quantified data from single cells. In somewhat rare cases when two EC cells were observed in the same field of view, responses were averaged. Dorsal root ganglion neurons were cultured for 24 hr, incubated with 2.5 μM Fura2-AM and 0.02% (v/v) pluronic acid for 30 min at room temperature in modified Ringer’s solution containing (mM): 145 NaCl, 5 KCl, 1.25 CaCl 2, 1 MgCl 2, 10 glucose, 10 HEPES. After a brief wash, coverslips were transferred to the recording chamber and Ca2+ responses were measured at room temperature. Colonic DRG neurons were identified by the presence of the 488 tracer and viability was verified by responses to 25 mM KCl. All pharmacological agents were delivered by local perfusion with exception of 1 μM U73122, 100 μM gallein, 200 ng/ml cholera toxin, or 200 ng/ml pertussis toxin, 10 μM SQ22536, which were preincubated. Associated vehicle control experiments were performed. In experiments using HEK293, construct-expressing cells identified by GFP expression were quantified and responses were normalized to maximal responses elicited by 1 μM ionomycin at the end of the experiment. Concentrations and abbreviations of molecules used in Ca2+ imaging screening (in μM): 1 Capsaicin, 500 allyl isothiocyanate (AITC), 50 1-(m-chlorophenyl)-biguanide (mCPBG), 1 icilin, 200 N-butyryl-L-Homoserine lactone (C4-HSL), 200 N-hexanoyl-L-Homoserine lactone (C6-HSL), 200 N-3-oxo-dodecanoyl-L-Homoserine lactone (3OC12-HSL), 1 or 10 N-Formylmethionine-leucyl-phenylalanine (fMFL), 50 μg/ml lipopolysaccharide (LPS) from E. Coli, 500 indole, 500 sodium propionate, 500 sodium acetate, 500 sodium butyrate, 500 isobutyrate, 500 isovalerate, 500 sodium deoxycholate, 1 substance P, 100 histamine, 1000 glutamate, 100 tryptamine, 100 serotonin, 100 glycine, 100 gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), 100 dopamine, 100 epinephrine, 100 norepinephrine. Unless stated otherwise, concentrations of other pharmacological agents (in μM): 0.5 tetrodotoxin (TTX), 10 nifedipine, 0.3 ω-agatoxin IVA, 0.3 ω-conotoxin, 5 mibefradil, 1 epinephrine, 1 norepinephrine, 5 yohimbine, 10 isoproterenol, 5 prazosin, 5 clonidine, 5 propranolol, 10 phenylephrine, 5 U73122, 100 gallein, 200ng/ml pertussis toxin (PTX), 200ng/ml cholera toxin (CTX), 50 2-aminoethoxydiphenyl borate (2-APB), 10 ML204. Most drugs were from Tocris, HSLs and 4-hydroxynonenal were from Cayman Chemical, volatile fatty acids were from Sigma.
Transcriptome sequencing and analysis Intestinal epithelial cells from organoids were dissociated and immediately sorted by fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) by the Laboratory for Cell Analysis at UCSF. ∼1% of total epithelial cells were GFP+ and collected. The remaining GFP- cells were retained for comparison. RNA from GFP+ and GFP- subgroups was then extracted and prepared for cDNA library generations using the SMARTer Ultra Low Input RNA kit followed by the Low Input Library Prep Kit (version 2, Clontech Laboratories, Inc.). cDNA quality was assessed via bioanalyzer using the High Sensitivity DNA kit (Agilent Technologies), and high quality samples were preserved for sequencing. PolyA cDNA libraries were sequenced on the Illumina Hi-Seq 4000 platform (QB3 Vincent J. Coates Genomic Sequencing Library), generating 150 bp paired-end reads. More than 100M reads were obtained. The quality of raw sequence reads was analyzed via FASTQC. Adapters were trimmed using Scythe, and sequence read ends were trimmed using Sickle. Reads were then aligned to the annotated mouse reference genome (mm10) using TopHat2 (version 0.7). Transcripts were assembled and relative abundance was estimated using Cufflinks and Cuffdiff tools. Gene ontology-based (GO) analyses were carried out using DAVID (version 6.8) to categorize the top ∼1000 transcripts annotated with ENSEMBL gene IDs that showed the greatest fold change between GFP+ and GFP- samples. The “biological process” set of GO terms was used in functional annotation of the enriched transcripts in the GFP+ sample over the GFP- sample, which was set as the background.
Histology Ishii et al., 2004 Ishii T.
Omura M.
Mombaerts P. Protocols for two- and three-color fluorescent RNA in situ hybridization of the main and accessory olfactory epithelia in mouse. Immunofluorescence (IF) was performed using 5 μm cryosections. Blocking was performed with 10% normal serum corresponding to secondary antibody species in 0.1% Triton-X and PBS at room temperature for 60 min. Primary antibodies were incubated overnight at 4°C at the indicated dilutions. Antibodies used were against ChgA (1:200, Santa Cruz), serotonin (1:10,000, Immunostar), Adrα2A (1:200, Affinity Bioreagents), tyrosine hydroxylase (1:500, Millipore), Synapsin (1:500, from R. Edwards), PSD-95 (1:200, Neuromab), Lysozyme (1:200, Dako), GLP-1 (1:200, Abcam), Substance P (1:1000, Penninsula). Alexa Fluor-conjugated secondary antibodies were used at 1:300-1000 (Millipore). In situ hybridization histochemistry was performed using digoxigenin- and fluorescein-labeled cRNA for mouse TRPC4 or Olfr558. Probes were generated by T7/T3 in vitro transcription reactions using a 500-nucleotide fragment of TRPC4 (nucleotides 1553 to 2053), and a 500-nucleotide fragment of Olfr558 cDNA (nucleotides 1000 to 1500). Hybridization was developed using anti-digoxigenin and anti-fluorescein Fab fragments, followed by incubation with FastRed and streptavidin-conjugated Dylight 488 according to published methods (). Epifluorescence imaging was performed on an Olympus IX51 microscope equipped with a DP71 imager and Nikon Eclipse Ti with a DS-Qi2 imager. Confocal imaging was performed on Nikon Ti microscope with Yokogawa CSU-22 spinning disk. Images were assembled in Photoshop and ImageJ. Surface rendering was performed using UCSF Chimera.Economic growth over the past six years hardly made a dent in poverty incidence in the Philippines, as the percentage of Filipinos living below the poverty line remained practically the same between 2006 and 2012, official statistics showed.
The poverty incidence stood at 27.9 percent in the first semester of 2012—“practically unchanged” from the same period in 2009 (28.6 percent) and in 2006 (28.8 percent), the National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB) reported Tuesday.
ADVERTISEMENT
Unlike in previous poverty reports, the NSCB did not indicate the number of families and people who fell below the poverty line.
Although the poverty incidence was practically unchanged in the past six years, the number of poor people was expected to be higher in 2012 because of the country’s growing population.
Norio Usui, senior country economist for the Asian Development Bank, said the government must solve the problem of jobless growth if it hoped to reduce poverty.
“I am not surprised at all. The benefits of strong economic growth have not spilled over to the people because they still cannot find a job,” he told Agence France-Presse in a telephone interview.
He said the Philippines’ economic model depended on consumption, strong remittances from its large overseas workforce and the business process outsourcing industry, which employs college graduates.
However, the country, with its weak industrial base, has stood out in the region, he added.
“Why do you need a strong industrial base? To give jobs not only to the highly educated college graduates, but also to high school graduates,” Usui said.
The National Economic and Development Authority (Neda) said it hoped to see improved results given new investments in infrastructure, agriculture and manufacturing.
“Although this first-semester result on poverty incidence is not the dramatic result we wanted, we remain hopeful that, with the timely measures we are now implementing, the next rounds of poverty statistics will give much better results,” Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Arsenio M. Balisacan said at a briefing.
ADVERTISEMENT
Create quality jobs
Balisacan said increased infrastructure and business investments since the latter part of 2012 should help create quality jobs that would enable the poor to improve their lives.
The country, which has a population of about 97 million, posted 6.6 percent economic growth last year, and this year obtained its first-ever investment-grade rating from Fitch Ratings.
However, the January 2013 jobless rate stood at 7.1 percent, with a further 20.9 percent underemployed, or working fewer than 40 hours a week.
About 41.8 percent of the underemployed are in the farming sector.
Joel Rocamora, head of the National Anti-Poverty Commission, said about three out of every five Filipinos were highly dependent on agriculture. “As such, increasing incomes in agriculture will make a big dent in addressing the poverty problem,” he said.
Falling commodity prices
Balisacan said underemployment in rural areas, security problems in provinces facing insurgencies and warlords, and the falling price of a number of commodities such as sugar were mainly to blame.
“If the problem of visible underemployment in agriculture is addressed, then incomes of farmers would increase, poverty incidence would decrease, and we would not be compromising food security,” Balisacan said in a statement.
He expressed hopes that the next round of data would reflect the government’s massive investment in human development and poverty reduction.
‘Extreme poverty’
NSCB Secretary General Jose Ramon Albert said at the briefing that during the first semester of 2012, a Filipino family of five needed P5,458 to meet basic food needs every month. Families earning that amount were considered to be living in “extreme poverty.”
The proportion of extreme poverty among families was largely unchanged from 10.8 percent in 2006, 10.0 percent in 2009 and 10.0 percent in 2012.
A family of five family would need P7,821 to meet both food and non-food needs (such as clothing, housing, transportation, health, education) every month. Family earning that much is considered to be living in “poverty.”
The NSCB said P79.7 billion was needed to eradicate poverty for the first semester of last year. By contrast, the government 2012 budget for its conditional cash transfer program was P39.4 billion.
Poorest provinces
Neda said that while there was a slight difference in poverty incidence between the first semester of 2009 and 2012, the results were not uniform across regions and provinces.
The NSCB identified the five poorest provinces as Lanao del Sur (68.9 percent poverty incidence), Apayao (59.8 percent), Eastern Samar (59.4 percent), Maguindanao (57.8 percent) and Zamboanga del Norte (50.3 percent).
By region, the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (46.9 percent), Region 12 (37.5 percent), Region 8 (37.2), Region 9 (36.9 percent), and Region 10 (35.6 percent) had the highest family poverty incidence.
“This suggests that the strong economic growth in 2010 and 2012 were not enough to extricate a lot of people from the poverty trap,” Dr. Benjamin Diokno of the University of the Philippines School of Economics said via e-mail.—With a report from AFP
Read Next
LATEST STORIES
MOST READWatch for your turn and limit your use to one hour per station, including clean up.
The Red, Black and Blue Ball is stricter than most Fourth of July weekend parties. (Photo: Getty Images/iStockphoto )
There'll be thousands of parties this weekend celebrating freedom. Most will involve fireworks.
But one soiree will take a different tack: The Red, Black and Blue Ball will celebrate bondage, even servitude (and presumably will involve fireworks of a different nature).
The private event, Saturday at a Westside motel, is hosted by a group of S&M enthusiasts called IMAS, which stands for "Indiana Masters and Slaves/submissives/switches."
It has more rules than your average Fourth-of-July party. Here are some of the do's and don'ts, taken from the event website, www.imas-bdsm.com:
Dungeon Rules and Etiquette
• No bare behinds on the chairs. Please bring a towel to put a barrier between yourself and the seat.
• Be consensual. NO means NO, and just because it is exposed doesn't mean you can touch it.
• "RED" and "SAFE WORD" will be recognized by all party guests. When a gag or hood is used, a safe signal MUST be arranged with the DMs (Dungeon Monitors) on duty.
• Sign up sheets are provided for the dungeon stations. Watch for your turn and limit your use to 1 hour per station including clean up.
• Participants use any of the equipment provided at their own risk.
NEWSLETTERS Get the The IndianapoLIST newsletter delivered to your inbox We're sorry, but something went wrong Your Indy-area things to do source. Sorting out the best concerts, dining spots, art shows and more. Please try again soon, or contact Customer Service at 1-888-357-7827. Delivery: Wed Invalid email address Thank you! You're almost signed up for The IndianapoLIST Keep an eye out for an email to confirm your newsletter registration. More newsletters
WHIPS AND CHAINS: Former dominatrix tells all
Respect any scenes in progress:
• Do not touch another person or enter a scene in progress without permission.
• Avoid loud conversation in the vicinity of scenes in progress.
• Do not carry on conversations or ask questions of people involved in scenes. Most will be happy to discuss the scene after an appropriate interval, but be sure to allow them time for rest and recovery.
• Report any equipment problems. We need your help in keeping the Dungeon and Party Areas Safe!
• No fire-related play of any kind is permitted in the Dungeon area.
• No irritants such as pepper spray and/or mace.
• Don't take risks. Play only to the level and experience of yourself and your partner.
Contact Star reporter Will Higgins at (317) 444-6043. Follow him on Twitter @WillRHiggins.
Read or Share this story: http://indy.st/1lWLx41Guten tag, players. Throughout the years of World War II gaming, countless games have been made where the player is on the side of the Allies, a few games have been made on side of the Wehrmacht, but hardly any mods, and practically no games have been made where the player joins the side of the Waffen-SS. Considered by some historians to be among the finest soldiers of the 20th Century, this mod will change your perspective of the war, and even open up a window of alternate history as you step into the boots of the soldiers of a variety of SS panzer divisions.
The goal of this mod is to almost completely "Germanize" the game, making it close to a total conversion (new maps may or may not be included, I am a rather bad map-maker), regardless, the experience of the Single-player campaign will be completely changed, and nearly every detail of the game is focused on from new language and sound files, to correct flags and bunker decals. Unlike other German mods (what few there are), the main focus will be on the player immersion, and, to a degree, realism.
Anyone who helps with voice acting, skinning, modeling, or map scripting will get early access to a beta, and possibly more depending on how outstanding their work is.
Features include:
-Switched sides from Allies to German Waffen SS
-New uniforms, vehicles, and weapons
-High quality weapon and uniform skins
-Interesting characters.
-New music, menu theme, and much more related to menu and mission select.
-A new background story for each SS soldier the player plays as, detailing an alternate history where the Axis powers are victorious in World War II.
-A tad bit of realism
-English language spoken with a German accent for friendly "hero" characters and friendly SS soldiers (I will admit that I have somewhat limited resources as a non-commercial modder, and thus cannot hire professional actors, anyone willing to volunteer their voice would be a great help, otherwise I will have to find a work-around some how.) Also, I might go simply with German, we'll see how things work out.
-Completely changed single-player campaign
-New load screens
-New AI
-New campaign videos and slides? (Seeing what I can do with that)
-Considering adding new maps.
-I might add new features to multiplayer, but in my opinion, multiplayer usually doesn't need a whole lot of work since Cod2 multiplayer is essentially dead.
-Real-life, historical characters (such as famous Waffen-SS generals) will both be mentioned and even make an appearance in the game.
-A slightly more gritty and grim game feeling.
-As few bugs as possible.
-More details and features will be showcased and added later as development continues.
Credits: DarknessImmortal669: Mod idea, research, script compiling, arms and sleeves, xmodel modifications, all localizedstrings, subtitles, menu music, theme, mission select themes, and side flags, storyline, main characters, weapon compiling, loadouts, bunker decals and flags, mod page, ranking and naming system, new quotes, most weapon stats, vehicle names, objectives, vehicle reskins, aesthetics, voice of the new "Letlev".
Back2fronts/WCP mod team: Mp40, P38, Panzer IV, bazooka, panzerfaust, grenades, British 6-pounder, helpful tips,
Mg42s, Fallschrimjaegers, FG42, StG.44, SS caps, T-34, Gewehr 41, MG34 and for being great modding teams with ambitious goals.
Slepnir's Wehrmacht mod and old Axis Player mod: Base aitype/character conversion, major character names (such as Cpt. Price), some weapon stats.
German Fronts Mod team: GMC truck
Uniforms/skins: Rapsodia, Ferry, and various other Filefront weapon and uniform skinners.
Iron Cross compass: PlusIce and Buckdich.
Maxim Machine Gun: Blacksmith mod.
Gimp 2.8: For making skinning and jpg to dds conversion loads easier
Infinity Ward/Activision: For making Call of Duty 2 a very moddable game, and for making a stable, and fun World War 2 game (but make some World War II games where we are the Axis for once!)
Real world SS, and Waffen SS, and Wehrmacht: Main menu song, in-game songs ideas, inspiration, historical reference, ranks, and more.
---Voice Acting Credits---
SS-Hstuf. Falkenburg: Vitrolic1
Schwarz: DarknessImmortal669
Kohl: Nieznanywydawca
9th SS Hohenstauffen commander: Wesp5
(More credits will be added as needed as development continues, and if you see any material in my screens which might have been made by you, tell me as soon as possible so I can update the credits.)
Note: This mod in no way advocates neo-Nazism, we all have our own political ideas, and they should not at all be brought to the forefront to this mod page, should anyone decide to complain about how offensive the mod's idea and theme is to them, I suggest to them that they forget this mod. Trolling and hateful comments directed toward politics will be promptly deleted.Expand A man is arrested by German federal police before a rally in the town of Remagen on November 19, 2011. © Reuters
(Berlin) – German law enforcement authorities need better training to effectively identify, investigate, and prosecute racist, homophobic, and other hate violence, Human Rights Watch said in a briefing paper released today.
The 21-page briefing paper analyzes the criminal justice system’s response to hate violence in six German states. It concludes that despite improvements in the criminal justice system response to hate violence in recent years, there are gaps, with attacks sometimes not investigated adequately or prosecuted as though they were ordinary crimes. Germany’s approach to hate violence is under the spotlight following recent revelations about the failure of German authorities to adequately investigate a neo-Nazi gang implicated in the murder of nine migrants and a policewoman during a 13-year crime spree.
“These shocking murders underscore the need for a more holistic approach to tackling hate violence in Germany, especially when suspects have no apparent ties to organized far-right groups,” said Benjamin Ward, deputy Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “Better police training to identify and pursue these kinds of crimes is crucial.”
Gautier, a migrant from Cameroon who has lived in Berlin for eight years, described the police response after a 2009 attack by three men that left him hospitalized for five days: “The first statement of the investigator was, ‘Why did you not call the ambulance, but the police?’ The second question was to ask for my ID. Third if they should call an ambulance....Only later they asked me a brief question on what happened.” Although two of the three men were arrested at the scene, the case was later dropped because the suspects could not be located after their release.
According to the German federal government, 467 violent hate crimes were recorded by police during 2010. But unofficial figures from victim support organizations suggest the real number is higher. Victims’ support groups in eastern states and Berlin counted 704 such offenses during 2010, and the lack of developed victim support groups in western Germany may mask the scale of the problem there.
The Human Rights Watch briefing paper is based on field research in the six states in western and eastern Germany between December 2009 and September 2010, including interviews with victims of violence, victim support groups, criminal lawyers, and federal and state government officials, police, and prosecutors. The states are: Berlin, Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia.
The briefing paper identifies a series of broad concerns with the criminal justice system response to hate violence, as well as positive examples. Not all of the concerns applied to each state, but they merit common attention from state and federal authorities, Human Rights Watch said.
One concern is that Germany treats hate crimes as a subcategory of politically motivated violence. In practice, this means that in cases in which a suspected attacker has no connection to organized right-wing groups or obvious ideological motivation, the attack risks being treated by the police as an ordinary crime.
Another is that, based on examples cited by victims and victim support groups, police may halt racist attacks but fail to take investigative steps, discouraging victims from filing complaints or focusing questions on the victims rather than the alleged attackers. Some minorities remain reluctant to report attacks to the police, and victim support groups in some states feel that police do not cooperate sufficiently with them.
An asylum seeker from Central African Republic, attacked by a group outside a nightclub in Burg, a city in Saxony-Anhalt, in 2008 together with a Saudi asylum seeker, said police had driven the two victims away from the scene but had not questioned the alleged suspects or witnesses at the time. When he and the other victim complained, they were told to be quiet.
The only person prosecuted for the attack was acquitted in March 2010 for lack of evidence.
Prosecutors and judges do not always take evidence of hate motivation into account when prosecuting and sentencing racist and other hate violence, despite having powers to do so, Human Rights Watch found. Victim support groups and lawyers said it was often left to them to raise the hate dimension of a crime.
The briefing paper contains recommendations to the authorities to improve the situation including:Jennifer Love Hewitt wants to ensure her best assets are protected. While promoting the second season of Lifetime's The Client List (premiering March 10), the 34-year-old actress admitted to USA Today that she would consider getting her breasts insured.
"I need, like, an insurance invitation. If somebody was like, 'Hey, you know what? We would like to insure your boobs for $2.5 million dollars,' I'd be like, 'Do it. Love it! Why not?'" laughed Hewitt, who wears a size 36C bra. She then pointed to her chest and joked, "These things right here are worth $5 million!"
PHOTOS: Jennifer Love Hewitt's cleavage-baring style
Hewitt shows off her famous assets regularly on the nighttime soap, much to the delight of her 86-year-old grandmother. "My grandmother loves to call me the TV ho," the actress giggled. "She thinks it's hysterical... I get to rub abs for a living. I never thought that that would be my job, so that's exciting. It's a hard job, but somebody has to do it, and I'm glad it's me!"
PHOTOS: Jennifer Love Hewitt's body through the years
Brian Hallisay's girlfriend and costar added that while she's "sort of used" to wearing skimpy ensembles on camera, the series' male guest stars can be a bit more vain. "I'll be sitting there eating a sandwich and the guys will be doing jumping jacks or push-ups to work out their arms," Hewitt revealed.
VIDEO: Jennifer Love Hewitt opens up about playing a prostitute
Compared her character Riley Parks, Hewitt said her bedroom attire is far less provocative. "I've cut down on the lingerie in my own life because I wear it all the time. So, it's like I don't want to go home and even think about another cute bra and panties set. I'm over it!" she told USA Today. "I'm a soft, cozy T-shirt or tank top and big baggy sweatpants girl."
Sign up now for the Us Weekly newsletter to get breaking celebrity news, hot pics and more delivered straight to your inbox!
Want stories like these delivered straight to your phone? Download the Us Weekly iPhone app now!Liverpool's Daniel Sturridge: Brendan Rodgers is very demanding BelfastTelegraph.co.uk Rarely does a game go by without one of Liverpool's strike force, Daniel Sturridge, Luis Suarez or Raheem Sterling, turning to berate another for shooting instead of passing. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/sport/football/premier-league/liverpool/liverpools-daniel-sturridge-brendan-rodgers-is-very-demanding-30095617.html https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/business/news/article29863177.ece/26863/AUTOCROP/h342/Daniel%20Sturridge.JPG
Email
Rarely does a game go by without one of Liverpool's strike force, Daniel Sturridge, Luis Suarez or Raheem Sterling, turning to berate another for shooting instead of passing.
It is not, however, like the 70s, when Tommy Smith and Emlyn Hughes combined effectively in central defence, but detested each other off the field. The Liverpool forwards get on well, until one of them is spurned in front of goal.
“I’m demanding. Stevie’s demanding. Everyone’s demanding,” said Sturridge. “It’s not just Luis that’s demanding of the players. The manager’s very demanding of the players. It’s important that everyone’s demanding if you want to be successful and everyone’s pushing each other to get the best out of each other. That’s what we all try to do.”
Manager Brendan Rodgers is perhaps the most demanding of all, even substituting Sturridge when he has appeared to be selfish in front of goal. The result is a team ethic that includes Sturridge and Suarez being prepared to play out wide for the good of the team with Rodgers increasingly playing 4-5-1 rather than 4-4-2 or 5-3-2.
“It is the manager's job,” said Sturridge. “It is his tactical nous and he gets it right. The times he has made the changes it has been perfect. Myself and Luis understand we have to do a job for the team - we both like to play centrally but a the same time we both understand the team is more important than us.
“We both do the job effortlessly, we don’t mind being out there - if we are out there, we are out there, simple as that. If I'm play central and Luis runs central I will go wide. We are just being fluid up front and it is not about someone being in a position, it is the same with Raheem, we all move about up front looking to make space for each other.
“Luis works tirelessly. I think we combine very well, he’s someone who wants to win, and I want to win, we both enjoy to score goals, both like to assist each other. I enjoy playing with him.”
With the pair scoring 42 goals between them, 18 from Sturridge, Liverpool go to Old Trafford on Sunday in the rare position of being favourites despite six successive defeats on the old enemy's turf. Since losing at Chelsea in December they have taken 23 of 27 points to move second in the table, 11 points clear of Manchester United.
Liverpool have scored 29 goals in those nine games, including 15 in the current run of four straight victories. Suddenly they are the most exciting team in the country. “I don’t think we really realise what we are achieving as a team,” said Sturridge. “To be honest with you we just go out there and we enjoy ourselves and that’s the most important thing. I think I play with a smile on my face. Luis does the same, Raheem, and the list goes on throughout the team. I wouldn’t say we’re doing anything that we’re not doing on the training field.
“We just go out there and do exactly what the manager wants us to do. We work hard as a team, and the team ethic’s the most important thing. People talk about our attacking but it’s important that we also look at the defence and how well they’ve done.”
Sturridge was talking at a Coca-Cola promotional event centred on this summer's World Cup, but inevitably Sunday's more immediate task loomed large. He marked his 24th birthday by scoring the only goal when United visited Anfield in September, a smartly-taken close-range header. Doing the double over the champions would seem to underline Liverpool's title credentials, even given United's poor season, but Sturridge is not getting carried away.
“It is a great game to play in for the players, and a great occasion for the fans, but regardless of what happens there will still be another nine games to play. We have got Chelsea and Manchester City at home, we have got Tottenham at home. We have got other big games. Of course we want to do as well as we can in every single game and get maximum points if we can, but it is important we keep playing the football we do.
“Winning at the weekend is not going to change anything in regards to the title race, we are four points behind Chelsea - and Manchester City if they win their games in hand. Those teams are the favourites for me.”
Such caution is wise. The last time in Liverpool won at Old Trafford was in March 2009 when Fernando Torres’ pace destroyed Nemanja Vidic. The Serb was dismissed as Liverpool won 4-1 to spark dreams of the title. Manchester United held on though and, in the seasons that followed, Liverpool fell away. Whatever happens in the next two months this time the Liverpool revival has a far greater air of permanency.
Belfast Telegraph DigitalPresident Trump‘s Holocaust remembrance remarks are very similar to the Holocaust Museum Website’s “Introduction to the Holocaust” page.
A White House release on Monday of the script reads, “the Holocaust was the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and attempted annihilation of European Jewry by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.”
The museum’s introduction reads, “The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.”
Whether it’s plagiarism or not, Trump is set to deliver the keynote address on Tuesday at the annual Yom Hashoah remembrance ceremony as part of the Holocaust Memorial Museum’s tradition. Ever since the museum opened in 1993, every American president has participated in the ceremony.
Just this weekend, Trump addressed anti-Semitism with the World Jewish Congress through a video conference.
“We must defeat terrorism, and we must not ignore the threats of a regime that talks openly of Israel’s destruction,” Trump said.
H/T the HillLast week, Jenna Coleman announced that she is leaving Doctor Who, BBC America’s long-running time travel show on which she plays monster-battling schoolteacher Clara Oswald. So, why, exactly, is the British actress leaving behind Peter Capaldi’s Doctor — and the TARDIS — now? “Conversations have been going on for a while in terms of where is the best place, how can we tell the best story, time-wise,” Coleman tells EW. “We decided last year, it had only been one season with Peter, and there was a lot more to do. So that’s what it was, really. It was just about telling the best story we could. So, I’m hoping that’s what was done. I’m really pleased with it. I think it’s really cool. People will have to wait and see what happens!”
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: I believe you thought about leaving at the end of last season, and then maybe after the special Christmas episode. This time around, did Steven Moffat [Doctor Who executive producer] say, “Are you really really, really sure?”
JENNA COLEMAN: My contract was up at the end of last season, so that initiated conversations of, “Okay, when and how?” I don’t know how a story was leaked that I was leaving — it was because the contract was up. There were just ongoing discussions about how to end Clara’s story, as it were, in the TARDIS, and this is where it ended up.
Can you say anything specific about when we will see your character leave the show, assuming we haven’t already [at the end of last week’s episode Clara was seemingly exterminated by those dreaded, armor-clad mutants, the Daleks]?
I can’t. But I’m hoping it will be a surprise, and I’m hoping it will stay a surprise. Yeah. [Laughs]
What kind of response have you received since making the announcement you were leaving?
People tweet at you but it’s been really warm and lovely, in fact. I have to say, it’s kind of a relief because, having known for such a long time, it’s really nice to be able to say it.
What was it like shooting your last day on Doctor Who?
It did not feel real at all. I mean, it’s become more my home than my home actually is. It was just really weird. But we film out of sequence as well so, my last part with Peter, I couldn’t quite look at him because it wasn’t supposed to be a sad part. It’s hard to go into detail without telling you anything, but I was really overwhelmed. I recognize that it’s a special part of my life. The storytelling is so dynamic, and big, and whimsical, and magical. You feel like you’re in a fairy tale and it’s really hard to walk away from that. It’s a lot more than just a job — the friendships I have with the crew and Peter, it’s very hard to say goodbye to it.
I know you keep in contact with Matt Smith, who played the Doctor before Capaldi. Have you spoken with him about life after Who?
Yeah, I’ve spoken to Matt a lot. I speak to Matt all the time anyway. He’s been around and he had |
ster, Scott Serio, and Gregory MacGillivary to Lee's 1998 Nissan Sentra (page 59). According to Forrester, the windshield wiper lever was "in a downward angle with a hole approximately that size in the side of the steering column." (page 60). A member of the Crime Lab comes to take still photographs of the windshield wiper lever. (page 203). -March 16, 1999: Detectives Forrester, MacGillivary, and Ritz decide that you can't really see that the windshield wiper lever is broken from looking at the still photographs; they just show "that it's hanging down in a downward angle." (page 64). Lee's Sentra is now stored at a body shop, which Forrester believes is owned by Lee's uncle. (page 64). Detective Forrester proceeds with Detective Kirk Hastings to the body shop (page 64). At the body shop, Detective Forrester films while Detective Hastings repeatedly lifts up the windshield wiper lever. (page 65). According to Detective Forrester, whenever Detective Hastings lets go of the lever, "it would fall." (page 66). -April 12, 1999: Detective MacGillivary sends a request, asking that the Trace Analysis Unit perform a "Fracture Examination" on the windshield wiper lever. -April 1999: Criminalist Daniel Van Gelder examines the windshield wiper lever "for the presence of broken edges under stereoscopic examination." -April 29, 1999: Van Gelder writes a "Laboratory Report" (Download Windshield Wiper Analysis) concluding that "[n]o broken edges were found on the windshield wiper lever." -December 10, 1999: At the first trial, Detective Forrester testifies about the windshield wiper lever, and the still photographs and video are admitted as exhibits. Forrester states that the lever is on the right side of the steering column. (pages 58-66). -December 14, 1999: At the first trial, Jay testifies that Adnan told him Lee "kicked off the signal on the driver's side of the car" while he was strangling her (page 198). -January 27, 2000: At the second trial, Detective Forrester testifies about the windshield wiper lever, and the still photographs and video are admitted as exhibits. (pages 200-206). Detective Forrester initially testifies that "the selector switch, if you sat on the driver's seat which would be on the left side of the steering column was broken." (page 203). While the video is being shown, Detective Forrester narrates: "That's Detective Hastings showing the lever which I believe was for the windshield wiper was broken." (page 205). -February 4, 2000: At the second trial, Jay testifies that Adnan told him Lee "kicked off the turn signal in the car" while he was strangling her. (page 142). -February 25, 2000: In her closing argument, Prosecutor Kathleen Murphy states that "[t]he Defendant told Jay Wilds as she struggled as she tried to get away, she kicked the wiper lever. You saw a video showing this wiper lever, how it dangled from the steering column in the car. That was consistent with what Jay Wilds said. In order for Hey Lee to kick this wiper lever, we know she was in that passenger seat." (page 50).
And there you have it. The prosecution had physical evidence corroborating Jay's claim that Adnan strangled Lee in her Sentra. Moreover, the windshield wiper lever being broken seems (only) consistent with someone being in the driver's seat and strangling Lee, who kicked back at her assailant from the passenger seat. Finally, as implausible as it might seem that Lee was in the passenger seat of her own Sentra, it possibly seems even more implausible that Lee would be in the passenger seat with anyone other than Adnan (except possibly her new boyfriend) in the driver's seat. There's just one problem: the windshield wiper lever wasn't broken.
As noted above, Criminalist Daniel Van Gelder examined the windshield wiper lever "for the presence of broken edges under stereoscopic examination." "Stereoscopic examination" means that Van Gelder looked at the lever under a microscope. From the Deposition of Lynda Johnson in Bonn v. L-3 Communications Vertex, LLC, 2010 WL 9479001 (N.D.Fla. 2010):
Q. Okay. Cradle shape, that's a good term. Now, in the next sentence you say that stereoscopic examination, and that's the microscope you were telling us about, right?
A. That's correct. Q. Stereoscopic examination at 50x magnification. Does that mean 50 times what you would see with your naked eye? A. That's correct.
Van Gelder's Laboratory Report doesn't tell us the magnification he used, but you get the idea: If he used 50x magnification, he could see "50 times what you could see with your naked eye." If he used 25x magnification, he could see 25 times what you could see with your naked eye. And what did Van Gelder see? Nothing.
As Van Gelder's Report notes, he did a "Fracture Examination" and was looking for "broken edges." This process is broken down pretty well in the testimony of forensic scientist Clyde Lideick in Commonwealth v. Woosnam, 2001 WL 36043981 (Pa.Com.Pl. 2001):
Q. And what is fracture edge analysis? A. Fracture edge analysis is a type of analysis that we do. When two things break, they leave a broken edge, and we compare those broken edges. We compare the two things that are, that were broken with respect to class characteristics, which are the characteristics that are given to the object by the manufacturer, such as color, thickness, general shape, those kinds of things. We also do analysis for what are called accidental characteristics, which are the characteristics that are a result of the break itself or by other environmental effects, such as scrapes across an object. If a piece of wood is scraped across the entire length of it and then it breaks and you put that back together, you could see again the scratch that is all the way across.... Q. And, specifically in your report, on item number 7, could you tell us what you did with regards to analyzing these pieces of plastic? A. The first analysis that one does on samples like this is microscopic analysis, and you look for general shape, color, thickness. And then you try to see if the two samples can be put together along the fracture edge. In a case where the fracture edge matches, one compares the class characteristics of the plastic as well as the accidental characteristics of the breaking, the broken edge. Q. And, specifically in this case, would you take a moment here and look at first of all, C-7, Mr. Lideick? A. Okay. C-7 consists of four pieces of plastic that I analyzed in this case, and they are marked with the case number, my initials and the item number. Q. And also C-10, which has already been admitted into evidence, as well? A. C-10 is also pieces of plastic that I analyzed in this case, and they are also marked with the case number and my initials and the item numbers. Q. Would you take a look at C-11 and take that out of there? You can leave it out once you get it out. A. This is also one of the items that I analyzed in this case. Q. Mr. Lideick, with regards to C-10, the small plastic pieces recovered from the vehicle; C-11, the windshield wiper; and C-7, which were the pieces of black plastic found at the scene of this incident, what was your analysis of those three items, Mr. Lideick? A. The pieces of plastic in Exhibit C-7, one of the pieces of plastic shared five class characteristics and 85 accidental characteristics with the plastic on the windshield wiper assembly. Q. So on C-7, the smaller plastic pieces, you found those to match the windshield wiper? A. One of the items, yes, ma'am. Q. And, again, please describe the difference between those class and accidental characteristics? A. Class characteristics are characteristics that we refer to as a characteristic in this case a plastic that is built into the plastic by the manufacturer, such as color, general shape and thickness. Accidental characteristics, are characteristics that can be referred to as characteristics of the item by environmental effects, such as scratches and breaking. When something breaks along an edge it has changes in direction, and on the thick part of it, the plastic for instance, it has many different shapes in it that are referred to as hackle marks. And those things can all be observed and count as accidental characteristics. Q. How significant is the number 85 accidental characteristics? A. That's quite a bit. Q. And when you say quite a bit, how many accidental characteristics would it take for you to say for something to match on another piece? A. A bare minimum I would say most people would think of as three. Q. Mr. Lideick, with regard to the items that share a common fracture edge, did you find any instances of that in this case? A. Yes, ma'am. Q. And where did you find those? A. One of the plastic items in Exhibit C-7 had a common fracture edge with the plastic portion of the windshield wiper in C-11, Exhibit C-11. Q. And when something has a common fracture edge, what does that mean? A. It means that they were once together and they were broken. We could have a number of the same kind of items and break it, each one of them, and each one of them will break differently. And each one of them will have obviously different accidental characteristics in them. Q. And did you find in this case anything with regards to the plastic pieces that you analyzed, anything to have more than 85 accidental characteristics? A. One of the items in Exhibit C-7 was found to match a piece of black plastic in Exhibit C-10 with respect to four class characteristics and 105 accidental characteristics; and one of the items in Exhibit C-7 was found to match one of the pieces in Exhibit C-10 with respect to four class characteristics and 40 accidental characteristics. Q. And, again, those numbers, how significant are those numbers? A. They indicate to me that those two pieces were once one and they were broken.
Conversely, after conducting a stereoscopic examination of the windshield wiper lever from Lee's Sentra, Van Gelder was able to conclude that "[n]o broken edges were found on the windshield wiper lever." In other words, after looking at the lever under a microscope, Van Gelder was unable to detect even one broken edge which would indicate that the lever had even partially broken off from the steering column based upon a kick or some other type of physical force.
This is huge, and...it wasn't mentioned at all at trial. That means one of two things happened: (1) the prosecution didn't disclose the Laboratory Report to the defense; or (2) the prosecution did disclose the Report to the defense, but defense counsel failed to mention it at trial. If it's (1), this was pretty clearly a Brady violation because the report was material exculpatory evidence. If it's (2), this was quite possibly ineffective assistance of counsel sufficient to satisfy the two-pronged test from Strickland v. Washington. [Update: I've been informed that this Report was disclosed to the defense, meaning that this was another error by defense counsel in not following up on the report or mentioning it at trial.].
Why? Besides a bloody shirt (which has its own set of problems I will probably address in a future post), the only evidence that Lee was strangled in her Sentra was the allegedly broken windshield wiper lever. The "broken" lever also corroborated Jay's testimony regarding what Adnan told him about the murder. Together, this evidence made it look like Jay was telling the truth and that Lee could have been strangled while she was in the passenger seat.
Now, imagine if Van Gelder's Laboratory Report were admitted at trial. First, it would have been clear that the windshield wiper lever was not, in fact, broken.* This wouldn't be all that surprising because Detective Forrester himself admitted that the lever didn't look broken in the Crime Lab photos. The only thing ostensibly supporting the theory that the lever was "broken" was the video from the body shop, which probably should have been deemed inadmissible due to chain of custody issues (if defense counsel made an objection).**
Second, the jury would have been left to make one of two conclusions: (1) Adnan lied to Jay about Lee kicking the windshield wiper lever; or (2) Jay lied about Adnan claiming Lee kicked the windshield wiper lever. This seems like a pretty strange lie for Adnan to tell, meaning that the jury would have had reason to doubt both Jay and the prosecution's theory of how the murder was committed.
This doubt could have been compounded by the conflicting testimony regarding what exactly was "broken." Here's the manual for the 1999 Nissan Sentra.*** At the top of 2-2, there is a diagram of the instruments and controls. On the left of the steering column is the "[h]eadlight and turn signal switch/front foglight switch." On the right of the steering column is the "[w]indshield wiper/washer switch." As you can see from my timeline above, there are a lot of conflicting statements. Detective Forrester testified that the "broken" lever was on the right of the steering column at the first trial, but he testified that it was on the left of the steering column at the second trial. In his police interview, Jay said that Adnan told him Lee kicked and broke the windshield wiper wand (which is on the right) while he was strangling her, but he testified at the second trial that Adnan told him that Lee kicked off the turn signal (which is on the left).
I'm guessing that the photos and video showed that the "broken" lever was on the right of the steering column, which is why Murphy was able to make the statement she made during her closing argument. Then again, in this case, who knows?
_____________________________________
*I am, of course, not a Criminalist or automotive expert, so, if any reader has relevant expertise, I welcome a contrary opinion regarding how the lever could have been "broken" or at least "damaged" (causing it to "dangle") and yet not have any broken edges. For instance, at one point, Detective Forrester notes that the lever might just have been "punched in" as opposed to broken (page 205). The problem is that neither the photos nor the video seem to be currently available.
**I imagine that there were several different objections that defense counsel could have made to this video, but it is impossible to say without seeing the actual video.
***Lee had a 1998 Sentra, but I'm guessing the steering column in the 1999 Sentra was similar. If anyone can point me to the manual for the 1998 Sentra, I could remove all doubt. [Update: Here's the manual for the 1998 Sentra, which shows the same alignment at 2-2]
[Update: Here's a hyperlink showing the windshield wiper lever for a 1995-2001 Nissan Sentra. So, this is the lever which had no "broken edges."]
-CM
https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/evidenceprof/2015/02/d-2001-wl-36043981-broken-edges.htmlPress Release
June 9, 2016
United Egg Producers Announces Elimination of Chick Culling by 2020
The Humane League convinces America’s largest representative of egg producers to take a historic stance on ending the practice of shredding newborn male chicks
(Alpharetta, GA June 9, 2016) – Following exclusive conversations with The Humane League, United Egg Producers announced today that it will eliminate the culling of male chicks at egg laying hen hatcheries by 2020 or as soon as it is commercially available and economically feasible, replacing the practice with in-ovo egg sexing technology. United Egg Producers represents 95% of all eggs produced in the country, making today’s statement historic in its firm stance against the culling of newborn male chicks, which is currently standard practice in the egg industry.
“United Egg Producers is proud to have worked with The Humane League on this commitment to support the elimination of day old male chick culling after hatch for the laying industry,” said Chad Gregory, President and CEO of United Egg Producers. "We are aware that there are a number of international research initiatives underway in this area, and we encourage the development of an alternative with the goal of eliminating the culling of day old male chicks by 2020 or as soon as it is commercially available and economically feasible."
Currently in the egg industry, all female chicks that are hatched will go on to become layer hens, but the industry has no use for the male chicks. About half of all hatched chicks in egg production are culled because they will not produce eggs or efficiently grow as chickens reared for meat. It is an industry standard to throw these male chicks - while still alive and just hours old - into a high-speed industrial grinder, or by other means. Hundreds of millions of newborn male chicks are killed this way each year in the United States, which is the second largest egg producing country in the world.
To address this practice of culling day-old chicks, a new technology developed by German scientists determines the sex of each fertilized egg before the chick inside develops. The embryo-sexing technology, which should soon be available for commercial use in egg production, will enable the termination of all male-identified eggs from the hatchery, preventing them from ever being hatched or culled. This is both a more ethical and more sustainable process, which will remove tens of thousands of hens from factory farming as the male-identified eggs will be used for an alternative supply, like vaccinations or pet food. The German government recently made a similar commitment to put this technology to use within the next few years.
“United Egg Producer’s decision to end its support of culling baby male chicks is historic, as it will virtually eliminate this practice in the American egg industry,” said David Coman-Hidy, Executive Director of The Humane League. “We are proud to have played such a pivotal role in doing away with this barbaric convention and to help pave the way to a more humane future. It is clear that chick culling will soon be a thing of the past in the United States."
After driving progress in the cage-free egg movement by securing commitments to eliminate cages from the supply chains of over 150 companies, including Walmart, Kroger, Sodexo, ConAgra and Denny’s, The Humane League approached United Egg Producers earlier this year with a request to work on eliminating the practice of chick culling. Through exclusive conversations and strategizing, The Humane League and United Egg Producers determined a feasible timeline for the egg producers the cooperation represents to implement the new embryo-sexing technology as it becomes available for commercial use. In 2014, Unilever made a similar commitment to convert to this technology, but today’s announcement proves that this will soon become the norm for the entire egg industry. United Egg Producer’s decision to support the elimination of newborn male chick culling is a historic tipping point and will prevent the suffering of hundreds of millions of animals each year.Julie Douthit was devastated when her engagement ring slipped off her finger while on vacation in Hawaii.
She and Sam Simeon were newly engaged in November and were vacationing with Sam's family. The ring was "maybe just half a size" too big, Julie told the Anchorage Daily News, and slipped off when she was in the ocean.
The family spent an hour snorkeling and looking for the ring to no avail.
Sam's father, Jon Simeon, started reading into the situation. "Maybe this is not meant to be," he recalled, "maybe they are getting married too young."
Sam, 20, and Julie, 19, are high school sweethearts from Alaska. Sam is in the Navy and stationed in San Diego. The engagement ring was all they could afford: gold with two heart-shaped stones, one emerald and one topaz, with their names engraved alongside the phrase, "Our love grows stronger."
A week later, at the same beach where the ring had been lost, Jon Simeon came across an off-duty lifeguard, Jason Freitas. Freitas had a metal detector and the two got to talking about the ring. Freitas searched, again to no avail.
The young couple and their family eventually returned to Alaska, where Sam and Julie -- undaunted by the bad omen -- were married at the courthouse before Sam returned to his duty station. The two did not exchange rings.
"In my heart," Julie told to the Anchorage Daily News, "there is no way me and Sam aren't going to be together. I love that boy more than anything."
Back in Hawaii, Jason Freitas ran into Rick Pepperworth, another metal-detecting hobbyist, on the same beach. Pepperworth lives in Hawaii but was with his twin brother, who was visiting from Alaska.
Freitas mentioned the lost engagement ring story and the distraught family from Alaska. He described the ring for Pepperworth, who exclaimed, "I found that ring last Wednesday!"
The ring had been underwater and buried in about 10 inches of sand.
Freitas recalled that Jon Simeon was a State Trooper in Alaska. Pepperworth's twin brother knew another State Trooper in Alaska, and it wasn't long before the two were connected. When the twin returned to Alaska, he had the ring in tow.
Sam wanted to surprise his fiancée with the news so his parents wrapped it and put it under the Christmas tree.
"I opened it," Julie said, "and pulled it out, and the only thing I could say was, 'Oh my God.' What are the odds?"
Julie will be joining Sam in San Diego soon, and no one is doubting their happily-ever-after anymore.
"If they can find this wedding ring," Jon Simeon told the Anchorage Daily News. "Then this is meant to be. They are meant to be together forever."The unpredictable progress of Bitcoin hit another downward spiral as more crooked dealings were revealed.
Bitcoin hit a two-year high of around $775 just a few days ago and then plunged by 25% after a major exchange went offline after an attack by hackers.
Investor confidence was badly shaken when an estimated $50 million of the virtual currency was siphoned from platform Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO).
The DAO funds projects with Bitcoin.
The organisation has gone offline while software engineers identify and rectify security flaws in the system, which is not directly linked to the Bitcoin blockchain database.
Cyber attack on exchange
“The cyber-attack was identified and we had to stop trading temporarily,” said spokesman Vitalik Buterin.
Efforts are underway to try to recover investor funds from the hacker.
Several online Bitcoin repositories or exchanges have lost millions of dollars in funds either to hackers or internal frauds.
The ability of criminals to target Bitcoin despite blockchain security has seriously affected the value of the virtual currency.
Another trader, Bitfinex also stopped trading this week claiming ‘network instability’ was putting customer funds at risk.
Betfinex advertises itself as the ‘world’s largest and most advanced cryptocurrencies exchange’.
The company stopped trading at least twice this week, citing infrastructure issues as the problem and confirming no money was lost or at risk.
Security fears
Bitcoin is a virtual currency that only exists in electronic vaults on the internet. Sophisticated security provided by software called a blockchain protects money held by traders and investors.
Many Bitcoin users are concerned about the security of their holdings after several exchanges failed with the loss of millions of dollar’s worth of the currency.
The most significant was Japan’s Mt Gox exchange which went down in February 2014 blaming technical issues. It was later revealed that hackers had stolen Bitcoin worth millions, forcing the company into bankruptcy.
The Mt Gox experience is why so hacking incidents spook the Bitcoin community so much.
Bitcoin is not regulated by any central bank or government. The value is determined by demand and supply. In a few days, supply is expected to fall as the software puts a scheduled built-in brake on generating new Bitcoin. The reduction or ‘halving’ is expected to increase the value of the virtual currency.Women are significantly outnumbered in the creative departments of ad agencies. Yet women are frequently behind some of the most creative ideas of the year.
Business Insider’s list of the most creative women in advertising looks to recognise the most talented women in the industry.
In order to put this list together, we asked adbiz insiders to nominate the women they believed are the most creative in the business. To counterbalance self-serving nominations, we also asked each agency to nominate a female staffer from a competitor, someone they would love to work with in the future or just someone they admire in the industry.
From these nominations, paired with our own research, we selected 36 women. Factors we considered included recognition within the industry, seniority in their respective agencies, size of the shop, and of course, exciting creative work that’s garnered attention outside of the advertising world.
Our list is by no means complete. But it does feature the fiercest talents in the business.
Business Insider Emails & Alerts Site highlights each day to your inbox. Email Address Join
Follow Business Insider Australia on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.Possible Neolithic tattoo marks depicted on a Pre- Cucuteni culture clay figure from Romania, c. 4900–4750 BC
Tattooing has been practiced across the globe since at least Neolithic times, as evidenced by mummified preserved skin, ancient art and the archaeological record.[1][2] Both ancient art and archaeological finds of possible tattoo tools suggest tattooing was practiced by the Upper Paleolithic period in Europe. However, direct evidence for tattooing on mummified human skin extends only to the 4th millennium BC. The oldest discovery of tattooed human skin to date is found on the body of Ötzi the Iceman, dating to between 3370 and 3100 BC.[3] Other tattooed mummies have been recovered from at least 49 archaeological sites, including locations in Greenland, Alaska, Siberia, Mongolia, western China, Egypt, Sudan, the Philippines and the Andes.[4] These include Amunet, Priestess of the Goddess Hathor from ancient Egypt (c. 2134–1991 BC), multiple mummies from Siberia including the Pazyryk culture of Russia and from several cultures throughout Pre-Columbian South America.[3]
Ancient and traditional practices [ edit ]
China [ edit ]
Cemeteries throughout the Tarim Basin (Xinjiang of western China) including the sites of Qäwrighul, Yanghai, Shengjindian, Zaghunluq, and Qizilchoqa have revealed several tattooed mummies with Western Asian/Indo-European physical traits and cultural materials. These date from between 2100 and 550 BC.[3]
In ancient China, tattoos were considered a barbaric practice, and were often referred to in literature depicting bandits and folk heroes. As late as the Qing Dynasty,[when?] it was common practice to tattoo characters such as 囚 ("Prisoner") on convicted criminals' faces. Although relatively rare during most periods of Chinese history, slaves were also sometimes marked to display ownership.
However, tattoos seem to have remained a part of southern culture. Marco Polo wrote of Quanzhou, "Many come hither from Upper India to have their bodies painted with the needle in the way we have elsewhere described, there being many adepts at this craft in the city". At least three of the main characters – Lu Zhishen, Shi Jin (史進), and Yan Ching (燕青) – in the classic novel Water Margin are described as having tattoos covering nearly all of their bodies. Wu Song was sentenced to a facial tattoo describing his crime after killing Xi Menqing (西門慶) to avenge his brother. In addition, Chinese legend claimed the mother of Yue Fei (a famous Song general) tattooed the words "Repay the Country with Pure Loyalty" (精忠報國, jing zhong bao guo) down her son's back before he left to join the army.
Europe [ edit ]
The earliest possible evidence for tattooing in Europe appears on ancient art from the Upper Paleolithic period as incised designs on the bodies of humanoid figurines.[5] The Löwenmensch figurine from the Aurignacian culture dates to approximately 40,000 years ago[6] and features a series of parallel lines on its left shoulder. The ivory Venus of Hohle Fels, which dates to between 35,000 and 40,000 years ago[7] also exhibits incised lines down both arms, as well as across the torso and chest.
The oldest and most famous direct proof of ancient European tattooing appears on the body of Ötzi the Iceman, who was found in the Ötz valley in the Alps and dates from the late 4th millennium BC.[3] Studies have revealed that Ötzi had 61 carbon-ink tattoos consisting of 19 groups of lines simple dots and lines on his lower spine, left wrist, behind his right knee and on his ankles. It has been argued that these tattoos were a form of healing because of their placement, though other explanations are plausible.[8]
Pre-Christian Germanic, Celtic and other central and northern European tribes were often heavily tattooed, according to surviving accounts, but it may also have been normal paint. The Picts may have been tattooed (or scarified) with elaborate, war-inspired black or dark blue woad (or possibly copper for the blue tone) designs. Julius Caesar described these tattoos in Book V of his Gallic Wars (54 BC). Nevertheless, these may have been painted markings rather than tattoos.[9]
Ahmad ibn Fadlan wrote of his encounter with the Scandinavian Rus' tribe in the early 10th century, describing them as tattooed from "fingernails to neck" with dark blue "tree patterns" and other "figures."[10] However, this may also have been paint, since the word used can mean both tattoo and painting. During the gradual process of Christianization in Europe, tattoos were often considered remaining elements of paganism and generally legally prohibited.
The significance of tattooing was long open to Eurocentric interpretations. In the mid-19th century, Baron Haussmann, while arguing against painting the interior of Parisian churches, said the practice "reminds me of the tattoos used in place of clothes by barbarous peoples to conceal their nakedness".[11]
Greece and Rome [ edit ]
Greek written records of tattooing date back to at least the 5th-century BCE.[3]:19 The ancient Greeks and Romans used tattooing to penalize slaves, criminals, and prisoners of war. While known, decorative tattooing was looked down upon and religious tattooing was mainly practiced in Egypt and Syria.[12]:155 According to Robert Graves in his book The Greek Myths, tattooing was common amongst certain religious groups in the ancient Mediterranean world, which may have contributed to the prohibition of tattooing in Leviticus. The Romans of Late Antiquity also tattooed soldiers and arms manufacturers, a practice that continued into the ninth century.[12]:155
The Greek verb stizein (στίζειν), meaning "to prick," was used for tattooing. Its derivative stigma (στίγμα) was the common term for tattoo marks in both Greek and Latin.[12]:142 During the Byzantine period, the verb kentein (κεντεῖν) replaced stizein, and a variety of new Latin terms replaced stigmata including signa "signs," characteres "stamps," and cicatrices "scars."[12]:154–155
Great Britain [ edit ]
British and other pilgrims to the Holy Lands throughout the 17th century were tattooed to commemorate their voyages, including William Lithgow in 1612.[citation needed]
In 1691, William Dampier brought to London a native of the western part of New Guinea (now part of Indonesia) who had a tattooed body and became known as the "Painted Prince".
Between 1766 and 1779, Captain James Cook made three voyages to the South Pacific, the last trip ending with Cook's death in Hawaii in February 1779. When Cook and his men returned home to Europe from their voyages to Polynesia, they told tales of the 'tattooed savages' they had seen. The word "tattoo" itself comes from the Tahitian tatau, and was introduced into the English language by Cook's expedition (though the word 'tattoo' or 'tap-too', referring to a drumbeat, had existed in English since at least 1644)[13]
It was in Tahiti aboard the Endeavour, in July 1769, that Cook first noted his observations about the indigenous body modification and is the first recorded use of the word tattoo to refer to the permanent marking of the skin. In the ship's log book recorded this entry: "Both sexes paint their Bodys, Tattow, as it is called in their Language. This is done by inlaying the Colour of Black under their skins, in such a manner as to be indelible." Cook went on to write, "This method of Tattowing I shall now describe...As this is a painful operation, especially the Tattowing of their Buttocks, it is performed but once in their Lifetimes."
Cook's Science Officer and Expedition Botanist, Sir Joseph Banks, returned to England with a tattoo. Banks was a highly regarded member of the English aristocracy and had acquired his position with Cook by putting up what was at the time the princely sum of some ten thousand pounds in the expedition. In turn, Cook brought back with him a tattooed Raiatean man, Omai, whom he presented to King George and the English Court. Many of Cook's men, ordinary seamen and sailors, came back with tattoos, a tradition that would soon become associated with men of the sea in the public's mind and the press of the day.[14] In the process, sailors and seamen re-introduced the practice of tattooing in Europe, and it spread rapidly to seaports around the globe.
By the 19th century, tattooing had spread to British society but was still largely associated with sailors[15] and the lower or even criminal class.[16] Tattooing had however been practised in an amateur way by public schoolboys from at least the 1840s[17][18] and by the 1870s had become fashionable among some members of the upper classes, including royalty.[19][20] In its upmarket form, it could be a lengthy, expensive[21] and sometimes painful[22] process.
Tattooing spread among the upper classes all over Europe in the 19th century, but particularly in Britain where it was estimated in Harmsworth Magazine in 1898 that as many as one in five members of the gentry were tattooed. Taking their lead from the British Court, where George V followed Edward VII's lead in getting tattooed; King Frederick IX of Denmark, the King of Romania, Kaiser Wilhelm II, King Alexander of Yugoslavia and even Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, all sported tattoos, many of them elaborate and ornate renditions of the Royal Coat of Arms or the Royal Family Crest. King Alfonso XIII of modern Spain also had a tattoo.
The perception that there is a marked class division on the acceptability of the practice has been a popular media theme in Britain, as successive generations of journalists described the practice as newly fashionable and no longer for a marginalised class. Examples of this cliché can be found in every decade since the 1870s.[23] Despite this evidence, a myth persists that the upper and lower classes find tattooing attractive and the broader middle classes rejecting it. In 1969, the House of Lords debated a bill to ban the tattooing of minors, on grounds it had become "trendy" with the young in recent years but was associated with crime. It was noted that 40 per cent of young criminals had tattoos and that marking the skin in this way tended to encourage self-identification with criminal groups. Two peers, Lord Teynham and the Marquess of Aberdeen and Temair however rose to object that they had been tattooed as youngsters, with no ill effects.[24] Since the 1970s, tattoos have become more socially acceptable and fashionable among celebrities.[25] Tattoos are less prominent on figures of authority, and the practice of tattooing by the elderly is still considered remarkable.[26]
India [ edit ]
In Southern India, permanent tattoos are called pachakuthu. It was very common in South India, especially Tamil Nadu, before 1980. In northern India, permanent tattoos are called godna. Tattoos have been used as cultural symbols among many tribal populations, as well as the general Hindu population of India.
In India, tattoos have many names, including tarazwa, gondan, and ungkala.
Indonesia [ edit ]
Several Indonesian tribes have tattooing in their culture. One notable example is the Dayak people of Kalimantan in Borneo (Bornean traditional tattooing). Another ethnic group that practices tattooing are the Mentawai people, as well as Moi and Meyakh people in West Papua.[27]
Japan [ edit ]
Tattooing for spiritual and decorative purposes in Japan is thought to extend back to at least the Jōmon or Paleolithic period and was widespread during various periods for both the Japanese and the native Ainu.[citation needed] Chinese texts from before 300 AD described social differences among Japanese people as being indicated through tattooing and other bodiapanese.[28] Chinese texts from the time also described Japanese men of all ages as decorating their faces and bodies with tattoos.[29]
Between 1603 and 1868, Japanese tattooing was only practiced by the ukiyo (floating world) subculture. Generally firemen, manual workers and prostitutes wore tattoos to communicate their status.[citation needed] By the early 17th century, criminals were widely being tattooed as a visible mark of punishment. Criminals were marked with symbols typically including crosses, lines, double lines and circles on certain |
management of my customers to that kind of artificial intelligence."
Mnuchin should know better
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. Thomson Reuters
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin came under fire recently for saying he was not at all concerned about the possibility that automation could wipe out a substantial portion of jobs — both blue collar and white.
"It's not even on our radar screen... 50 to 100 more years" away, he said, in an interview with Axios. "I'm not worried at all" about robots displacing humans in the near future. "In fact, I'm optimistic."
That's a bit of an odd thing for Mnuchin to say given his background as a longtime Goldman Sachs banker and later Hollywood film executive, considering that both industries have all but been revolutionized by technological change in just the past decade.
A mere look at the growing share of market trades done by electronic algorithms rather than humans should tell the secretary something about the pace of change in banking. And computer-generated imagery has completely redrawn the landscape of cinematic possibility, including using fewer actors and costume and stage designers, even for large, epic scenes. "Lego Batman," anyone?
A study from PwC published March 24 suggests Mnuchin could be understating the challenge from automation to employment conditions in the US and overseas. Their research found that some 38% of American jobs are at risk of automation by the early 2030s — that's less than 20 years away. In industry-heavy Germany, that rate is even higher at 35% and slightly lower but still substantial at 30% for the UK.
Still, Mnuchin is correct in seeing AI more as an opportunity than a threat, especially among jobs requiring college degrees.
The PwC survey itself maintains that automation will also help generate new jobs and therefore is not a zero-sum game for the labor market.
"Automation will also boost productivity and wealth, leading to offsetting additional job gains elsewhere in the economy — but inequality may rise," according to the survey by PwC chief economist John Hawksworth and Richard Berriman, a machine-learning specialist at the firm.
"Wall Street has seen a dramatic impact," says Ford. "By one account, about a third of the financial-sector jobs in NYC have disappeared since 2000. Trading floors, of course, used to be full of people calling on phones. Now it is all automated and most trading is algorithmic. There are now hedge funds run almost entirely by AI."
Rachel Grimes, the president of the International Federation of Accountants, agrees that white-collar workers should welcome, not fear, their electronic colleagues.
"Computers and software have evolved to a point where they can populate spreadsheets, crunch numbers, and generate financial statements and earnings reports more quickly and accurately than any human accountant," she wrote in a recent opinion piece for Business Insider.
"In fact, machines are already taking on many of an accountant's old, routine, administrative chores — online tax returns and bookkeeping software are great examples of routine work that accountants no longer have to do."
If all goes well, we journalists should also be able to kick our work up a notch.Meet the newest, meanest bulls on the bull riding circuit. There's Kiss Monster, Kiss Destroyer, Kiss Animalize, Kiss Revenge, Kiss Love Gun and Kiss Psycho Circus. All are trained and eager to buck the top 35 bull riders from the Professional Bull Riders around for years to come.
The rock band Kiss has teamed with the PBR on dual promotions, both beginning May 10 at the PBR Last Cowboy Standing event in Las Vegas, Nev. That's when, according to the band's website, these six bulls will make their entrance for the 26 PBR Built Ford Tough Series events across America. (We're assuming / hoping the bulls' face paint was done via Photoshop. And hey, where's Vinnie?)
In addition, each arena's kiss cam will become the 8-second Kiss cam. Fans will have to hold on to their lovers for eight seconds, the same amount of time a rider must hold onto his bull. Video and images of the kissing couples will then be displayed at the PBR website, and fans can vote for the best or worst kisses while registering to win PBR and Kiss gear.
While the kissing is happening, Kiss band members Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, Tommy Thayer and Eric Singer will cheer fans on and provide constructive criticism. The Last Cowboy Standing event will be televised on CBS this Saturday and Sunday (May 11 and 12).Announcing IPv6 support for Cloud IPs
Today I’m very pleased to announce IPv6 support for Cloud IPs. So now you can instantly move IPv6 IP addresses between Cloud Servers, Load Balancers and Cloud SQL instances as well as IPv4 addresses.
Cloud IPs are one of the foundational features of Brightbox Cloud and enable you to treat your servers like “cattle not pets” by decoupling your public facing IP addresses from your back-end systems. Just build new instances and re-point your Cloud IPs - no DNS updates necessary!
Unlike some more basic “floating IP” implementations, Brightbox Cloud IPs work seamlessly across both our UK datacentres. So you can instantly move an IP address from a server in one datacentre to a server in another without any reconfiguration. And when mapped to a Load Balancer, they’re available from both datacentres at once with automatic fail-over if there is a problem.
We’ve had “static” IPv6 support within Brightbox Cloud since way back in 2012, where IPv6 addresses were tied to the cloud servers. This meant a more traditional approach to handling migrations between servers, which usually means updating DNS and waiting.
It always made a lot of sense for Cloud IPs to support IPv6, but the technical solution wasn’t as straightforward as IPv4 (we had to add support to the Netfilter conntrack tools, as an example!) - which is why we believe this is a first of its kind!
How do they work?
Cloud IPs use NAT (Network Address Translation), which IPv6 has sought to avoid (for some good reasons) so it’s been tricky adding support for this. Announcing this feature on Halloween might be a nod to every network administrator having a scary NAT story to tell!
But IPv6 never managed to come up with a good client-side way to avoid interruptions so NAT remains a good fit here.
The compromise is that, unlike IPv4 Cloud IP addresses, IPv6 Cloud IPs are used only for incoming connections, so your outgoing IPv6 connections still use your Cloud Server’s own static IPv6 addresses. So unless you specifically choose to use the addresses, by exposing them in DNS records for example, they won’t affect any of your existing IPv6 traffic. It stays out the way unless you need it.
How do I use them?
Rather than give you a whole new type of Cloud Resource to manage separately, we’ve just added an associated IPv6 address to every Cloud IP. So when you map a Cloud IP, the IPv6 address goes along with it automatically. You can find the IPv6 address of your Cloud IPs using our API (via our CLI or our web-based Brightbox Manager), or simply using the Cloud IP’s DNS record which now has a AAAA entry:
$ host cip-dcdx0.gb1.brightbox.com cip-dcdx0.gb1.brightbox.com has address 109.107.35.197 cip-dcdx0.gb1.brightbox.com has IPv6 address 2a02:1348:ffff:ffff::6d6b:23c5
Those fluent in base16 should have noticed that our IPv4 Cloud IP addresses are embedded within our IPv6 address space :)
So just stick your Cloud IPv6 address in your DNS along with the IPv4 address and you’ll start getting incoming IPv6 (most modern network services listen on IPv4 and IPv6, but make sure before you update your DNS).
Load Balancers
Since our Load Balancers are also Cloud IP enabled, they now support IPv6! Just publish your Load Balancer’s Cloud IPv6 address in your DNS and you’re good to go. Our Load Balancers continue to use your Cloud Servers’ private IPv4 addresses for the backend connections so you don’t even need to worry about their IPv6 configuration. Incoming IPv6 connections go out to the backend as private IPv4, so nothing changes from the perspective of your backend (well, except if you’re using HTTP listeners, the X-Forwarded-For header will be an IPv6 source address of course).
DNS
The new IPv6 address also now appears in the public.srv-xxxxx.gb1.brightbox.com hostname:
$ host public.srv-6x1w3.gb1.brightbox.com public.srv-6x1w3.gb1.brightbox.com has address 109.107.35.157 public.srv-6x1w3.gb1.brightbox.com has IPv6 address 2a02:1348:ffff:ffff::6d6b:239d
And ipv6.srv-xxxxx.gb1.brightbox.com remains unchanged and still resolves to the server’s own IPv6 address.
The DNS reference page has been updated with all the new records so take a look there to see what’s changed.
World first?
Know of any other providers offering movable IPv6 addresses like this? We think this might be a world first. OpenStack seem to be working on it but it’s early days. Let us know if we’re missing someone!
Get started
I’ve personally needed this feature for years for my own projects, but it took this long to convince the team that NAT wasn’t evil, at least not in this case!!
I hope you find it useful too.
You can sign up for Brightbox Cloud in just a couple of minutes and get a £20 free credit to play with IPv6.Yesterday I posted my swatches of Corvus Cosmetics’ Mouseia Collection. Now it’s time for the looks. This was an interesting collection to come up with looks for, since the colors in it are very extreme. It’s pretty much all dark intense colors or super light pastels with nothing in the middle. It definitely makes it unique as a collection, but it’s a bit tricky to work with if you’re using it and only it for your looks. Several of these looking would be much easier if you supplemented with a midtone transition shade.
Look 1: Urania, Thalia and Polyhymnia
I primed my lids and applied Thalia to the inner half of the lid and Polyhymnia to the outer half of the lid and blended the two together. Then I mixed Urania with superstar serum and applied it as winged liner along my upper lashline. I finished the look by curling my lashes and applying mascara.
Look 2: Urania, Melopmene and Erato
I started by priming my lids all the way around, including my lower lashline. Then I patted Pixie Epoxy onto my eyelids and waited 20 seconds for it to set. I carefully patted Melpomene onto the middle of each lid, leaving the very inner and outer corners blank. Next I patted Erato onto the outer corner and around onto the outer 2/3 of my lower lashline. Then I carefully patted Urania onto the inner corner of both my upper and lower lids. I blended it up into the purple on my upper lids and into the red on my lower lashline. I used a q-tip with some face lotion on it to tidy up the outer edges of the shadow, and then used a clean blending brush to soften as much as I could. The edges wound up being a little choppy and grungy anyways. To finish, I lined my eyes with black pencil liner, smudged it out and added mascara. (If you wanted a less grungy version of this look, I would recommend using a transition shade that works for your skintone to blend out the upper edge.)
Look 3: Erato
Noel has said that a smoky eye with Erato is one of her favorite looks, so I knew I wanted to do one for my review. I tried this using Clio to blend out the edges, but it was too dark of a gold to work as a blending color with my skintone, so I did the whole look with one color and a lot of blending. I started by priming my lids and applied Erato all over, blowing it out at the outer corners and bringing it down around my lower lashline, but stopping before my tear ducts. I used a q-tip and lotion to tidy up the shape of the shadow and blended the crap out of the upper edge. I lined my eyes with black pencil and smudged it with a brush. To finish, I curled my lashes and put on mascara. (To make this look easier, you could use a transition shade to blend out the upper edge instead of tidying it with a q-tip.)
Look 4: Terpsichore and Euterpe
To start, I primed my lids. Then I applied Euterpe all over. I placed Terpsichore in my outer corner and crease and used a fluffy blending brush to blend the two together. I also used a liner brush to apply Terpsichore to my lower waterline to brighten my eyes a little bit more. Then I did a classic cat eye with black liquid liner and finished with mascara.
Look 5: Calliope, Clio and Euterpe
For this look I actually didn’t prime my eyelids. I started by buffing Euterpe into my lids to even out the color a little bit. Then I tapped out little piles of both Clio and Calliope next to each other on the mirror I used for mixing. I placed a dot of Superstar Serum next to each pile. I mixed Clio first and applied it to the inner third of my upper lashline as well as my lower waterline. Then I mixed Calliope and lined the outer two thirds, ending in a wing. I used my brush to mix the two mixtures together and went over the middle third of the line until the transition between the green and the gold was no longer harsh. Then I curled my lashes and finished with a coat of mascara.
So there they are! Five looks using only shadows from Corvus’s Mouseia collection. Because of the extremes of the collection, I stuck to smoky eyes or winged liner looks, but I think they turned out really nicely. Look 2, my tricolor smoky eye was probably my favorite. I’ve been trying to get a tricolor smoky eye to work for a little while now, and I feel like this is my favorite variation so far! I also really liked look number 5, with the green and gold gradient liner. Which look is your favorite?Swedish karting graduate Linus Lundqvist will make the step up to cars in 2015.
Lundqvist, 15, will join the Formula Renault 1.6 Nordic championship with Team Tido.
He won the 2010 and 2011 titles in the Swedish MKR series before finishing sixth in the national Rotax Max championship.
In 2014, he combined international and local karting, winning the KF2 Swedish Kart Festival and finishing 14th in the CIK-FIA KF World Championship.
“This is a great day for me,” stated Lundqvist. “Getting the chance to compete in formula racing is a dream come true, and it hasn’t really sunk in yet. This would not have been possible without Team Tido – I am incredibly grateful for this opportunity and hope I can repay their trust through good performances on the track.”
“I know I have a lot to learn and this will firstly be a learning season. I expect a steep development curve in the beginning and I would like to be fighting for the podium towards the end of the year. I will give it everything from the first to the last race.”
2015 will mark Team Tido’s return to FR1.6 Nordic after the team won the inaugural season of the championship with Erik Johansson.
“We are very pleased to welcome Linus welcome to Team Tido this season,” said David Von Schinkel. “He has made a really good impression on us in the winter. We have always been passionate about helping young, talented drivers to the extent we can, and we are now looking forward to a good and, hopefully, long association with Linus.”
“We think he has the qualities required to succeed in this sport, and it will be very interesting to follow his progress in Formula Renault 1.6.“Today we are going to show you how to draw Queen Elsa of Arendelle …also known as the Snow Queen. Elsa has the power to make it snow and it is amazing to witness. In this picture, Queen Elsa is creating a snowflake. Learn how to draw Elsa with the following illustrated steps.
You Might Also Like Our Other Disney Frozen Drawing Tutorials
How to Draw Princess Elsa from Frozen Step by Step Tutorial
Step 1
Lightly draw a circle and a square.
Step 2
– Lightly draw a guideline thru the center of the circle…diagonally. Use these guidelines to help place the facial features.
– Draw a lowercase letter ‘e’ shape at the top left side of the square.
– Draw a letter ‘s’ shape for the chin and neck. Draw a curved line for the back of the neck.
– Draw a letter ‘V’ like shape for the eye.
Step 3
– Lightly draw 2 ovals under the neck…in a sideways #8-like form.
– Draw a?-like shaped mouth.
– Draw a letter C nostril.
– Draw a letter ‘s’ like shape for the forehead.
Step 4
– Draw a sideways letter ‘t’ shape for the top of the mouth.
– Draw a letter ‘s’ shape inside the ear.
– Draw lashes on the top of the eye.
– Draw an oval inside of the eye.
– Draw 2 ovals for the brooch (jewelry).
– Draw 2 curved lines on top of the ovals.
Step 5
– Draw a letter ‘Y’-like shape inside the mouth.
– Draw a #3-like shape on the right side of her bun and curved lines on the other side of the bun.
– Draw a sideways #5-like shape from her collar down towards her chest.
– Draw another oval inside the eye.
– Draw a sideways letter ‘s’ shape for the brow.
– Draw a #3-like shape on the left side of her hair.
Step 6
– Draw a bunch of letter ‘J’-like shapes on the right side of the hair.
– Draw another sideways letter ‘s’ shape on the brow.
– Draw a letter ‘v’ like shape for the side burn area.
– Draw a letter ‘s’ like shape in her chest area.
– Draw stick-arm in shape of letter ‘v’-like shape with an oval at the bottom.
Step 7
– Draw #3-like shapes on the inside of the hair.
– Draw zig-zaggy bangs … with a letter ‘s’-like shape on the far right-side.
– Draw ovals on the chest.
– Draw ovals along the arm and where the hand will be.
– Draw an upside down letter ‘V’ shape on the head.
Step 8
– Outline the ovals of the arm and outline the palm.
– Start drawing stick fingers…one of them looks like a letter ‘Y’ shape.
– On the chest, make the shape of the top of a heart. There are bubble letter ‘V’ and ‘S’ shapes on the chest.
Step 9
– Add a letter ‘T’ shape in the triangle on the top of the head.
– Outline the oval in the thumb area…also draw letter ‘D’ like shapes for the fingers.
– Above the fingers, make the template form of the snowflake … circles with arrow shapes surrounding it.
– Add leaf shapes, circles, and letter ‘V’ shapes in the chest.
Step 10
– Draw another letter ‘D’ shaped finger on the hand. Finish the hand.
– Outline the template shapes (blue) that you drew in the last step on the snowflake.
Step 11
– Erase guidelines (blue in this tutorial) and lines you don’t need any more.
Finished Picture of Princess Elsa
– Darken important lines.
Now your Princess Elsa is complete. I hope that this tutorial helped you draw her and that you enjoyed learning how to do it.
You Might Also Like Our Other Disney Frozen Drawing Tutorials
Technorati Tags: Princess Elsa, Elsa, how to draw Princess Elsa, Princess Elsa from frozen Elsa from frozen, disneys frozen, disney frozenJames “Whitey’’ Bulger was disciplined at a Florida prison last June for alleged sexual activity in his cell, theThe Boston Globe reports.
While a male corrections officer was making early morning rounds at the US Penitentiary Coleman II, the now 86-year-old was reportedly seen masturbating in his cell with the lights on, according to prison documents obtained by the Globe.
The prison prohibits any sexual activity by inmates. Authorities put Bulger in solitary confinement for 30 days, halted his commissary and email privileges for 120 days, and confiscated his personal property for 30 days, the Globe reports.
The documents showed Bulger denied the sexual activity, saying he was applying medicated powder to an irritation on his genitals.
Advertisement
“I’m 85 years old. My sex life is over,’’ Bulger told a disciplinary hearing officer in June, according to the Globe.
Bulger appealed the disciplinary action, even though he already served his punishment. If he prevails, the sanction would be removed from his record, the Globe reports.
Bulger is serving a life sentence for participating in 11 murders. His attorney declined to comment to the Globe on the incident.
Read the full story at the Globe.SEATTLE -- A Seattle judge will consider a mother's request Thursday to keep her teenage sons away from a woman who killed her own daughters 20 years ago.
Trisha Conlon of Silverton, Ore., had two children with her former husband, retired Marine fighter pilot Lt. Col. John P. Cushing Jr., in the 1990s. But they split up several years ago, and John Cushing has since gotten back together with his first wife, Kristine, who killed their 4- and 8-year old daughters in California's Orange County in 1991.
Kristine Cushing blamed it on antidepressants and was found not guilty by reason of insanity.
Conlon says she doesn't want her boys living with their dad in Washington with Kristine Cushing in the house. John Cushing says Kristine loves the boys and poses no danger.The 48 police forces in the UK use a wide range of operational vehicles including compact cars, powerful estates and armored police carriers. The main uses are patrol, response, tactical pursuit and public order policing. Other vehicles used by British police include motorcycles, aircraft and boats.
Ground vehicles [ edit ]
Patrol Cars [ edit ]
Patrol cars may also be known as response or area cars. They are the most essential mode of police transport. In most forces these vehicles are low-budget compact cars due to the simple tasks they need to perform. The Vauxhall Corsa and Ford Fiesta have both been used as patrol cars by forces nationwide, although Peugeot 208s are now becoming a popular sight, used by Neighbourhood Policing Teams and Police Community Support Officers.
Engine sizes vary according to each forces vehicle procurement policies but range from 1.3 to 2.0. Although petrol-powered engines once dominated, diesel engines are now becoming much more common due to their superior fuel economy, and therefore lower operating costs. As well as this, both partially and fully electric models are also having an increasing presence for use as police vehicles.
Forces may choose to use unmarked patrol cars to double up as diary cars, covert cars and unmarked transport vehicles for discreet escort of civilians or prisoners.
Marked variants of these cars feature a single row of battenburg police markings on each side of car with 'Police' lettering on the front and rear of the vehicle. Badges or slogans from police forces can be found on the front and sides of marked cars in most areas to identify the force it belongs to. Most marked cars also have high-visibility chevrons on the back.
Response Cars [ edit ]
These vehicles are used for attending 999 calls and patrolling in targeted areas, where a police officer may be needed more urgently. Many forces do not differ between patrol and response cars; this could mean the response car is used to cover both its normal role and the duty of a traditional patrol car. Forces including City of London Police and Thames Valley Police do not differentiate between the two types of cars and use only one specification identified as a response car. Response cars are not authorised to pursue a failing-to-stop suspect: an area car, traffic car or advanced blue light trained officer will take over the pursuit.
Response cars are much the same as the patrol cars but will generally carry equipment and lighting for use at traffic incidents, such as cones, red and blue boot or side police lights, warning signs and basic first aid equipment. Many response cars in the UK now also carry mobile technology which can be linked to police databases and automatic number plate recognition technology. Most response cars have sirens. The Vauxhall Astra or Ford Focus are a classic but key car in police response units. In 2017/2018, the Peugeot 308 and Ford Transit Custom are far becoming popular response vehicles.
Area Cars [ edit ]
There are times when police feel the need to increase presence and performance in an area. Area cars are tasked to serve high crime areas or large areas with a fair response time. Area cars typically carry a single row of battenburg marking like their response car counterparts but the drivers are trained in tactical pursuit, advanced driving and stopping fleeing offenders. Area cars may carry both, firearms officers, or local patrol officers, but are on hand in major cities and large urban counties when help is needed most. Area cars may be various high performance vehicles. Vauxhall Insignia, BMW 5 Series, Skoda Octavia, Volvo V40, Volvo XC70 and the Ford Mondeo have all been used as area cars in recent[when?] years. Some area cars may be tasked for rural patrols or highway duties so they may utilise 4x4 capabilities when needed. Area cars can be old Traffic cars given to local response teams when the vehicles become dated. London's new area cars are branded with ANPR Interceptor wording. Before that, the Vauxhall Vectra, Ford Sierra and Rover SD1 were used as area cars.
Traffic Cars [ edit ]
Road policing units use cars that are larger, more powerful vehicles that are capable of carrying out tasks such as high speed pursuits and attending major accidents. Traffic cars are often estate cars that can carry additional equipment, such as traffic cones, signs to warn of road closures or collisions and some basic scene preservation equipment. Their daily roles primarily consist of ANPR patrols.
Unmarked vehicles are also employed for motorway patrol duties.
The most common traffic car used by British police RPUs is the BMW 530d and BMW 330D, while models from Audi, such as the Audi S3 are also becoming popular as unmarked units as well as the Volvo V70.
Cars used by Armed Police Units [ edit ]
With the exception of Northern Ireland most police officers in the United Kingdom do not routinely carry firearms. There are, however, a number of armed tactical units in which authorised firearms officers are deployed and which use special vehicles called Armed Response Vehicles. Armed Response Units operate in all police forces. The Metropolitan Police also have a Diplomatic Protection Group (DPG) and a Special Escort Group (SEG) for the protection of VIPs. A very common vehicle for armed police units is the BMW X5 (Used by Metropolitan Police and City of London Police).
A range of vehicles are used by these squads. They are often larger and with a higher performance than those used for local patrols. DPG cars, minibuses and vans are red. Special Escort Group officers use Range Rovers and motorcycles. The motorcycle officers may be identified by their Glock 17 pistols.
Motorcycles [ edit ]
Motorcycles are used by a number of forces in the UK, usually by the Road Policing Unit. Police motorcycles are also used in road safety initiatives such as Bikesafe, a national program to reduce motorcycle casualties in which police motorcyclists provide advanced rider training to members of the public.[1]
Some Metropolitan Police Special Escort Group officers also use motor cycles. These officers may be identified by their side arms as they are the only armed motor cycle police in London, apart from a small section of the Diplomatic Protection Group who use motorcycles to respond quickly to incidents faster than the DPG ARVs can.
The motorcycles used by police include the BMW R1200RT, Honda ST1100 Pan-European, and Yamaha FJR1300. The Honda ST1300 Pan-European was the most popular bike, but it was withdrawn from service by most forces in 2007,[2] following the death of a Merseyside police motorcyclist in 2005 in an accident caused by an inherent instability in the model.[3]
Vans and Minibuses [ edit ]
Police vans, such as the Ford Transit, Vauxhall Movanos or the Mercedes-Benz Sprinter, are widely used across the United Kingdom and incorporate a cage to hold prisoners. Although in the United States it is usual to carry a prisoner in a police car, some British forces do not permit this, as most police cars have no barrier between the front and back seats to protect the officers. Each police force has different policies on prisoner transportation. Some allow compliant prisoners to be transported in response cars, ensuring that one officer sits in the rear with the prisoner, and the prisoner sits behind the passenger seat.
Larger vans are also used to act as mobile control room at major incidents, and may also carry specialised equipment such as hydraulic door entry and cutting tools.
Minibuses are used to carry groups of police officers, for example to public order and major incidents, and for inner-city patrols. One notable example is the Mercedes Sprinter used by the Metropolitan Police's Territorial Support Group. Other public order minibuses include the Vauxhall Movano and the Iveco Daily. They are usually fitted with riot shields to protect the windscreen from damage.
Other vehicles [ edit ]
[4] Jankel armoured truck of the Metropolitan Police Service, sometimes used for public order policing but mainly for airport duties
Dog unit cars/vans
Horse trailers
Vehicle removal trucks
Mobile custody units
Unmarked cars
Marked vehicles
Nearly a half of British police forces use the battenburg livery of yellow and blue checks for their vehicles. Other forces use white, black, or silver. Silver became popular in some forces because of the higher resale values when sold. Most cars use retroreflective livery on the sides and red and yellow chevrons on the rear. Some carry slogans, the force crest and contact information.
Most police cars, vans and minibuses have aerial roof markings that help aircraft crew identify them. These can include the unique force code, vehicle identifying mark, or police division that the vehicle belongs to.
Under the Road Vehicle Lighting Regulations 1989, police vehicles may display blue flashing lights to alert other road users to their presence or when the driver feels that the journey needs to be undertaken urgently. These lights are usually mounted on the roof and incorporated into the standard vehicle system of external lights. Most police vehicles are also fitted with a siren. In addition to blue lights, many traffic and incident response cars are fitted with flashing red lights that are only visible at the rear of the vehicle. These indicate that the vehicle is stopped or moving slowly.[5]
Equipment [ edit ]
Police vehicles may carry:
Speed gun
Taser
Enforcer
First aid kits
Traffic cones
Police signs
Fire-extinguisher
Torch
Breathalyser
Personal flotation device
Stinger
Runlock system [ edit ]
Most cars and police motorcycles are fitted with a 'Runlock' system. This allows the vehicle's engine to be left running without the keys being in the ignition. This enables adequate power, without battery drain, to be supplied to the vehicle's equipment at the scene of an incident. The vehicle can only be driven after re-inserting the keys. If the keys are not re-inserted, the engine will switch off if the handbrake is disengaged or the footbrake is activated; or the sidestand is flipped up in the case of a motorcycle. Runlock is also commonly used when an officer is required to quickly decamp from a vehicle or to keep the vehicle Mobile data terminal running. By enabling Runlock, the car's engine can be left running without the risk of someone stealing the vehicle: if the vehicle is driven normally, it will shut down, unless the Runlock system is turned off.
Aircraft [ edit ]
The Eurocopter EC135 is in service with many UK police forces.
Most British police forces have access to an aircraft, commonly a helicopter. The most widely used helicopters are the Eurocopter EC 135 and MD Explorer.
Police helicopters are fitted with an array of surveillance, navigation and communication technology to help them with a wide variety of tasks. The specific tasks that any one police helicopter performs will vary from force to force, but common deployments are for missing person searches, vehicle pursuits, the tracking of suspects, and maintaining public order.[6][7]
Some police helicopters may be shared with the local air ambulance. In this case, a medically trained person may be carried onboard along with medical equipment and the aircraft will respond to medical emergencies as well as those of the police.[6]
Crew [ edit ]
The standard crew in a police helicopter consists of a pilot, responsible solely for operating and flying the aircraft; a front seat observer, responsible for operating the helicopter's surveillance systems; and a rear seat observer, responsible for communications using the TETRA radio and downlink systems. Although both observers are often police officers, the pilot does not engage in any police activities and is usually not a police officer.
Watercraft [ edit ]
Police forces whose area includes significant waterways often include marine support units. Not only do these units police the waterways, but they also maintain a capability for waterborne rescue, usually in co-operation with HM Coastguard.
See also [ edit ]Nuclear isn't dead, according to Morningstar analysts, but cheap natural gas has shuttered some plants and left others at risk.
[The Morningstar analysts do believe one aspect of nuclear power is dead: new-built nuclear in the West. Read about it here.]
"In the last year, U.S. utilities have closed or announced plans to close five nuclear reactors in addition to the canceled development plans," according to Morningstar's Utilities Observer report for November, "leading to speculation that prolonged low gas prices could drive more plant closures given the high maintenance capital investment requirements."
"Despite slimmer margins for nuclear operators in a low natural-gas price environment, we think this speculation is unwarranted outside of some select situations."
But what are those select situations?
Below is a list of operating nuclear plants that Morningstar analysts believe are most exposed to the possibility of closure. The list does not include disabled plants, like Fort Calhoun in Nebraska, that are offline and may never reopen. And it does not include plants already scheduled for closure, like Exelon's Oyster Creek plant in New Jersey.
1. Indian Point: Less than 50 miles north of Manhattan, the reactors at Entergy's Indian Point Energy Center face a tough political fight for relicensing. One license has expired, and that reactor is operating under an allowance from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Another license is due to expire in 2015. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo opposes relicensing. Outgoing New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has defended the plant, based on the impact closure could have on New Yorkers' electric bills. Mayor-elect Bill DeBlasio has called for a gradual decommissioning as alternative power sources come online, which isn't how the process works. Ultimately, the decision rests not with local officials, but with the NRC.
2. Ginna Nuclear Generating Station: On the south shore of Lake Ontario near Rochester, NY, Ginna is a single-reactor plant that faces fresh competition from wind turbines, falling power prices, and, like Indian Point, a political climate hostile to nuclear reactors. "Upstate New York off-peak power prices have fallen to $32 per megawatt hour as of mid-2013 from $55/MWh in 2008," according to Morningstar. Ginna is owned jointly by Exelon and Électricité de France.
3. James A. Fitzpatrick Nuclear Power Plant: Another plant on the south shore of Lake Ontario in New York, FitzPatrick faces the same challenges as Ginna, but it's also an older boiling-water reactor that may need upgrades. "Fitzpatrick’s operating license expires in 2034, but its revenue-sharing agreement with the New York Power Authority expires in December 2014, and unfavorable contract renewal negotiations could lead Entergy to shut the plant."
4. Three Mile Island: Most of the shale gas boom in America is happening in the Marcellus region of Western Pennsylvania, according to the Energy Information Agency, which means Exelon's infamous Three Mile Island plant now has to compete with an abundance of gas never before seen in its lifetime. Several large, high-efficiency gas power plants are planned for the region.
5. Davis Besse Nuclear Power Station: FirstEnergy's plant near Toledo is not far from the Marcellus Shale formation and all that cheap natural ga. After Indian Point, it's the next power plant up for license renewal— in 2017. "We expect strong opposition from some parties," says Morningstar. "It has a tarnished reputation after an extended outage in 2002-04 due to corrosion in the reactor vessel head and several smaller issues since then."
6. Pilgrim Nuclear Generating Station: Entergy's Pilgrim plant in Plymouth, Mass., just survived a contentious license renewal process and was granted a new lease on life through 2032. But it may not survive the energy economy in which it now must compete. "Entergy is not obligated to operate it for that long and could exit if power prices sink much further," Morningstar says. The old boiling water reactor is more expensive to operate than newer designs.
Reactors recently closed or scheduled for closure:
Vermont Yankee, Vermont
San Onofre, California
Kewaunee, Wisconsin
Crystal River, Florida
Oyster Creek, New Jersey
Most existing nuclear plants will survive because they provide power without producing carbon emissions, Morningstar says, because coal will suffer with greenhouse gas regulations, and because power prices should recover from their current trough. But most of all, because of nuclear's low variable cost (about $12/mwhr, compared to $24 for the most efficient gas plants).
"No emissions, coal closures, and improving power prices are certainly favorable aspects of nuclear stations but the low variable cost is far and away the primary reason that most are not at risk of closure despite a difficult market environment," said analyst Mark Barnett.
Follow Jeff McMahon on Facebook, |
after touching on the subject on a parenting blog post I wrote two weeks ago. Within hours, I was deluged with responses from worn-out mothers who said they, too, could not bear to sleep with their husbands.
One lady contacted me to say it’s been five years since her child was born and still her libido hasn’t returned. Thankfully, her husband understood and respected this.
The majority of women, however, told me their partners find it hard to empathise.
There were those, not unlike me, who struggled to feel so much as a flicker of interest in sex. And others who would like to be intimate but felt too tired all the time. One mother admitted she felt angry with her husband if he even tried to be close to her.
And though they were tapping out their feelings to me in lengthy emails, I bet they’re not half as open with the men in question.
It’s like Sam and me: we tend not to talk about sex — or the lack of it. I avoid the subject, and I don’t think Sam wants to start a discussion in case I get upset.
We both hate confrontation and would prefer to brush things under the carpet. When he does try to initiate sex and I refuse, I never elaborate on why and he doesn’t push.
We are both not as trim and youthful as we were when we first got together. While I still think Sam is handsome, he does look different to the devoted gym-goer I fell in love with
Sometimes he feels I am playing hard to get and will try to get me to return his advances. But it frustrates me because when I say I am not in the mood, I’m not asking for his help — I’m saying I have absolutely no interest. I don’t miss lovemaking at all, and I don’t feel I’m missing out now.
Even though we’re only 26, its a long way from the early days of our relationship, when we couldn’t keep our hands off each other.
We met through mutual friends, and I was instantly smitten. He was completely different to the sort of man I usually went for, being over-confident and funny, plus a gym fanatic, with well-honed muscles.
We quickly became inseparable; every spare minute was spent together. We met in December and by the following September we were living together and I was pregnant. This is when the physical side of our relationship first began to suffer.
Lots to love: Stay-at-home mum Nat is kept busy looking after her four young children - four-year-old twins, Pepper and Cherry, three-year-old Lola (pictured together) and nine-month-old Jasper
We soon learnt we were expecting twins, I was very ill and suffered from extreme sickness that lasted the entire pregnancy.
Admission: Nat admits that the thought of having sex with her partner of six years Sam ‘can make my skin crawl’
Coupled with the fact my bump was enormous, I definitely wasn’t feeling inclined to jump into bed with him.
Sam was so understanding and never once complained about it or made me feel bad. The babies were born naturally at 35 weeks and thankfully slept well from a very early age.
The fact they were bottle-fed and were extremely easy-going meant Sam and I were able to share their care between us.
I was surprised by how smoothly things went, as I was expecting to be exhausted but wasn’t. As a result, it wasn’t long before we were able to rekindle our sex life.
But five months later, I got pregnant with our daughter Lola: she was born 14 months after the twins. This was when intimacy really suffered.
Lola was breastfed for two years but I had a never-ending run of infections and she struggled to latch on well, which caused a lot of pain — as did the fact that she didn’t sleep more than two hours at night until she was one.
I was so tired and suffered awful mood swings. I would regularly ring Sam at work in tears and ask him to come home as I was too tired to function. I understand now that this is something many mothers experience.
All of this added up to a completely non-existent love life.
We barely exchanged a word about anything other than the children. While I still loved Sam and knew he loved me, we were both just glad to get from morning to night without any major bust-ups.
It wasn’t helped by the fact that I was diagnosed with postnatal depression when Lola was six months old.
This explained the mood swings and I was given anti-depressants. But though these made my behaviour less erratic, I actually felt devoid of any emotion. I became robot-like, feeling neither happy nor sad. I was very cold towards Sam and probably the children too.
Once Lola passed her first birthday, things improved with regards to her sleeping. I came off the medication and began to feel more like my old self.
Over the next two years things gradually improved. I loved the level of closeness the return of sex brought to our relationship.
But August 2014 brought a huge shock. We had come to the decision we were going to have no more children. Yet, due to negligence on my part, I found out I was pregnant again.
My main concern was how I would cope with another baby. I didn’t even think about the impact on our sex life.
Deeper connection: Nat, pictured with Sam in 2010, says the hormone-fuelled early days don’t last for ever
It took a few months of getting used to, but soon we were swept up in the excitement of a new baby.
During the pregnancy, as I got bigger, sex took a back seat once again. Maybe it’s just me, but once there is a hint of a bump to be seen I feel very awkward making love.
And that’s pretty much where it has stayed since.
Jasper is nine months old now and is breastfed. He doesn’t sleep well, so he’s in with me and, in the absence of a spare room, Sam is relegated to the sofa.
For the most part, Sam is very accepting. But as a man, it must be truly hard for him to understand what I’m going through both physically and emotionally.
We’re parents to the same children, yet our experiences couldn’t be more different. He leaves as soon as they get up in the mornings and doesn’t see them until they are fed and ready for bed in the evening. Meanwhile, I do everything in between. As a result, we’re not really on the same page emotionally.
Nor are we both as trim and youthful as we were when we first got together. While I still think Sam is handsome, he does look different to the devoted gym-goer I fell in love with.
Do I feel guilty about our dire love life? Or worry that Sam might be unfaithful to me as a result? After all, there is the age-old idea that ‘if he’s not getting it at home, he will find it somewhere else’.
You might be married but you did not sign over the rights to your body. You did not enter into a contract whereby you are obliged to put aside your feelings to protect his
My honest — and some may say surprising — answer is ‘no’. If a man would jeopardise a loving and stable relationship with the mother of his children just because he hasn’t had sex for a few months, then he simply isn’t worth having.
I know I can trust Sam, and while he may be confused and hurt by my constant rejection, he’d never cheat on me. I have heard close friends say things like: ‘I feel so bad for John — we hardly ever have sex.’
Well, I don’t feel bad for my partner and neither should they. You might be married but you did not sign over the rights to your body.
You did not enter into a contract whereby you are obliged to put aside your feelings to protect his.
You don’t owe it to your husband or partner to have sex when you don’t want to. I understand that sometimes he might try to bargain and cajole and convince you. I’ve experienced this myself.
But no means no. Even in marriage, it is not an opening for a discussion. It’s the end of the conversation.
I know that to some couples the sexual side of their relationship is extremely important — it was for us once, too.
I know from experience, though, those hormone-fuelled early days don’t last for ever.
But that closeness can be regained in other ways. Sam and I are still very tactile with each other. We say ‘I love you’ multiple times a day, enjoy each other’s company and laugh as much as we ever did. We hold hands and hug, but for me that’s all I can manage right now. Hopefully, that’s enough for him.
Little joys: Nat and Sam had their eldest children, twins Cherry and Pepper, pictured, four years ago
Sam says: 'There are times when I miss the intimacy that comes with sex. When I first met Nat, I thought she was beautiful and, of course, I enjoyed our active love life.
Loyal: Despite the sex drying up Sam says he will not cheat on his partner
But our relationship developed quickly — which was great — and we had twins when we were in our mid-20s. That was the first time in our relationship that there had been a lack of sex. But I hadn’t expected anything different. It was after Lola was born that things got worse.
It was exhausting simply getting through the day. Sex was off the menu, and I’d be lying if I said that sense of being close to Nat in that way wasn’t an issue. But I was more concerned about our children and Nat’s well-being. Seeing the woman I loved in such a state of despair was worrying to say the least.
Eventually, however, life returned to ‘normal’. When Nat got pregnant with Jasper it was a real shock, but again I was excited. I love having children — it’s like having four best friends in the house and I’d have more if we could. But once again, sex has taken a back seat.
I also wonder if our sex life has dwindled in part because I’ve let myself go, and ditched the healthy diet and rigorous workout regime I devoted my time to before we had children. But I’m not ashamed of putting my family before my physical appearance — I always put the children first and myself last.
Some men, if rebuffed by their girlfriend or wife, might go looking elsewhere for sexual fulfilment. But I can honestly say I wouldn’t even entertain the thought of being unfaithful to the mother of my four wonderful children. Today, Nat and I are simply getting on with life.
I am not one of those who dwell on the negatives, and I know our relationship will survive. I know things won’t be like this for ever. The baby is still so young and so dependent on Nat, as Lola was before. We got through that and we will get through this, too.
We have such a strong relationship and sex is only a small part of it.M-Sport team boss Malcolm Wilson has confirmed Elfyn Evans will return to the WRC before the end of this season.
Evans said last month after Rally Finland that he had no more scheduled events in the World Rally Championship, but on the back of his success in the British Rally Championship, the Welshman secured the title on the Ulster Rally last weekend after winning, Wilson has revealed the 27-year-old will run again at the top level - albeit in WRC2.
Evans still has a chance of winning this year's WRC2 title, although Teemu Suinen is only two points behind, and Esapekka Lappi has also closed - the gap down to 13 points - after winning last weekend's Rally Deutschland. Suinen and Lappi also both have two points' scoring events left, to Evans' one.
"They'll [Evans and co-driver Craig Parry] be back in the World Rally Championship before the end of the season," Wilson confirmed.
"We just need to assess the events and determine which will give them the best shot of securing another championship this year."
Meanwhile, Evans said he was delighted to have secured the British Rally Championship title with one event remaining.
"It feels really good to win the BRC title in style but it was a difficult event and hard to concentrate on the job in hand. The rally was really tough, probably the hardest of the season with the weather changing all the time. To win the rally and the championship is very special, especially as it was 20 years since my father was champion," he added.Ed note Trevor–There is a large disinfo campaign which was started by “the good Torah Jews” to attempt to convince gentiles that Judaism was NEEEEVER a problem, and it wasn’t until “zionism” was invented that all the trouble began. (Can’t you just hear Rabbi Weiss’ loud, high pitched voice in your head right now?) That just might be the mother of all lies, and there is minimally 1800 years worth of history of Jewish expulsions, by diverse peoples of diverse ethnic backgrounds, that PROVE this is simply not the case. It looks like “the good Torah Jews” are a bunch of liars just like the “zionists,” and they are willing volunteers to act as a Jewish supremacist version of “human shields” for the other “bad” Jews, making sure that gentiles with blame everything but Judaism for the world’s problems.
The typical Jewish response when confronted with facts that are incredibly damning to Judaism, is the familiar accusation that “all religions are bad,” and Jews try to hide behind this overtly Marxist twaddle…but weren’t both Christianity and Islam originally intended to right the wrongs of the outright savagery and immorality of Judaism? There is just no basis for comparison when you look into the writings of these religions. The New Testament and the Qur’an are wide open to public scrutiny, and all people are welcome to become a part of their respective faiths, whereas Judaism is full of dark secrets which gentiles are forbidden to know.
You simply cannot get a straight answer from these people. Also, if these atheistic Jews who tell us they reject Judaism along with all the other religions are to be taken seriously, then what the hell do they think they are still doing stealing Palestine? Israel’s claim to the land is based solely on the writings of the Old Testament. If there is no God, as a majority of them claim, then WHO CHOSE THEM? Why do they need a Holy Land? What is the Temple going to be for? All of these points can and should be used to trap these despicable chosenoids in their own rhetorical web of lies so that they may be made examples of so they can be convicted in the court of public opinion, and we can get on with the business of laying the foundation for a sane, peaceful, prosperous, and ETHICAL world which we can happily inhabit together as a universal human family where no one is designated as “chosen” above the others. Jewish expulsions
YEAR......................PLACE
250 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Carthage
415 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Alexandria
554 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Diocèse of Clermont (France)
56 1 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Diocèse of Uzès (France)
612 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Visigoth Spain
642 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Visigoth Empire
855 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Italy
876 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Sens
1012 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Mainz
1182 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – France
1182 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Germany
1276 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Upper Bavaria
1290 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – England
1306 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – France
1322 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – France (again)
1348 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Switzerland
1349 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Hielbronn (Germany)
1349 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Saxony
1349 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Hungary
1360 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Hungary
1370 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Belgium
1380 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Slovakia
1388 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Strasbourg
1394 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Germany
1394 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – France
1420 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Lyons
1421 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Austria
1424 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Fribourg
1424 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Zurich
1424 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Cologne
1432 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Savoy
1438 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Mainz
1439 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Augsburg
1442 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Netherlands
1444 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Netherlands
1446 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Bavaria
1453 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – France
1453 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Breslau
1454 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Wurzburg
1462 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Mainz
1483 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Mainz
1484 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Warsaw
1485 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Vincenza (Italy)
1492 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Spain
1492 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Italy
1495 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Lithuania
1496 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Naples
1496 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Portugal
1498 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Nuremberg
1498 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Navarre
1510 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Brandenberg
1510 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Prussia
1514 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Strasbourg
1515 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Genoa
1519 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Regensburg
1533 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Naples
1541 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Naples
1542 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Prague & Bohemia
1550 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Genoa
1551 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Bavaria
1555 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Pesaro
1557 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Prague
1559 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Austria
1561 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Prague
1567 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Wurzburg
1569 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Papal States
1571 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Brandenburg
1582 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Netherlands
1582 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Hungary
1593 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Brandenburg, Austria
1597 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Cremona, Pavia & Lodi
1614 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Frankfort
1615 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Worms
1619 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Kiev
1648 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Ukraine
1648 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Poland
1649 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Hamburg
1654 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Little Russia (Beylorus)
1656 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Lithuania
1669 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Oran (North Africa)
1669 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Vienna
1670 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Vienna
1712 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Sandomir
1727 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Russia
1738 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Wurtemburg
1740 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Little Russia (Beylorus)
1744 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Prague, Bohemia
1744 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Slovakia
1744 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Livonia
1745 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Moravia
1753 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Kovad (Lithuania)
1761 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Bordeaux
1772 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Deported to the Pale of Settlement (Poland/Russia)
1775 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Warsaw
1789 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Alsace
1804 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Villages in Russia
1808 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Villages & Countrysides (Russia)
1815 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Lbeck & Bremen
1815 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Franconia, Swabia & Bavaria
1820 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Bremen
1843 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Russian Border Austria & Prussia
1862 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Areas in the U.S. under General Grant’s Jurisdiction[1]
1866 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Galatz, Romania
1880s – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Russia
1891 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Moscow
1919 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Bavaria (foreign born Jews)
1938-45 – – – – – – – – – – – – – – German Controlled AreasIt’s time to put some simple facts directly to you, the fans.
Sadly, the story that needs to be told is this; the Matildas will not be playing the USA because FFA and the A-League clubs can’t meet the PFA’s unaffordable demands in relation to the level of the salary cap for A-League players.
A competition in which the clubs lost a collective $17 million last season. Go figure.
In other words, the Matildas interests have been taken hostage by the PFA in the stand-off over the interests of male professional players.
Today, Professional Footballers Australia (PFA) rejected an offer that would have seen the Matildas undertake the US tour and receive an immediate payment under an interim agreement with increased pay rates.
On top of that, the PFA informed FFA that even if a long-term Matildas CBA agreement was reached today, the players would still not go to the USA unless a $120 million four-year CBA covering the Socceroos and A-League was also agreed today.
What we have today is an extraordinary situation in which the two male playing groups continue to be paid by FFA and A-League clubs.
The female players aren't being paid. Their contracts have expired and they have been advised by the PFA not to train or play for the Matildas until the Socceroos and A-League deals are done.
The Matildas alone are the ones being directly affected as a result of the whole of game CBA talks not being resolved.
It’s a sad state of affairs and one that the PFA has created, it appears deliberately, as part of a negotiating tactic. It could have been solved by the PFA accepting the interim proposal and moving to complete the CBA negotiations.
By way of background, it’s important to note that FFA agreed to the PFA’s suggestion that negotiating a whole of game CBA covering Socceroos, Matildas and Hyundai A-League players was the right approach.
Since February, the parties have met more than 30 times to craft a deal. The correspondence and briefing notes run to hundreds of pages.
Virtually all the negotiation has been about the A-League component of the three-way deal. That’s because the largest part of football’s $30 million annual player payments go to the A-League’s 230 professional players.
The A-League accounts for roughly $25 million, the Socceroos up to $4 million and the Matildas under $1 million.
In FFA’s view, there was merit in considering how these funds would be allocated. The concept that male players might curb some demands in order for women players to earn more makes a lot of sense.
FFA’s objective was to ensure the total amount was affordable.
This week, events took a nasty turn. The PFA gave us a counter-proposal involving a fresh set of demands, including;
An immediate $1 million increase across 10 clubs in the Hyundai A-League salary cap for this season and further $2 million for the following season in 2016-17. This $3 million increase in payments would come directly from club finances ($300,000 per club).
An immediate pay rise of $1,000 per match for Socceroos, increasing the match fee from $6,500 to $7,500 per match. This represents an immediate 13% increase.
Significant increases in spending on air travel, accommodation and benefits for Matildas players. FFA had taken the position that the priority for new funding for the Matildas would be devoted to an immediate 10% pay increase, with annual increases rising to 15% across the term of the CBA.
To be clear, the new demands added $5 million of unfunded commitments to the PFA’s position, the bulk of the money going to the A-League players and Socceroos.
On top of that, the PFA’s counter-proposal came with an ultimatum.
The PFA declared that unless FFA accepted a four-year whole of game CBA worth over $120 million, the Matildas would withdraw from the matches against the USA.
We had a gun at our head.
In response, FFA tabled an interim deal for the Matildas to enable the US tour to proceed. We offered to make a one-off payment for the players on the US tour for the two month period 1 August – 30 September 2015 of $6,750 for each player.
In addition, FFA offered to bring forward the payment of FIFA Women’s World Cup prize money for each of the 23 players who represented Australia in Canada. This equates to $13,274.15 per player.
The PFA rejected this solution.
By the way, FFA will bring forward the World Cup payments, despite the PFA’s unreasonable stance. That will happen in the next 24 to 48 hours.
So, where to now?
On behalf of all the stakeholders in Australian football, I have an obligation to ensure the new whole of game CBA is affordable, fair and reasonable.
Payments to players account for more than $1 in every $3 of income. Every dollar that goes to player payments is one less dollar for game development, coach and referee education, promotion in schools, support for A-League clubs and distributions to State and Territory member federations.
In particular, I note that the PFA’s assertions about a “freeze” in the A-league salary cap. The range of new allowances (loyalty players, home grown players, minimum salary and salary cap banking) are in fact payments to players. They already amount to $400,000 for this coming season. They are tantamount to increases in the salary cap. Talk of a salary cap freeze with these allowances taken into account is nonsense.
And it’s nonsense that until their male colleagues get a deal, the Matildas are in limbo.In 1991, I got a call from my friend Matt Federgreen, the proprietor of the Beverly Hills Baseball Card Shop and my co-host for a little segment I did on each of my half-hour-long Sunday night sportscasts on KCBS-Channel 2 in L.A.
Matt had been approached by Bruce McNall, the owner of the Los Angeles Kings and at that time the rising figure in hockey ownership and L.A. sports moguldom. McNall had made his millions buying and selling (and as the jury later agreed, often selling and re-selling and re-re-selling) antique coins, and he was fascinated by the upcoming auction of the Jim Copeland sports memorabilia. Big-money auctions were nothing new to the baseball card world, but this one was being handled by Sotheby’s, meaning the hobby was being mainstreamed into investment-grade collectibles.
The centerpiece of the Sotheby’s Auction was an unbelievably pristine copy of the 1909 American Tobacco Company card of Honus Wagner, hardly the scarcest, but handily the most famous, card in the landmark series we collectors call by its catalogue number “T-206.” McNall and a then-unidentified partner (who proved to be his star player, Wayne Gretzky) wanted the card and they wanted Federgreen’s expertise. The card looked brand new. It bore no earmarks of being a clever counterfeit. But it also bore no signs of nearly 92 years of aging. Unless somebody was standing at the printing press when the card was finished drying, and stuffed it between the pages of a book, and kept the book in a climate-controlled room from the opening days of the Presidential administration of William Howard Taft, and had only taken it out after the inauguration of George H.W. Bush, something seemed wrong.
Something was very wrong. I couldn’t go with Matt to the inspection of the Wagner that McNall had arranged for him. But Matt took a bunch of pictures, and the next time he came in to the studios he brought them.
Matt has a sly smile that usually gives him away. “Whaddya think?”
I took one look at the photos and said “It’s been trimmed.”
Matt laughed. “That’s what I told Bruce. He said thanks very much, he said he thought so too, he said he’d probably buy it any way, and he walked me to the door, and he paid me a very generous fee, and I left.”
I asked him to show me the photos again. They had rung too loud a bell. “I’ve seen this card before.”
Matt’s eyes lit up. By the following Sunday I had found in my rabbit’s warren of card-related stuff, photos of a Wagner that had been offered for sale in the early ’80s by a fellow who owned a baseball card store on Long Island outside New York City. I had no doubt and neither did Matt. Between his photos and mine we were looking at before-and-after shots of the same card.
Before and after somebody with the guts of a burglar and the skills of a circumcision specialist had trimmed the thing.
In its previous state the Wagner was an anomaly. It had very large white borders, and the card was thus perhaps 10% bigger than the average T-206. It looked like it had been hand-cut from a sheet of cards, and not done by a machine. Some of the corners were stubbed and worn from age. But the “face” of the card, the player’s image, the bright yellow background, the lettering, were shiny and virtually perfect. It had been handled, and handled an appropriate amount, since 1909. But whoever had done the handling had been very, very careful not to touch the face.
And then somebody bought it and actually cut away all the damage on the sides and sold it to Jim Copeland who had turned it over to Sotheby’s which would shortly sell it to Bruce McNall and Wayne Gretzky for $451,000. When McNall was exposed as a crook who would sell the same priceless coin to several different collectors (throwing in secure storage of it for a small additional fee – so that it was always around for him to show it and re-sell it to another collector even though he didn’t own it any more) Gretzky got full possession of the treasure and sold it off to Walmart as a publicity thing, basically at a break-even figure. The price has gone up and up and up, and “the” Wagner was finally sold to Conservative political figure and Arizona Diamondbacks’ owner Ken Kendrick, who five years ago paid $2,800,000 for it.
It’s not a fake. But it’s also not an original.
And for years, collectors and experts have murmured about the process by which a really nice Wagner had been altered, and the alterations hidden from the public (even receiving the stamp of approval by the presumptive “final word” of a card authenticating company which got enormous publicity – and undeserved credibility – for encasing the card in the first of its plastic “slabs”), and the card became the image of the sports memorabilia hobby.
But who was behind this? And, Heavens, who cut the card?
Now we have the answer, courtesy the FBI…
According to the indictment, in advertising portraying Mastro Auctions as the premier seller of valuable items, including the world’s most expensive baseball trading card, a Honus Wagner T-206 card, Mastro allegedly failed to disclose that he had altered the Wagner T-206 card by cutting the sides in a manner that, if disclosed, would have significantly reduced the value of the card.
The “Mastro” in question is Bill Mastro, who I have known since we were both teenagers. At age 19, he had bought a Wagner for $1,500 and thus completed his T-206 set. Those of us whose own massive collections might have been worth a total of $1,500 were aghast. My friend and mentor Mike Aronstein told me that some of Mastro’s relatives had actually gathered together to consider what we would now call an “intervention” or forcing him to seek psychological help. It was believed that no Wagner had previously sold for more than around $250. At the left is how this startling development was contemporaneously covered by a monthly publication I used to write for called The Trader Speaks.
Mastro was already buying and selling cards that were not intended for his own collection. By the ’80s he had gone from card dealer to the founder of one of the first sports memorabilia auction houses, Mastro Auctions, and would regularly work the phones to try to drum up publicity for his auctions.
It eventually became a $50,000,000 business. And now it’s gotten Mastro and some of his colleagues indicted. And not just for the deception regarding the Wagner.
More from the Department of Justice’s press release:
CHICAGO — Online and live auctions of sports memorabilia and other collectibles conducted during the 2000s by the former Mastro Auctions, which was based in suburban Chicago, routinely defrauded customers, according to a federal indictment unsealed today. William Mastro, who owned the former business that once billed itself as the “world’s leading sports and Americana auction house,” together with Doug Allen and Mark Theotikos, both former executives of Mastro Auctions, were indicted on fraud charges for allegedly rigging auctions through a series |
the entire pivoting assembly (more plastic, less steel).
CHANGES FROM LAST YEAR: The "MIX UNLOAD" label on #3905 Mighty Mixer changed from white letters on a transparent background to white letters on a black background.
1990 #3901 Mighty Dump 1990 #3908 Mighty Power Treads
1990 #3920 Mighty Loader 1990 #3907 Mighty Dozer
1990 #3905 Mighty Mixer 1990 #3909 Mighty Tow Truck
1990 #3931 Mighty Backhoe 1990 #3926 Mighty Crane
1990 #2500 25th Anniversary Mighty Dump Model #2500 celebrated the 25th year of the Mighty Tonka series. The "Silver Dump" as it is referred, began life as a typical #3901 Mighty Dump. All components, plastic and steel, that make a #3901, also make the #2500. Molded plastic parts like the tire hubs and the cab insert (the component that includes the grille) were run in an oil free environment. Special lubricants were used on mold surfaces and injection press operators wore white, lint free gloves when handling the plastic parts. Additionally, the containers the molded parts were stored in, were lined with a plastic bag and securely tied closed.
Pressed steel components also required special handling. After the steel components were pressed, the parts were run through a cleaning bath. This operation removed all lubricants required to keep steel stamping dies performing. Operators, wearing white, lint free gloves, would follow the same procedure as the injection molding operators when handling the clean steel parts.
Small steel components like the cab roof, were bulk packed in plastic bags and shipped in corrugated boxes. Large parts like the dump bed, cab wrap and chassis, were packed in a 48 inch square by 48 inch tall, plastic lined, wire mesh basket.
All components were shipped from Tonka's manufacturing facility in El Paso, Texas to Spartek, Inc. in Sparta Wisconsin. Spartek was a Tonka vendor when Tonka was manufacturing trucks in Mound. Spartek used a process called vacuum metalizing to put a "chrome like" finish on the parts. After the parts were metalized, each component was individually wrapped to prevent damaging the finish and returned to El Paso for final assembly. The trucking company's loved this project. Multiple carriers were signed on to haul approximately 50 thousand sets of parts to and from Spartek.Image copyright Getty Images
"Drastic action" is needed to contain the spread of deadly Ebola in West Africa, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Nearly 400 people have died in the outbreak which started in Guinea and has spread to neighbouring Sierra Leone and Liberia.
It is the largest outbreak in terms of cases, deaths and geographical spread.
The WHO said it was "gravely concerned" and there was potential for "further international spread".
The outbreak started four months ago and is continuing to spread.
So far there have been more than 600 cases and around 60% of those infected with the virus have died.
Ebola, a haemorrhagic fever, has no cure and is spread by contact with the fluids of infected people or animals, such as urine, sweat and blood.
Most of the deaths have been centred in the southern Guekedou region of Guinea.
The WHO has sent 150 experts to the region to help prevent the spread of the virus but admits " there has been significant increase in the number of daily reported cases and deaths".
Dr Luis Sambo, the WHO's regional director for Africa, said: "This is no longer a country-specific outbreak, but a sub-regional crisis that requires firm action.
"WHO is gravely concerned of the on-going cross-border transmission into neighbouring countries as well as the potential for further international spread.
"There is an urgent need to intensify response efforts...this is the only way that the outbreak will be effectively addressed."
The charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has already warned that the Ebola outbreak is out of control.
It says the epidemic will spread further unless there is a stronger international response.
Ebola virus disease (EVD)
Image copyright Science Photo Library
Symptoms include high fever, bleeding and central nervous system damage
Fatality rate can reach 90%
Incubation period is two to 21 days
There is no vaccine or cure
Supportive care such as rehydrating patients who have diarrhoea and vomiting can help recovery
Fruit bats are considered to be the natural host of the virus
Why Ebola is so dangerousThe debate on validity of triple talaq intensified after the Allahabad High Court on Thursday termed the system as unconstitutional. The court added that it is the Constitution of India that is supreme and not the Muslim Law Board. The high court bench said that Triple Talaq violated human rights and that personal law of any community cannot be above the Constitution.
#FLASH Allahabad High Court says "triple talaq is unconstitutional, it violates the rights of Muslim women" — ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) December 8, 2016
"No Personal Law Board is above the Constitution," says Allahabad High Court — ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) December 8, 2016
The observation comes in the wake of discussion and debate getting vocal about the validity of Muslim Law Board and this statement by Allahabad High Court is a boost for women petitioners involved in the case of triple talaq.
Coming down heavily on triple talaq, the court called it instant divorce, and said it's "most demeaning" and "impedes and drags India from becoming a nation". "The question which disturbs the court is — should Muslim wives suffer this tyranny for all times? Should their personal law remain so cruel towards these unfortunate wives? Whether the personal law can be amended suitably to alleviate their sufferings? The judicial conscience is disturbed at this monstrosity," a single judge bench of Justice Suneet Kumar said.
"Muslim law, as applied in India, has taken a course contrary to the spirit of what the Prophet or the Holy Quran laid down and the same misconception vitiates the law dealing with the wife's right to divorce", he said.
"The purpose of law in a modern, secular state...is to bring about social change. The Muslim community comprise a large percentage of Indian population, therefore, a large section of citizens, in particular women, cannot be left to be governed by archaic customs and social practice under the garb of personal law purportedly having divine sanction", the court observed.
"India is a nation in the making, geographical boundaries alone do not define a nation. It is to be adjudged, among others, on the parameter of overall human development and how the society treats its women; leaving such a large population to the whims and fancies of a personal law which perpetuates gender inequality and is regressive, is not in the interest of the society and the country. It impedes and drags India from becoming a nation", the court remarked.
The court observed, "Divorce is permissible in Islam only in case of extreme emergency. When all efforts for effecting a reconciliation have failed, the parties may proceed to a dissolution of marriage by talaq or by 'khola'. The view that the Muslim husband enjoys an arbitrary, unilateral power to inflict instant divorce does not accord with Islamic injunctions.It is a popular fallacy that a Muslim husband enjoys, under the Quranic Law, unbridled authority to liquidate the marriage."
"The whole Quran expressly forbids a man to seek pretexts for divorcing his wife, so long as she remains faithful and obedient to him," the court said in an order dated 5 November.
"The Islamic law gives to the man primarily the faculty of dissolving the marriage, if the wife, by her indocility or her bad character, renders the married life unhappy; but in the absence of serious reasons, no man can justify a divorce, either in the eye of religion or the law", the court said.
The court made the observations while dismissing the petition of Hina, a 23-year-old woman, and her husband who was
30 years her senior and had married her "after effecting triple talaq to his wife".
Speaking with CNN-News18 Kamal Farooqui of All India Muslim Personal Law Board said, "This is not a judgment, just an observation." Adding to that Congress' Rashid Alvi said, "This view of the Allahabad High court won't stand in the Supreme Court. I don't agree with what the Allahabad HC has to say. No one is above the Constitution and nobody should interfere in the practises of any community."
Other ministers reacted to High Court's observation:
Islam is 1 of most progressive religions about women's rights. Talaq is part of Sharia law, no interference should be there: Kamal Faruqui pic.twitter.com/210VRuTkzn — ANI (@ANI_news) December 8, 2016
Constitution gives me right to follow my religion. Its observation by court, not decision: Kamal Faruqui All India Muslim Personal Law Board pic.twitter.com/kqxLiEvtT8 — ANI (@ANI_news) December 8, 2016
It is a progressive move by the court (on triple talaq). Only some orthodox people are objecting to it: R.K Singh, BJP pic.twitter.com/kbttCb4FRq — ANI (@ANI_news) December 8, 2016
It is a progressive decision (triple talaq) by court, should be welcomed by all regardless of political affiliations: Meenakshi Lekhi, BJP pic.twitter.com/awRjMb24Xa — ANI (@ANI_news) December 8, 2016
There is no Sharia law in country, if there was people's head/hand would be cut off Decision will benefit Muslim community: Meenakshi Lekhi pic.twitter.com/UdbbpzzByH — ANI (@ANI_news) December 8, 2016
This should have happened long ago, I am happy that my Muslim sisters will have more rights in life: Renuka Chowdhury, Congress pic.twitter.com/m8dDRJb7ZF — ANI (@ANI_news) December 8, 2016
I am happy that my Muslim sisters have a little more security, dignity to their lives: Renuka Chowdhury,Congress on Triple talaq pic.twitter.com/UUMrcibyQo — ANI (@ANI_news) December 8, 2016
It’s an idea that has come of age;Happy my Muslim sisters have more security to their lives: Renuka Chowdhury on verdict on triple talaq pic.twitter.com/bhnEfivKmc — ANI (@ANI_news) December 8, 2016
The Muslim Law Board has announced that it will file a petition against the order. The issue is expected to gain more ground and the matter of arbitrary divorce debated upon after this order. The controversial Shah Bano maintenance case in 1986 raged a debate on the rights of Muslim women and their exploitation on the grounds of Triple Talaq, a personal law that allows muslim man to divorce his wife by uttering the word 'talaq' three times.
This order will also embolden the advocates of Uniform Civil Code and bring the personal law boards under pressure. Considering the upcoming assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, this decision gains more significance. On 23 November, Union home minister Rajnath Singh had said that muslim women cannot be treated like second class citizens in a developing country like India and he termed the Triple Talaq as a burning issue.
On the issue of 'triple talaq', the Centre had in an affidavit in the Supreme Court last month opposed the practice. The AIMPLB and various other outfits have objected to the affidavit and Law Commission's questionnaire on Uniform Civil Code and announced their boycott of the move, accusing the government of waging a "war" against the community.
In an appeal issued on 7 October, the Commission had said the objective of the endeavour was to address discrimination against vulnerable groups and harmonise various cultural practices.
In the appeal, it has assured the people that the "norms of no one class, group or community will dominate the tone and tenor of family law reforms". Indicating need for wider consultation before taking a call on Uniform Civil Code, the government had in June asked the Law Commission to examine the issue.
The move asking the law panel to examine the issue assumes significance as the Supreme Court had recently said it would prefer a wider debate, in public as well as in court, before taking a decision on the constitutional validity of triple talaq, which many complain is abused by Muslim men to arbitrarily divorce their wives.
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.Hockey pants are primarily designed to protect three high-risk areas on your lower body – hips / kidneys, front thighs, and tailbone – against falls, shots, slashes, and hits. In addition, some pants will have minor padding in other areas as well.
In this article we will cover
Popular brands of Hockey Pants
Price
Difference in Materials
Sizing and Fit
Personal preferences
Lifetime and General Care
Recommendations
Tips for buying
Popular brands of Hockey Pants
The most common brands are:
Bauer (Supreme, Vapor, Nexus)
CCM (Super Tacks, Jetspeed, Quicklite)
Warrior (Covert)
Sher-Wood, Winnwell, Graf, and Powertek are also around, although not as common.
Reebok (Now under CCM name)
Easton (now owned by Bauer – Stealth, Mako)
Tackla
Price Range
A pair of hockey pants will cost you $50-$200 new. There is a difference in material between good hockey pants and cheap hockey pants which we will detail below.
Difference in material / features among price ranges
All pants will have three main materials – a nylon fabric shell, armored plastic/foam padding, and stretch material for mobility. Traditional style pants will build all three of these into one, while girdle pants have a separate, removable nylon shell and a tight-fitting inner liner which contains padding and Spandex-type stretch material.
Stretch fabric: This is located primarily on the underside of the pant in the crotch/inner leg area. It allows for mobility and long strides during play, and also helps with breathability. Some of the cheapest pants only have one piece of stretch fabric running front to back, while most have 4-way stretch (a plus-shape of stretch fabric running front/back and left/right). High-end pants may have additional stretch or vent mesh panels in other places too.
Padding: All pants will have pads in at least 5 areas: one on each hip, one on each thigh, and one in the tailbone (usually segmented). Higher-quality pants will have thicker pads in these areas, and may also have extra padding in places such as the space between the hip and thigh pads.
Shell: Better pants will have thicker, more durable nylon shells, helping with longevity and cut resistance. They can also have zippers on the inner leg for those who like putting on their pants after their skates.
Hockey Pants Sizing & Fit
Most pants come in the standard XS-XXL size designation, although each brand will fit differently. Tackla and some pro stock pants will use European sizing (eg. 52), which you can convert using charts online.
When fitting your pants, there are a couple things to look for
The pants should be snug enough around the waist that they won’t fall down during play. If you like a loose fit, suspenders are an option for you.
The bottom of the pant should rest somewhere between the middle and top of your kneecap when your legs are straight. If they’re too long, your mobility will be restricted, and if they’re too short, you will have gaps in your protection.
They should be comfortable to move around in – try doing various stretches to see how easy it is to move.
What if you’re skinny and everything feels too loose?
First of all, try finding a pant made to fit tall players. For example, the Easton Stealth 75s is made in regular and tall options, so it’s a good choice for skinny players. Higher-end Reebok pants also have a built-in zipper around the waist which allows you to increase their length.
If you can’t find anything that fits well, go for a proper length fit first, and wear hockey suspenders (usually available for around $12). If you try to fit width at the expense of height, your pants won’t protect you properly at the knees.
Common personal preferences
Different brands will come in different fit styles. Try as many on as you can to see what works for you. I’ve divided them up into three categories here: Snug is made mostly of girdles, although some of Easton’s recent pants have been quite tight as well. A European fit is moderately wide in the waist but a bit narrower in the legs, while an American fit is wider throughout.
This list refers to the current generation of pants – except for the Supreme traditional pant, which is no longer current but still worth noting because it’s still pretty common in stores.
Snug fit Bauer Supreme (girdle) Warrior Projekt (girdle) Other girdle-construction pants, if any
Mid (“European”) fit: Bauer Vapor Tackla CCM JetSpeed
Wide (“American”) fit: Bauer Nexus Bauer Supreme (traditional pant) Sher-Wood CCM Supertacks Warrior Covert Most pro stock pants
Expected lifetime, general care & maintenance for Hockey Pants
Overall, hockey pants are easy to take care of. You should dry them out promptly after use and inspect them occasionally for damage.
If you find rips, get them patched up before they get too big. If you do this, a decent pair of pants can easily last a decade or more. The ones in the sizing pictures are close to 15 years old.
Note from Coach Jeremy: I bought a pair of hockey pants when I was 17 and they lasted until I was 27, they would have lasted longer except I made the mistake of washing them with a bit of bleach and it caused the foam padding to fall apart.
Recommendations
If you’re new to skating, something with a decent tailbone protector is a good idea. (you will fall on your butt!)
If you block shots, something with a good thigh pad is recommended. If you get bumped around or cross-checked a lot when fighting for position in front of the net, look for something with a large tailbone/lower spine protector which leaves minimal gap below your shoulder pads.
Pants with only minimal stretch fabric on the bottom can get restrictive and uncomfortable. Try to find something with the full plus-shaped (4-way) stretch bottom.
Hockey Pant Shells and Colours
Black is the most common colour when it comes to hockey pants, however other colours are available. Blue and red are also common. If you want to look good and get pants that match the colour of your teams jersey you can always buy black pants and then buy hockey pants shells that will match the colour. The link provided shows the models of pants that shells are available for. Click on the pants you have to select the size and colour you would like.
Buying used Hockey Pants
Picking up used pants can be quite cost-effective, since their overall construction hasn’t changed much in the last few decades and they tend last a very long time. Just make sure to check to that they’re in good condition.
Here are a few things to look for when shopping for used hockey pants:
No plastic inserts should be missing – There shouldn’t be any major rips anywhere (or if there are, they should be easily fixable).
Pay particular attention to the underside near the crotch and inner legs, because this is an easy area to overlook. Rips in the stretch fabric are nearly impossible to patch effectively, because doing so will make them less stretchy.
The zippers (if any) on the inner thigh should close all the way: In some leagues, having open thighs isn’t allowed and you will be kicked out if the ref notices. It may also be possible to sew up at your LHS if the zipper is stuck open or the shell is cut.
Tips for Hockey Pants Fitting
Buying Hockey Pants online
If you can’t make it to a local hockey shop, or you just want to browse the selection and deals online there are a few great online hockey equipment retailers. The sites listed below have good return policies and a wide selection. I also recommend sizing yourself up first and consulting the hockey pants fitting charts before ordering.
Recommended online hockey equipment storesTheir actions devastated News's competitors, and the resulting waves of high-tech piracy assisted News to bid for pay TV businesses at reduced prices – including DirecTV in the US, Telepiu in Italy and Austar. These targets each had other commercial weaknesses quite apart from piracy, the AFR says.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is still deliberating on final details before approving Foxtel's $1.9 billion takeover bid for Austar, which will cement Foxtel's position as the dominant pay TV provider in Australia.
News Corp has categorically denied any involvement in promoting piracy and points to a string of court actions by competitors making similar claims, from which it has emerged victorious. In the only case that went to court, in 2008, the plaintiff EchoStar was ordered to pay nearly $19 million in legal costs.
The issue is particularly sensitive because Operational Security, which is headed by Reuven Hasak, a former deputy director of the Israeli domestic secret service, Shin Bet, operates in an area which historically has had close supervision by the Office of the Chairman, Rupert Murdoch.
The security group was initially set up in a News Corp subsidiary, News Datacom Systems (later known as NDS), to battle internal fraud and to target piracy against its own pay TV companies. But documents uncovered by the AFR reveal that NDS encouraged and facilitated piracy by hackers not only of its competitors but also of companies, such as Foxtel, for whom NDS provided pay TV smart cards. The documents show NDS sabotaged business rivals, fabricated legal actions and obtained telephone records illegally.Walk and talk with your children. Ask them questions that simulate survival scenarios for children.
Survival Scenarios for Children
Let me start off by saying, I’m not asking you to drop your children off in a forest, with only a knife to see if they survive.
I am asking you to talk with them, ask them questions and to get them thinking.
Turn it into a Game
Make it fun to think. Give them a quiz.
I like to get settled in at a restaurant or movie theater, then after a short while, spring a quiz on my kids.
“How many exits are there from this room/building?”
“Where are the exits from this room/building?”
Since I don’t do it every time, they aren’t sure when they need to know the answers, so now they know they need to be ready to answer these questions at random times.
What does the winner get? A “Great job!” followed by a high-five.
Make Them Think
Ask your kids lots of “What if” or “How would you” questions, come up with some creative survival scenarios for children and brainstorm together, as a family.
We were shopping at Ikea this week and we came to a room display that had a real window, about 8 feet tall, starting at the floor level. This window was overlooking a 3 story drop to the parking lot below. There was nothing there to break a fall except hard, unforgiving blacktop.
Being the secret agent-ninja that I am (Ha), I was already trying to figure out what I’d do if I had to go out that window, so I decided to outsource this dilemma to my daughters.
“Ok, ladies, if this building was on fire, and our only escape was this window, what would you guys do?”
The brain wheels went wild.
“We could take those curtains and the blankets from that bed and tie them together, like a rope and use that to get down.”
I was pretty impressed, but that was probably the same plan I would use, but there was still a problem that I hadn’t solved.
What would I secure the makeshift rope to, so that a full grown man, like me could get down.
“What would you tie the rope to so we could all climb down”, I asked.
My 8 year old didn’t bat an eye. She pointed to the open, industrial ceiling, and there at about 9 feet high was a thick steel beam. “We’d tie it to that!”
Crap, I didn’t even see that. Not to be outdone, “Who’s going to knot all these fabrics together to fashion this rope?”, I inquired.
The 8 year old and 6 year old answered in unison “Sarah”.
Sarah, is my 7 year old knot master. If it’s a knot, she can tie it. If it’s in a knot, she can untie it. You’re trapped at a picnic without plates? Give her 15 seconds and she’ll weave some plates for you out of grass and then fashion some sticks and weeds together into a rudimentary lathe, for good measure.
They had me, there was no arguing about the knots, it would be Sarah.
By playing these games and creating these imaginary scenarios, they are learning and coming up with amazing ideas. Even if they come up with a terrible plan, it’s better than no plan at all.
Practice Drills
You need to also take some of this a step further and do some home safety drills. Have fire drills, tornado drills, earthquake drills, car jacking and burglar alarm or home invasion drills.
Make sure your entire family knows the plan, the secret code words and the meeting places. Ensure that you explain the what and why you are doing these things, and make them routine, make them fun and offer rewards and praise for a job well done.
Teach them how to call 911, make sure they have important contact numbers memorized.
By discussing, practicing and brainstorming about survival scenarios for children you’ll sharpen their minds and hopefully this will make them more likely to come up with a plan, instead of falling into panic and freezing up if the unexpected happens.
Also take the time to teach them fun stuff, take them bowling, canoeing, back yard camping, hiking or to do activities that they enjoy. They are kids you know 😉One by one, here are the details of what's being proposed, with the official announcement to come at a series of news conferences tomorrow. (Click here to see the whole plan below.)
The new arena — officially dubbed an event center — will cost $140 million, plus $33 million for land acquisition. That's substantially less than the $300 million figure that had been whispered in recent months. A spokesman for Mr. Emanuel says the arena will create 10,000 construction and 3,700 permanent jobs.
The facility will cover most of the block bounded by 21st Street, Indiana Avenue, Cermak Road and Prairie Avenue. That's a block west of a property that the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, the agency that runs McCormick Place, originally wanted. But that land has been stuck in bankruptcy proceedings and “it was taking forever to acquire it,” said authority CEO Jim Reilly. So the agency switched gears.
DePaul's board has approved an agreement in principle to hold its men's and women's basketball games there, as well as some other events such as graduation ceremonies, Mr. Koch said. The school, which now plays its basketball games in Rosemont, will finance half the cost of the new building (or $70 million) and, according to Mr. Reilly, it will pay “market rate” rent of $25,000 per men's game, $15,000 for women's, which attract a smaller crowd.
DePaul will get naming rights on the facility, and it is believed the school has lined up a major donor. The timetable calls for the Blue Demons to begin playing there in the 2016-17 session.
McPier, as the convention agency generally is known, will pay the other half of building costs by using leftover funds from bond sales that have been held in reserve. Those revenue bonds are secured by McPier revenues, primarily a tax on hotel rooms.
Messrs. Reilly and Koch said the arena/event center will at least pay its own operating costs, thanks in part to raiding the concert business that the United Center has dominated. But the United Center's primary owners, Jerry Reinsdorf and Rocky Wirtz, don't like that at all. And some sports insiders argue that spending the $70 million may cause the city to squeeze Chicago hotel guests for even more money, even though they already pay the highest room tax in the country.
“Not true,” responds Mr. Reilly. “In fact, the development ought to help... attract more people to more hotels.”
Among those interested in using the new arena for convention-related gatherings are shows for hardware merchants, dentists and the solar-power industry, the city says.
We had heard about the 1,100-room hotel to McCormick's west before; it will be financed by McPier, though run privately. What's new is another 500-room hotel that would be developed somewhat later, depending on demand. It would go next to the basketball arena.
A total of $33 million in TIF money will be used for land acquisition and streetscaping. The investment “absolutely” is worth it because the development overall will spur the type of night life, dining and entertainment venues the McCormick Place area has lacked, Mr. Koch said.Late afternoon lighting produced a dramatic shadow of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity photographed by the rover's rear hazard-avoidance camera on March 20, 2014.
The shadow falls across a slope called the McClure-Beverlin Escarpment on the western rim of Endeavour Crater, where Opportunity is investigating rock layers for evidence about ancient environments. The scene includes a glimpse into the distance across the 14-mile-wide (22-kilometer-wide) crater.
The rover experienced a partial cleaning of dust from its solar panels by Martian wind this week, boosting electrical output from the array by about 10 percent, following a similar event last week. That is in addition to increased sunshine each day in the Martian southern hemisphere's early spring. Combined, the seasonal effect and multiple dust-cleaning events have increased the amount of energy available each day from the rover's solar array by more than 70 percent compared with two months ago, to more than 615 watt hours.
On March 23, 2004, when Opportunity had been working on Mars for only two months, scientists announced the mission's headline findings of evidence for water gently flowing across the surface of an area of Mars billions of years ago.
During Opportunity's first decade on Mars and the 2004-2010 career of its twin, Spirit, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Project yielded a range of findings proving wet environmental conditions on ancient Mars -- some very acidic, others milder and more conducive to supporting life.
JPL manages the Mars Exploration Rover Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. For more information about Spirit and Opportunity, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/rovers and http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov
You can follow the project on Twitter and on Facebook at:
http://twitter.com/MarsRovers and http://www.facebook.com/mars.rovers
News Media Contact
Guy Webster 818-354-6278Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.guy.webster@jpl.nasa.gov2014-095Enlarge By Joel Salcido for USA TODAY Juan Guillermo Tornoe, an Hispanic advertising executive at his home in Austin. The Guatemalan native is an example of an upward mobility of Hispanics in the U.S. Digg
del.icio.us
Newsvine
Reddit
Facebook Prashant Tungare arrived in the USA in 1984 with a wife, a child and $500 in his pocket. Today, the India-born American citizen is a prosperous computer specialist at Wachovia Bank. "I've lived the American dream," says Prashant, 55. He owns a 3,000-square-foot house in Charlotte and has enough money to retire, but loves his job too much to quit. Tungare is part of the wealthiest generation in American history — a group of 67 million people 55 and older who are so affluent that the gap between them and younger people increasingly is making the USA a nation of haves and haves-much-less. RELATED STORY: Grads set out in more debt than their parents did The growing divide between the rich and poor in America is more generation gap than class conflict, according to a USA TODAY analysis of federal government data. The rich are getting richer, but what's received little attention is who these rich people are. Overwhelmingly, they're older folks. Nearly all additional wealth created in the USA since 1989 has gone to people 55 and older, according to Federal Reserve data. Wealth has doubled since 1989 in households headed by older Americans. Not so for younger Americans. Households headed by people in their 20s, 30s and 40s have barely kept up with inflation or have fallen behind since 1989. People 35 to 50 actually have lost wealth since 1989 after adjusting for inflation, Fed data show. YOUNG & IN DEBT: USA TODAY's six-week series on how twentysomethings are struggling with growing debt Older people have always been wealthier than younger ones. What's changed is the disparity between the generations. Old people have been racing ahead, helped by government retirement benefits. Young people are running in place, partly because they're delaying careers to get more education. The growing gap between rich and poor has raised concerns about social justice, the fairness of the tax system and other issues. Congressional Democrats, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and President Bush have expressed concerns about economic inequality, although there is no consensus about what, if anything, should be done. Much attention has focused on the multimillion-dollar paychecks of corporate chief executives and hedge fund managers, who've enjoyed windfalls at a time when the wages of ordinary workers have stagnated. But the graying of wealth and income may be the most important twist in the new inequality. The implications are far-reaching and can turn conventional wisdom on its head. Social Security and Medicare increasingly are functioning as a transfer of money from less affluent young people to much wealthier older people. Because the older generation hasn't set aside enough money to cover promised government benefits, young people will have to make up the difference or older people will face benefit cuts. The financial shortfalls of Social Security and Medicare over the next 75 years are so large — $340,000 per household — that they dwarf the wealth of every age group. This hidden debt will make it a challenge for young people to accumulate as much wealth late in life as their parents have. A growing imbalance In the USA, income typically peaks at age 57 and wealth tops out at 63, according to the Fed's Survey of Consumer Finance. Wealth describes a person's net worth — assets minus debts — and reflects a lifetime's accumulation of income, investments and inheritances. Income measures how much a person earned in a single year. Inequality within age groups hasn't changed much. People in their 30s or 60s have roughly the same wealth distribution among themselves as in 1989. What's changed is inequality between age groups. Older people are thriving in wealth and income. Younger people are not. How wealth and income have changed for two age groups, after adjusting for inflation: •Ages 55-59: Median net worth — the middle point for all households — rose 97% over 15 years to $249,700 in 2004, the most recent year for which data is available. Median income rose 52%. •Ages 35-39: Median household net worth fell 28% to $48,940. Median income fell 10%. The increase in the wealth of older people tracks a sharp reduction in elderly poverty that began in the 1960s, when Medicare was introduced and Social Security benefits were improved. The wealth gap between young and old is on a path to grow even more extreme. Baby boomers — 79 million people born from 1946 to 1964 — are entering their years of greatest wealth and maximum government benefits. Today, the oldest baby boomer is 61. The youngest is 43. As tens of millions of people head into their years of peak wealth, inequality could soar until baby boomers pass on inheritances to their children or grandchildren. The inequality debate has focused mostly on the super-rich, who have been getting super-richer. The top-earning 1% of taxpayers — those who make more than $310,000 annually — collected 17% of total income in 2005, up from 13% in 1989 and 8% in 1975, according to Internal Revenue Service data analyzed by economists Thomas Piketty at the Paris School of Economics and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley. IRS data don't include information on age, race and education. A USA TODAY analysis of Federal Reserve and Census data found that demographics — especially age — could be the most important and overlooked factor behind the widening gap. The old are richer Most wealth accumulation happens rapidly and late in life — after the kids leave, when income is high, debts drop, 401(k) accounts fatten and home equity swells, according to Fed data. The safety net — Social Security, pensions and Medicare — also has resulted in big increases in income for the elderly and a sharp decline in the rate at which they dissipate their assets in old age. Most people over 60 have no mortgage debt, no credit card debt and no car loan. Trends for younger people have gone in the opposite direction. Mortgage debt peaks for people in their late 30s, the same time they have the most kids at home. About 11% are at least 60 days behind paying on some debt. Younger generations now delay the start of wealth accumulation. They postpone careers to get more education. They marry later (delaying the financial benefit of a shared household), have children later (delaying the arrival of lower-cost, kid-free days) and inherit money later (their parents live longer). Younger people may not look poor. They have more stuff than ever — more valuable houses, cars and other assets. But they are so much deeper in debt than their parents — student loans, credit cards, mortgages, car loans — that their net worth has shriveled. What's not clear is whether today's younger people will catch up. Will they reap financial rewards late in life as their parents did? "Young people have a great future ahead of them, but the rules of wealth creation have changed," says economist Kay Strong of Bowling Green State University in Ohio. She says young people will have to work longer and switch jobs more often than their parents for financial success. "The baby boomers were the last generation able |
, Draconic
Common, Draconic Challenge 9 (5,000 XP) Slayer. The dragonspawn's weapon attacks ignore the damage resistances and immunities of celestials and dragons. On a critical hit, a celestial or dragon must make a Constitution saving throw with a DC equal to the damage dealt, or drop to 0 hit points. Actions Multiattack. The dragonspawn makes two melee attacks. Longsword. Melee Weapon Attack: +12 to hit, reach 15 ft., one target. Hit 19 (2d10 + 8) slashing damage, and the target must succeed on a DC 16 Strength saving throw or be pushed up to 30 feet away from the dragonspawn and knocked prone. Bite. Melee Weapon Attack: +12 to hit, reach 10 ft., one target. Hit 17 (2d8 + 8) piercing damage plus 5 (1d10) lightning damage. Lightning Breath (Recharge 5-6). The dragonspawn exhales lightning in a 60-foot line that is 5 feet wide. Each creature in that line must make a DC 16 Dexterity saving throw, taking 55 (10d10) lightning damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one. Dragonspawn Dragonspawn are savage monsters originally created from the magical corruption of dragon eggs by infusing them with the blood of other creatures. This ritual is exclusively performed by followers of Tiamat, as Bahamut accepts only willing non-dragons into his service to be transformed into dragonborn. Bluespawn Godslayer Bluespawn godslayers live for one purpose: to slay Tiamat’s enemies. They delight in combat and take pride in their expertise with weapons. These giant-blooded dragonspawn guard the lairs of blue dragons, and seek out and slaughter good dragons and allies of Bahamut. Bluespawn godslayers often work with other spawn of Tiamat serving as heavy hitters and anchor points in an army, and with true dragons who protect them from flying enemies. Creating Dragonspawn Dragonspawn are fully draconic in appearance, bearing scales, claws, and heads resembling their draconic parentage but with a body in the shape of some other creature. The half-dragon template (Monster Manual pg 180) can be used with other creatures for on-the-fly creation of the sample dragonspawn below: Blackspawn Exterminator: Assassin
Assassin Greenspawn Razorfiend: Wyvern
Wyvern Redspawn Firebelcher: Triceratops (Large size)
Triceratops (Large size) Whitespawn Hordeling: Winged Kobold (CR 1)
Elemental Greater Fire Elemental Fire elementals vary in appearance—they usually manifest as coiling serpentine forms made of smoke and flame, but some fire elementals take on shapes more akin to humans, demons, or other monsters in order to increase the terror of their sudden appearance. Features on a fire elemental’s body are made by darker bits of flame or patches of semi-stable smoke, ash, and cinders. Greater Fire Elemental Huge elemental, neutral Armor Class 13
13 Hit Points 121 (13d12 + 36)
121 (13d12 + 36) Speed 50ft. STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA 10 (+0) 17 (+3) 16 (+3) 6 (-2) 10 (+0) 7 (-2) Damage Resistances bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from nonmagical attacks
bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from nonmagical attacks Damage Immunities fire, poison
fire, poison Condition Immunities exhaustion, grappled, paralyzed, petrified, poisoned, prone, restrained, unconscious
exhaustion, grappled, paralyzed, petrified, poisoned, prone, restrained, unconscious Senses darkvision 60 ft., passive Perception 10
darkvision 60 ft., passive Perception 10 Languages Ignan
Ignan Challenge 9 (5,000 XP) Fire Form. The elemental can move through a space as narrow as 1 inch wide without squeezing. A creature that touches the elemental or hits it with a melee attack while within 5 feet of it takes 10 (3d6) fire damage. In addition, the elemental can enter a hostile creature’s space and stop there. The first time it enters a creature’s space on a turn, that creature takes 11 (2d10) fire damage and catches fire; until someone takes an action to douse the fire, the creature takes 10 (3d6) fire damage at the start of each of its turns. Illumination. The elemental sheds bright light in a 50-foot radius and dim light in an additional 50 feet. Water Susceptibility. For every 5 feet the elemental moves in water, or for every gallon of water splashed on it, it takes 1 cold damage. Actions Multiattack. The elemental makes two touch attacks. Touch. Melee Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, reach 10 ft., one target. Hit: 21 (5d6 + 3) fire damage. If the target is a creature or a flammable object, it ignites. Until a creature takes an action to douse the fire, the target takes 10 (3d6) fire damage at the start of each of its turns.
Greater Air Elemental Huge elemental, neutral Armor Class 15
15 Hit Points 145 (12d10 + 24)
145 (12d10 + 24) Speed 0 ft., fly 90ft. (hover) STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA 14 (+2) 20 (+5) 14 (+2) 6 (-2) 10 (+0) 6 (-2) Damage Resistances lightning, thunder; bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from nonmagical attacks
lightning, thunder; bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from nonmagical attacks Damage Immunities poison
poison Condition Immunities exhaustion, grappled, paralyzed, petrified, poisoned, prone, restrained, unconscious
exhaustion, grappled, paralyzed, petrified, poisoned, prone, restrained, unconscious Senses darkvision 60 ft., passive Perception 10
darkvision 60 ft., passive Perception 10 Languages Auran
Auran Challenge 9 (5,000 XP) Air Form. The elemental can enter a hostile creature’s space and stop there. It can move through a space as narrow as 1 inch wide without squeezing. Actions Multiattack. The elemental makes two slam attacks. Slam. Melee Weapon Attack: +9 to hit, reach 10 ft., one target. Hit: 23 (5d6 + 5) bludgeoning damage. Whirlwind (Recharge 4–6). Each creature in the elemental’s space must make a DC 16 Strength saving throw. On a failure, a target takes 25 (4d10 + 2) bludgeoning damage and is flung up to 30 feet away from the elemental in a random direction and knocked prone. If a thrown target strikes an object, such as a wall or floor, the target takes 3 (1d6) bludgeoning damage for every 10 feet it was thrown. If the target is thrown at another creature, that creature must succeed on a DC 15 Dexterity saving throw or take the same damage and be knocked prone. If the saving throw is successful, the target takes half the bludgeoning damage and isn’t flung away or knocked prone. Greater Air Elemental Although all air elementals of a similar size have identical statistics, the exact appearance of an air elemental can vary wildly between individuals. One might be an animated vortex of wind and smoke, while another might be a smoky bird-like creature with glowing eyes and wind for wings.
Giant Death Giant Huge giant, neutral evil Armor Class 17 (splint)
17 (splint) Hit Points 243 (18d12 + 126)
243 (18d12 + 126) Speed 40 ft. STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA 27 (+8) 13 (+1) 25 (+7) 13 (+1) 16 (+3) 21 (+5) Saving Throws Str +13, Con +12, Wis +8, Cha +10
Str +13, Con +12, Wis +8, Cha +10 Skills Arcana +6, Religion +6, Perception +8
Arcana +6, Religion +6, Perception +8 Damage Immunities necrotic
necrotic Senses darkvision 120 ft., passive Perception 18
darkvision 120 ft., passive Perception 18 Languages Common, Giant
Common, Giant Challenge 16 (15,000 XP) Innate Spellcasting. The giant's innate spellcasting ability is Charisma (spell save DC 18). It can innately cast blight 3 times per day, requiring no material components. It can target itself with the spell, regaining hit points with necrotic absorption. Legendary Resistance (3/Day). If the giant fails a saving throw, it can choose to succeed instead. Necrotic Absorption. Whenever the giant is subjected to necrotic damage, it takes no damage and instead regains a number of hit points equal to the necrotic damage dealt. Soul Shroud. At the start of each of the giant’s turns, each creature within 5 feet of it takes 10 (3d6) necrotic damage. Additionally, creatures within 5 feet of the giant cannot regain hit points. Turn Vulnerability. Any effect that turns undead affects the giant's soul shroud, using the giant's statistics except that the giant cannot use its Legendary Resistance to automatically succeed on this saving throw. If the soul shroud is turned, the giant loses the use of its Soul Shroud trait and cannot take legendary actions for 1 minute. Actions Multiattack. The giant makes two greataxe attacks. Greataxe. Melee Weapon Attack: +13 to hit, reach 15 ft., one target. Hit: 28 (3d12 + 8) slashing damage. Rock. Ranged Weapon Attack: +13 to hit, range 60/240 ft., one target. Hit: 34 (4d12 + 8) bludgeoning damage. Reactions Rock Catching. If a rock or similar object is hurled at the giant, the giant can, with a successful DC 10 Dexterity saving throw, catch the missile and take no bludgeoning damage from it. Death Giant A death giant harvests souls, trapping those it slays in a shroud of moaning spirits from which it draws power and sustenance. The ancestors of the death giants traded their own souls for immortality when they relocated to the Shadowfell, where they evolved into the soul-eating horrors they are today. Once slain, a death giant can never again return to life. Legendary Actions The giant can take 3 legendary actions, choosing from the options below. Only one legendary action option can be used at a time and only at the end of another creature’s turn. The giant regains spent legendary actions at the start of its turn. Frightful Keening. Each creature of the giant’s choice that is within 120 feet of the giant and can hear it must succeed on a DC 18 Wisdom saving throw or become frightened for 1 minute. A creature can repeat the saving throw at the end of each of its turns, ending the effect on itself on a success. If a creature’s saving throw is successful or the effect ends for it, the creature is immune to the giant’s Frightful Keening for the next 24 hours. Soul Search. The soul shroud warns the giant of danger, and the giant makes a Wisdom (Perception) check. The giant then has advantage on its next attack roll or saving throw against a creature or hazard it is aware of. Steal Soul. One creature that is within 15 feet of the giant and at 0 hit points must succeed on a DC 18 Charisma saving throw. On a failed save, the target dies and its soul is magically drawn into the giant's soul shroud, and the giant regains one casting of blight. While a creature's soul is trapped, it cannot be returned to life until the giant chooses to release the soul, or the giant dies.
Eldritch Giant Huge giant, neutral evil Armor Class 18 (plate)
18 (plate) Hit Points 263 (21d12 + 126)
263 (21d12 + 126) Speed 40 ft. STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA 29 (+9) 10 (+0) 22 (+6) 18 (+4) 16 (+3) 19 (+4) Saving Throws Str +14, Con +11, Wis +8, Cha +9
Str +14, Con +11, Wis +8, Cha +9 Skills Arcana +9, History +9, Perception +8
Arcana +9, History +9, Perception +8 Damage Resistances psychic
psychic Senses darkvision 120 ft., passive Perception 18
darkvision 120 ft., passive Perception 18 Languages Common, Giant
Common, Giant Challenge 15 (13,000 XP) Innate Spellcasting. The giant's innate spellcasting ability is Charisma (spell save DC 19). It can innately cast the following spells, requiring no material components: At will: detect magic, dispel magic 3/day each: dimension door, globe of invulnerability 1/day each: wall of force Shape Force. As an action, the eldritch giant can create one Large or smaller magical weapon, tool, or object of shimmering force, which lasts until the giant lets go of it or dismisses it as a free action. An item can take any form the giant wishes, but attacks with it always use the statistics for eldritch strike below. Actions Multiattack. The giant makes two eldritch strike attacks. It can replace one of these attacks with eldritch blast. Eldritch Strike. Melee Spell Attack: +14 to hit, reach 15 ft., one target. Hit: 42 (6d10 + 9) force damage. Eldritch Blast. The giant directs four rays of energy at the same target or different ones, making a separate attack roll for each ray. Ranged Spell Attack: +14 to hit, range 120/300 ft., one creature. Hit: 10 (1d10 + 4) force damage. Eldritch Giant Eldritch giants are ancient creatures that once ruled mountaintops and vast empires in the Feywild, now fallen from what was once great power. Although their strength has ebbed since those days, eldritch giants remember their ancient mastery of magic and forever seek to regain it. Eldritch giants dwell mainly in the near fonts of magical power. They guard such places jealously, leaving them only to seek out more magical power, such as an artifact or a piece of lost knowledge. An eldritch giant's skin is tattooed with magical patterns that protect it from magical attacks and allow it to absorb conjurations and other effects. These patterns also grant the giant the ability to teleport on flows of arcane energy. A particular eldritch giant might have access to other magical powers, as well as rituals and magic items. The eldest eldritch giants sometimes choose to act as otherworldly patrons for Fey Pact warlocks, favoring the Pact of the Blade and directing their followers to seek out arcane lore and magic items.
Golem Chain Golem Modeled after chain devils, chain golems often act as guardians over prisoners. Imbued with magic, these humanoid conglomerations of metal links enwrap foes in crushing chains. They specialize in pounding enemies, pulling them close, and engulfing them. Chain Golem Huge construct, unaligned Armor Class 19 (natural armor)
19 (natural armor) Hit Points 338 (25d12 + 175)
338 (25d12 + 175) Speed 40 ft. STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA 20 (+5) 22 (+6) 25 (+7) 3 (-4) 9 (-1) 1 (-5) Damage Immunities poison, psychic; bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from nonmagical attacks that aren't adamantine
poison, psychic; bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from nonmagical attacks that aren't adamantine Condition Immunities charmed, exhaustion, frightened, paralyzed, petrified, poisoned
charmed, exhaustion, frightened, paralyzed, petrified, poisoned Senses darkvision 120 ft., passive Perception 10
darkvision 120 ft., passive Perception 10 Languages understands the languages of its creator but can’t speak
understands the languages of its creator but can’t speak Challenge 15 (13,000 XP) Immutable Form. The golem is immune to any spell or effect that would alter its form. Magic Resistance. The golem has advantage on saving throws against spells and other magical effects. Reactive. The golem can take one reaction on every turn in combat. Stable Footing. The golem's movement speed is not reduced by difficult terrain. The golem has advantage on Strength ability checks and saving throws to resist being moved or knocked prone. Actions Multiattack. The golem makes three chain attacks. Chain. Melee Weapon Attack: +10 to hit, reach 20 ft., one target. Hit: 23 (4d8 + 5) bludgeoning damage, and the target must succeed on a DC 15 Strength saving throw or be pulled up to 20 feet toward the golem. Engulf. Each creature within 5 feet of the golem must make a DC 15 Dexterity saving throw. On a failed save, the creature enters the golem's space, and the creature takes 23 (4d8 + 5) bludgeoning damage and is engulfed. The engulfed creature can't breathe, is restrained, and takes 18 (4d8) bludgeoning damage at the start of each of the golem's turns. When the golem moves, the engulfed creature moves with it. The golem can have up to one Large or four Medium or smaller creatures engulfed at a time. An engulfed creature can try to escape by taking an action to make a DC 15 Strength check. On a success, the creature escapes and enters a space of its choice within 5 feet of the golem.
Iron Golem Juggernaut The ancients of certain powerful civilizations once took great pride in crafting golems of tremendous size and strength, often fashioned in the likeness of a god or other entity. A city’s greatest statue might be its key defender, a deity’s enormous idol could attack those who defile the sacred temple, or a pair of great sculptures might serve as guardians of another creature’s lair or tomb. Stone Golem Colossus The statistics here can be used for a Huge stone golem with a CR of 19 by eliminating the fire damage immunity and fire absorption trait, and reducing the golem's armor class to 18. Iron Golem Juggernaut Huge construct, unaligned Armor Class 20 (natural armor)
20 (natural armor) Hit Points 324 (24d12 + 168)
324 (24d12 + 168) Speed 40 ft. STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA 28 (+9) 9 (-1) 24 (+7) 3 (-4) 11 (+0) 1 (-5) Damage Immunities fire, poison, psychic; bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from nonmagical attacks that aren't adamantine
fire, poison, psychic; bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from nonmagical attacks that aren't adamantine Condition Immunities charmed, exhaustion, frightened, paralyzed, petrified, poisoned
charmed, exhaustion, frightened, paralyzed, petrified, poisoned Senses darkvision 120 ft., passive Perception 10
darkvision 120 ft., passive Perception 10 Languages understands the languages of its creator but can’t speak
understands the languages of its creator but can’t speak Challenge 20 (25,000 XP) Fire Absorption. Whenever the golem is subjected to fire damage, it takes no damage and instead regains a number of hit points equal to the fire damage dealt. Immutable Form. The golem is immune to any spell or effect that would alter its form. Magic Resistance. The golem has advantage on saving throws against spells and other magical effects. Magic Weapons. The golem’s weapon attacks are magical. Actions Multiattack. The golem makes two melee attacks. Slam. Melee Weapon Attack: +15 to hit, reach 10 ft., one target. Hit: 48 (7d10 + 9) bludgeoning damage. Sword. Melee Weapon Attack: +15 to hit, reach 15 ft., one target. Hit: 55 (7d12 + 9) slashing damage. Wrathful Gaze (Recharge 6). Each creature within 5 feet of a point the golem can see within 120 feet of the golem must make a DC 20 Dexterity saving throw, taking 110 (20d10) radiant damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one.
Nightshade Nightshades are hateful beings of pure shadow that spread death and suffering. Normally found in the deepest reaches of the Shadowfell, they sometimes stalk the world on unhallowed nights or linger near places where great evil was done. Nightwalkers stalk the surface of the Shadowfell, while the depths are plumbed by nightcrawlers resembling purple worms, and the heights are scoured by the roc-like nightwings. Nightwalker The first Nightwalkers came about when Orcus converted the seven Hierophants of Annihilation into these dread creatures. Only the ancient, unyielding will and malice of the long-dead spirit holds a nightwalker in its corporeal shape. A nightwalker exudes a deathly cold aura that harms living creatures and can channel the cold, dark energies of the Shadowfell through its attacks. A nightwalker uses telepathy to communicate. Nightwalkers can warp the void energies of the Shadowfell to create undead horrors. A humanoid slain by the nightwalker rises 24 hours later as a bodak under the nightwalker’s control, unless the humanoid is restored to life or its body is destroyed. Nightwalker Huge undead, chaotic evil Armor Class 17 (natural armor)
17 (natural armor) Hit Points 243 (18d12 + 126)
243 (18d12 + 126) Speed 40 ft. STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA 27 (+8) 13 (+1) 25 (+7) 11 (+0) 16 (+3) 21 (+5) Skills Perception +8, Stealth +6
Perception +8, Stealth +6 Damage Resistances fire, lightning; bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from nonmagical attacks
fire, lightning; bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from nonmagical attacks Damage Immunities cold, necrotic, poison
cold, necrotic, poison Condition Immunities charmed, frightened, poisoned
charmed, frightened, poisoned Senses darkvision 120 ft., passive Perception 18
darkvision 120 ft., passive Perception 18 Languages Abyssal, telepathy 120 ft.
Abyssal, telepathy 120 ft. Challenge 16 (15,000 XP) Voidchill Aura. Any creature other than fiends and undead that ends their turn within 30 feet of the nightwalker takes 10 (3d6) cold damage. Death Gaze. When a creature that can see the nightwalker’s eyes starts its turn within 30 feet of the nightwalker, the nightwalker can force it to make a DC 18 Constitution saving throw if the nightwalker isn’t incapacitated and can see the creature. If the saving throw fails by 5 or more, the creature dies. Otherwise, a creature that fails the save takes 55 (10d10) psychic damage. The target dies if this effect reduces it to 0 hit points. Creatures immune to fear automatically succeed on this saving throw. Unless surprised, a creature can avert its eyes to avoid the saving throw at the start of its turn. If the creature does so, it can’t see the nightwalker until the start of its next turn, when it can avert its eyes again. If the creature looks at the nightwalker in the meantime, it must immediately make the save. Sunlight Hypersensitivity. The nightwalker takes 10 radiant damage when it starts its turn in sunlight. While in sunlight, it has disadvantage on attack rolls and ability checks. Actions Multiattack. The nightwalker makes two slam attacks. Slam. Melee Weapon Attack: +13 to hit, reach 15 ft., one target. Hit: 22 (4d6 + 8) bludgeoning damage plus 18 (4d8) necrotic damage. Withering Gaze. The nightwalker fixes its gaze on one creature it can see within 30 feet of it. The target must make a DC 18 Constitution saving throw, taking 55 (10d10) necrotic damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one.
Spider Huge Fiendish Spider Lolth's fiendish blessings are not only bestowed upon the drow, but also upon her favored pets, the spiders. A brood of giant spider eggs nursed by a bebilith will hatch into these monstrosities. A fiendish giant spider will soften up its prey with raking claws, then finish off wounded targets with its paralyzing bite or web. Huge Fiendish Spider Huge fiend, chaotic evil Armor Class 16 (natural armor)
16 (natural armor) Hit Points 68 (8d12 + 16)
68 (8d12 + 16) Speed 30 ft., climb 30 ft. STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA 16 (+3) 18 (+4) 14 (+2) 4 (-3) 13 (+1) 6 (-2) Saving Throws Str +6, Con +5, Int +0, Cha +1
Str +6, Con +5, Int +0, Cha +1 Skills Stealth +7
Stealth +7 Damage Resistances cold, fire, lightning, poison; bludgeoning, slashing, and piercing from nonmagical weapons
cold, fire, lightning, poison; bludgeoning, slashing, and piercing from nonmagical weapons Senses blindsight 15 ft., darkvision 60 ft., passive Perception 10
blindsight 15 ft., darkvision 60 ft., passive Perception 10 Languages understands Abyssal but can't speak
understands Abyssal but can't speak Challenge 5 (1,800 xp) Spider Climb. The spider can climb difficult surfaces, including upside down on ceilings, without needing to make an ability check. Web Sense. While in contact with a web, the spider knows the exact location of any other creature in contact with the same web. Web Walker. The spider ignores movement restrictions caused by webbing. Actions Multiattack. The spider makes two claw attacks. Claw. Melee Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, reach 10 ft., one creature. Hit: 10 (1d10 + 4) slashing damage. Bite. Melee Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, reach 10 ft., one creature. Hit: 11 (1d12 + 4) piercing damage, and the target must make a DC 15 Constitution saving throw, taking 9 (2d8) poison damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one. If the poison damage reduces the target to 0 hit points, the target is stable but poisoned for 1 hour, even after regaining hit points, and is paralyzed while poisoned in this way. Venomous Web (Recharge 5-6). Ranged Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, range 30/60 ft., one creature. Hit: 9 (2d8) poison damage, and the target is restrained by webbing. While restrained, the target takes 9 (2d8) poison damage at the start of each of its turns. If the poison damage reduces the target to 0 hit points, the target is stable but poisoned for 1 hour, even after regaining hit points, and is paralyzed while poisoned in this way. As an action, the restrained target can make a DC 15 Strength check, bursting the webbing on a success. The webbing can also be attacked and destroyed (AC 10; hp 10; vulnerability to fire damage; immunity to bludgeoning, poison, and psychic damage).
Treant Blackroot Treant A blackroot treant is an undead horror that looks like a dead tree with brown, crumpled leaves clinging to its skeletal branches. Its bark and roots are black, and its eyes are cold, lifeless pits. Forests haunted by blackroot treants are blighted, forlorn places overrun with undead. Blackroot Treant Huge plant, chaotic evil Armor Class 17 (natural armor)
17 (natural armor) Hit Points 207 (18d12 + 90)
207 (18d12 + 90) Speed 30 ft. STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA 23 (+6) 8 (-1) 21 (+5) 12 (+1) 16 (+3) 12 (+1) Damage Resistances bludgeoning, necrotic, piercing
bludgeoning, necrotic, piercing Damage Vulnerabilities fire, radiant
fire, radiant Senses darkvision 60 ft., passive Perception 13
darkvision 60 ft., passive Perception 13 Languages Common, Druidic, Elvish, Sylvan
Common, Druidic, Elvish, Sylvan Challenge 11 (7,200 XP) False Appearance. While the treant remains motionless, it is indistinguishable from a dead tree. Siege Monster. The treant deals double damage to objects and structures. Actions Multiattack. The treant makes two slam attacks. Slam. Melee Weapon Attack: +10 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 16 (3d6 + 6) bludgeoning damage plus 7 (2d6) necrotic damage. Rock. Ranged Weapon Attack: +10 to hit, range 60/180 ft., one target. Hit: 28 (4d10 + 6) bludgeoning damage. If the target is a creature, it must succeed on a DC 17 Strength saving throw or be knocked prone. Create Undead (1/Day). The treant magically creates up to eight ghouls or four ghasts from the corpses of dead beasts or humanoids within 10 feet of it. These undead obey the treant for 1 day or until destroyed; until the treant dies or is more than 120 feet from the undead; or until the treant takes a bonus action to relinquish command. The undead then become uncontrolled and act according to their nature.
Troll Mountain Troll Huge giant, chaotic neutral Armor Class 18 (natural armor)
18 (natural armor) Hit Points 176 (13d12 + 91)
176 (13d12 + 91) Speed 40 ft. STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA 20 (+5) 13 (+1) 24 (+7) 7 (-2) 16 (+3) 7 (-2) Skills Perception +8
Perception +8 Senses darkvision 60 ft., passive Perception 18
darkvision 60 ft., passive Perception 18 Languages Giant
Giant Challenge 14 (11,500 XP) Innate Spellcasting. The troll’s innate spellcasting ability is Wisdom (spell save DC 16). It can innately cast the following spells, requiring no material components: At will: stone shape 3/day each: spike growth, commune with nature 1/day each: earthquake, flesh to stone Keen Smell. The troll has advantage on Wisdom (Perception) checks that rely on smell. Regeneration. The troll regains 20 hit points at the start of its turn. If the troll takes acid or fire damage, this trait doesn’t function at the start of the troll’s next turn. The troll dies only if it starts its turn with 0 hit points and doesn’t regenerate. Actions Multiattack. The troll makes three attacks: one with its bite and two with its claws or greatclub. Bite. Melee weapon attack: +10 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 19 (3d8 + 5) piercing damage. Claw. Melee weapon attack: +10 to hit, reach 10 ft., one target. Hit: 32 (6d8 + 5) slashing damage. Greatclub. Melee weapon attack: +10 to hit, reach 15 ft., one target. Hit: 33 (5d10 + 5) bludgeoning damage. Rock. Ranged weapon attack: +10 to hit, range 60/240 ft., one target. Hit: 31 (4d12 + 5) bludgeoning damage. Reactions Rock Catching. If a rock or similar object is hurled at the troll, the troll can, with a successful DC 10 Dexterity saving throw, catch the missile and take no bludgeoning damage from it.
Mountain Troll Though grotesque, charmless, and prone to fits of violence, mountain trolls are not inherently evil, nor do they always attack intruders on sight. A mountain troll prefers to withdraw and observe before entering combat, lumbering forth to attack only if intruders make clear their intentions to harm it or its allies, or if the newcomers seem to be encroaching upon the troll’s territory rather than simply passing through. Once enraged, a mountain troll is a savage opponent, calling upon its native strength and alliances with earth elementals to bury its opponents in stone or spread their entrails across the slopes. Mountain trolls prefer to live in narrow ravines or shallow caves that allow them to look out over the landscape. They sometimes knuckle-walk like a gorilla, but when angered they rear up to their full height of nearly 30 feet. Mountain trolls are quick to forge alliances with fey, and while they see smaller trolls as sadists, they nonetheless feel a sort of familial responsibility. Lesser trolls often capitalize upon mountain trolls’ generosity, but take care to abide by their larger cousins’ rules when sheltering in their homes. Mountain trolls have even been known to aid explorers or give advice, provided they are treated with respect.
Umber Hulk Shadow Hulk Shadowfell umber hulks have been known to grow to tremendous size and strength. The shadow hulk stands more than 16 feet in height and weighs about 8,000 pounds. Truly horrid and phenomenally powerful, the shadow hulk is a loner that is feared even by its own kind. It is a prized slave for shadow dragons or mind flayer enclaves to guard their lairs. Shadow Hulk Huge monstrosity, chaotic evil Armor Class 18 (natural armor)
18 (natural armor) Hit Points 225 (18d12 + 108)
225 (18d12 + 108) Speed 40ft., burrow 30 ft. STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA 21 (+5) 13 (+1) 22 (+6) 9 (-1) 12 (+1) 10 (+0) Damage Resistances acid, cold, fire, lightning, thunder; bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from nonmagical attacks
acid, cold, fire, lightning, thunder; bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from nonmagical attacks Senses darkvision 120 ft., tremorsense 60 ft., passive Perception 11
darkvision 120 ft., tremorsense 60 ft., passive Perception 11 Languages Umber Hulk
Umber Hulk Challenge 15 (13,000 XP) Confusing Gaze. When a creature starts its turn within 30 feet of the umber hulk and is able to see the shadow hulk's eyes, the shadow hulk can magically force it to make a DC 17 Charisma saving throw, unless the shadow hulk is incapacitated. On a failed saving throw, the creature can't take reactions until the start of its next turn and rolls a d8 to determine what it does during that turn. On a 1 to 4, the creature does nothing. On a 5 or 6, the creature takes no action but uses all its movement to move in a random direction. On a 7 or 8, the creature makes one melee attack against a random creature, or it does nothing if no creature is within reach. Unless surprised, a creature can avert its eyes to avoid the saving throw at the start of its turn. If the creature does so, it can't see the shadow hulk until the start of its next turn, when it can avert its eyes again. If the creature looks at the shadow hulk in the meantime, it must immediately make the save. Incorporeal movement. The shadow hulk can move through other creatures and objects as if they were difficult terrain. It takes 5 (1d10) force damage if it ends its turn inside an object. Siege monster. The shadow hulk deals double damage to objects and structures. Tunneler. The shadow hulk can burrow through solid rock at half its burrowing speed and leaves a 10 foot-wide, 15-foot-high tunnel in its wake. Actions Multiattack. The umber hulk makes three attacks: two with its claws and one with its mandibles. Claw. Melee Weapon Attack: +10 to hit, reach 15 ft., one target. Hit: 19 (3d8 + 5) slashing damage. Mandibles. Melee Weapon Attack: +10 to hit, reach 10 ft., one target. Hit: 32 (6d8 + 5) slashing damage, and the target is grappled (escape DC 15). Until this grapple ends, the target is restrained, and the shadow hulk can't use its mandibles on another target. Claw Frenzy (Recharge 5-6). The shadow hulk makes one claw attack against each creature, object, or structure within its reach.
Warforged Titan Warforged titans, much like the warforged, are created from wood, stone, and metal. Unlike the human-sized warforged developed later, warforged titans have little to no intelligence, and lack the souls found in warforged. They are huge in size, towering compared to other humanoid fighters. Their armor is crafted from adamantine, and is able to withstand some of the most powerful hits. They wield an embedded maul for their one hand, and an embedded axe for their other. Titans are a small step forward from massive, mindless war golems. Warforged titans are not true living constructs like other warforged; they are barely sentient |
in Washington."
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski framed the plan as a boost for the economy.
"The National Broadband Plan is a 21st century roadmap to spur economic growth and investment, create jobs, educate our children, protect our citizens, and engage in our democracy," he said in an FCC news release.
"It's an action plan, and action is necessary to meet the challenges of global competitiveness, and harness the power of broadband to help address so many vital national issues."
The plan places some emphasis on the mobile Internet and indicates that the U.S. wants to be a leader in that emerging space.
CNN's Doug Gross contributed to this report.If you see a horde of shuffling, moaning figures staggering through downtown Wilkes-Barre on Saturday, don't worry - it's not the zombie apocalypse.
It's the second annual Zombie Pub Crawl, which kicks off at 7 p.m. at Bart and Urby's on Main Street. Proceeds benefit the Luzerne County SPCA and Luzerne County Pit Bull Owners Avail-a-Bullies pit bull adoption program.
The pub crawl, organized by Bart and Urby's bar manager Carl Achhammer, winds through downtown with planned stops at Senunas' and Rodano's. Each stop features beer and drink specials.
An after party will take place at Bart and Urby's, featuring a two-hour happy hour and a zombie costume contest.
Achhammer, inspired by his love for television show "The Walking Dead," said he wanted to host his own zombie event in downtown Wilkes-Barre. While last year's pub crawl attracted a few zombified patrons, he's hoping more attendees get into the spirit with costumes this year.
"The costume can be really easy to make, or pretty complex," he said. He relies on friend and makeup guru Crissy Kithcart to perfect his zombie getup.
He chose the beneficiaries because he's familiar with their work personally and through some of his customers. His goal is to bring people together to celebrate the Halloween season while supporting a good cause.
"These are two great causes, and I love dogs," he said. "My brother actually has a blind pit bull from a rescue."
In addition to the costume contest, the event features raffles and giveaways, including the chance to win a Magic Hat guitar from the event's beer sponsor, L.T. Verrastro.
QUICK INFO
What: Zombie Pub Crawl
When: Saturday, 7 p.m.; after-party 9:30 p.m.
Where: Downtown Wilkes-Barre. Crawl begins and ends at Bart and Urby's, 119 S. Main St. Stops include Senunas', 133 N. Main St. (7:30), and Rodano's, 53 Public Square (8:30).
Details: Admission $5. Proceeds benefit Luzerne County SPCA and Avail-a-Bullies adoption program. Call 709-1678 or visit carlsbeertours.com, facebook.com/carlsbeertours, or bartandurby.com.
So you want to look like a zombie...
Transforming into a credible zombie takes some decomposition - here's a few tricks for that straight-out-of-the-grave look:
- Use pale, yellowish-green, or bluish makeup to create a dead skin tone and dark shadows under the eyes to create a gaunt, hollow-eyed stare.
- Choose clothes that reflect your undead status - did you rise from the grave or were you bitten while alive and turned? Dress accordingly and use old clothes that you won't mind tearing and getting dirty.
- The dirtier, the better - the committed zombie might want to skip showering or shampooing for an authentic greasy, dirty look (Warning: not recommended unless you really want people to run away from you).
- Practice your zombie walk. Try copying the walkers from AMC's "The Walking Dead" (pictured above), or check out clips from TV shows and movies for the right moves.Growing up on the prairies, farming was a way of life for many people that I knew. I would often spend time over at friends, and help with assorted chores on their farms. Feeding animals, milking cows, chucking hay bales, it was all in a day’s work for the fine folk that so often literally brought home the bacon. I have a great deal of respect for farmers, and so I was ready to take a dive into Farming Simulator 18, the latest iteration of the popular Farming Simulator series, to see what of actual farm life translates into these popular gaming sims.
Farming Simulator 18 is the newest release from GIANTS Software and publisher Focus Home Interactive. Unlike last year’s release, there is no home console version of the game, this year the focus is on portability and bringing your farm with you wherever you go. The game is available on iOS, Google Play, and for the PlayStation Vita and the 3DS. It has been a while since the series has had an updated version for on-the-go play, so busy folk that want to take their farming with them now have a solid version to do just that.
The game is set in an idyllic town in the southern states. Picturesque backdrops of red rock canyons, tankers floating out in the ocean, and old brick buildings fill the county in which you reside. The game has a fairly vibrant color palette, however, I did find the county to feel fairly empty. It’s a nice area to work and drive around in, but you rarely see more than one vehicle on the roads at any given time. Sure it isn’t necessary, but it just makes the world seem a little flat.
However, Farming Simulator 18 is definitely not about how busy the roads are, but what you can do with your properties and there is a decent amount of work to be done on the farm. The game starts you out with a few fields to tend, a couple of tractors and a harvester. You are slowly taught the basics of cultivating, seeding fields, harvesting crops and then selling or storing your grains, vegetables, etc. Once you get the hang of working your crops, you can start to take the money that you make to buy up some more fields, and expand your farming empire.
One pretty interesting feature is the pricing index, that you can bring up to check and see what the going rates are for your products is. This allows you to try and maximize the return that you get on your crops or animals, and get the most bang for your buck. Additionally, you will be alerted by the friendly in-game guide on occasion about a buyer that will pay extra for wheat or canola for example, and then you have to get over within a certain time limit for a bigger payout. It was nice when it happened, and helped me to keep an eye on what I had and what I could make some good money on.
The in-game guide, whom I generally just referred to as Willie Nelson, did a good job early game in teaching what is needed to understand the basics of the game. However, I did find that there were a few things that were a little vague, or not explained well enough initially. For example, I decided that after growing a bunch of wheat that I would try and grow some corn. The corn grew perfectly, but when I went to harvest, I was told that I did not have the right gear to do so. I eventually decided to check in the shop and looked around and found in the headers, the attachment that lets harvesters gather corn. Then it became a mad scramble to go and pick up the header, bring it back, and then harvest my corn before it went bad. For players that are old hands at the series, i’m sure it is no big deal, but there had been no instructions or hints as to what I needed to do, and this happened a few other times in the game.
The more I played Farming Simulator 18, the more I got into the groove of it and was interested to see what my crops would yield, what I could sell for, as well as breeding and raising various animals. However, this was the aspect that I probably spent the least amount of time with. I was just always focused on setting up crops and driving tractors and didn’t bother with animals that much. But they are there and do add an extra bit of strategy to the game, plus they provide manure, so there is that at least.
The biggest drawbacks, for me anyways, were the camera and the music. The camera, in general, does a decent job of showing what you need to see, and it can be zoomed out a decent distance. However, I found that when close to tall rock formations, or by buildings, my vision was obstructed and it was tough to see my vehicles. It would have been nice to have the rocks or buildings go transparent, which would have been appreciated when trying to line up your tractor when you are doing runs on your fields. The music was something that I really did not appreciate after hearing the same three tracks for the hundredth time. I don’t expect licensed music in every game that I play, but hearing the same few tracks over and over again, well I just turned up the FX of the game so the tractors blared over the music.
Farming Simulator 18 is a good little sim title, that will please fans of the series, especially those that are looking for an on the go version. New players may find interest in the game, however, it does take some time to really get going which may deter some. While there are some flaws to the game, such as a repetitive soundtrack and some camera and visual issues, it is a solid title for farming fans and should be added to your library, especially if you want a portable farming sim.
A Playstation Vita Review Copy of Farming Simulator 18 was provided by Focus Home Interactive for the Purpose of this ReviewIn his latest controversial effort to dismiss media criticism, Donald Trump has labeled talk-show host and political pundit Tavis Smiley a "racist."
The attack came one day after Smiley appeared on ABC's "This Week" and called the Republican frontrunner "an unrepentant, irascible, religious and racial arsonist" -- a reference to controversial remarks Trump has made about various minority groups.
Trump shot back at Smiley on Monday morning: "Why does [This Week] allow a hater & racist like Tavis Smiley to waste good airtime?" he tweeted. "ABC can do much better than him!"
Smiley, who hosts the "Tavis Smiley" talk show on PBS, is not an ABC employee. His appearance on Sunday was prompted in part by the release of his new book, "The Covenant With Black America: Ten Years Later."
Smiley responded to Trump's attack in an interview with CNN's Don Lemon late Monday night: "I don't know how I'm a racist. I'm not the one who went after Muslims, I'm not the one who went after undocumented workers," Smiley said. "My comment yesterday was not singularly directed to Mr. Trump, it's at the media. I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired of watching us cover this campaign without calling him on the carpet."
"It says something about America that he is resonating in the way that he is, and I can't get in the minds of the voters," Smiley continued. "I just hope that at some point we will come to our senses and that we will see that this is how these slippery slopes begin."
Trump's comments about Smiley mimic dozens of attacks the GOP frontrunner has lobbed at members of the media, but it is the first time this campaign that Trump has labeled a member of the media a racist.
Sign up for the Reliable Sources newsletter — delivering the most important stories in the media world to your inbox every day.Media playback is not supported on this device Liverpool Ladies clinch Super League title
England and Lincoln Ladies captain Casey Stoney is writing a regular column for the BBC Sport website this season.
Here she talks about Liverpool's WSL triumph and what it means for the women's game.
Liverpool's victory over Bristol Academy in the Women's Super League title decider on Sunday signalled a real power shift in the women's game and it's set a new level that other teams will now have to match.
Their first league title underlines what real investment in a women's team can achieve.
All about Casey Stoney Born: 13 May 1982, London
Captain and centre-back at Lincoln Ladies
Former clubs: Arsenal, Charlton, Chelsea
England skipper with 115 caps
Considered international retirement after not playing at Euro 2005 in England
Says she often gets confused on Twitter with former MotoGP rider Casey Stoner Twitter: @caseystoney
Liverpool were bottom of the WSL table last season and although they signed a whole team and were able to train five times a week it is still a wonderful achievement by manager Matt Beard to make everything gel in the first year.
In my view, they deserve to win the title as they have been the most consistent side this season and it shows you that if other teams want to compete with Liverpool, they have to match their commitment.
Other teams, including former champions Arsenal, still train only two to three times a week but I believe Liverpool's move to a full-time schedule has made a telling difference.
Unless other clubs can follow suit, Liverpool will start as favourites for next season's title. They are only going to improve and clubs that don't keep up with them will go backwards.
This season has been a great stride forward for the women's game; domestically the league has never been more competitive and you have to compete for every single point. It's an exciting time.
But if the England team is to compete at international level we have to get to point where all our top-flight clubs are full-time. My hope is that happens within five years.
The introduction of a second tier next season should add to the league's competitiveness while offering the chance for players at other clubs to develop in a more professional environment.
And although our poor European Championship was a blip, we need to keep moving forward to stay in touch with our international rivals and avoid becoming complacent.
England back on song
England's victories over Belarus and Turkey put the Euro 2013 nightmare well behind us and while were expected to win both games, I was pleased we didn't drop our standards because of that.
Scoring 14 goals and conceding none was fantastic, and you could tell that the girls were bursting to make an impression after Sweden and in front of new manager Brent Hills.
Media playback is not supported on this device Women's Super League round-up
Brent was very relaxed, and enjoyed himself because being the manager is something he has always wanted to do.
He has already declared he wants the job on a full-time basis but it is not for me to say whether he has enhanced his chances. Picking the new manager is not something the players can control.
All I will say is that the new manager should be the best person for the job, male or female. I'm excited about a new coach but also anxious because I don't know where my future lies with England.
The new boss might have difference ideas and although I've been picked for England over the last 13 years, who's to say the new person will think the same?
Time to take take stock at Lincoln
At my club, Lincoln Ladies, it has been a disappointing season, finishing third from bottom in the WSL.
Final WSL standings Pld Pts 1 Liverpool 14 36 2 Bristol 14 31 3 Arsenal 14 30 4 Birmingham 14 18 5 Everton 14 15 6 Lincoln 14 10 7 Chelsea 14 10 8 Doncaster 14 6 Full WSL table
We are due to move the club to Nottingham next season and become Notts County Ladies so we are desperate to win some silverware when we take on Arsenal in the Continental Cup final on Friday.
Winning a trophy would be the perfect send-off for everyone involved in the club since it formed in 1995. It would also represent my first cup since 2006, which has been far too long.
After the final I will sit down with the club to discuss their ambitions for the future because it is clear this season has not been good enough.
We need to sign new players and train more often if we are to improve and with my contract up, I want to make sure that the club's targets are the same as mine.
I came here to win things but it hasn't been that way for the last three years so things need to change a little bit if we are to succeed.Have you ever wondered what really happened to that mall in The Blues Brothers or where Tarkovsky filmed those jarring and surrealistic scenes in Stalker? While many urban abandonments are left alone or the occasional subject of urban exploration, some remarkable buildings and complexes have become famous (or infamous) after being used as film sets for cult classics or contemporary major motion pictures. Here are five films that made use of deserted buildings ranging from suburban malls and insane asylums to an unfinished nuclear reactor. To learn more or see larger original images click the movie-titled links below each film clip.
The Blues Brothers: Did you ever wonder if they really destroyed a mall to make one of the most famous scenes in this film? As it turns out, the infamous mall car chase scene did in fact wreak havoc on what remained the (yes, recently deserted) Dixie Square Mall. Fans of the film may enjoy the above video clip which shows the chase scene moment by moment from the movie reenacted in a real vintage police car, in the same mall and with the same camera shots (now fully deserted and falling apart). For more images of this abandoned mall visit DeadMalls.
12 Monkeys: This retrofuturistic film was shot across a number of prominent locations from mansions and power plants in Baltimore, Maryland to jails and convention centers in Philadelphia, Pennsylvia. One of its more eerie settings, however, was the Westport Power Generation Station. This site was used to create some of the more chilling interior shots set in the post-apocalyptic future from which the movie’s protagonist originates. Even from these seemingly benign shots it is easy to see how they could create the steampunkish settings required for the film. [Article update: other power station locations used in the filming of 12 Monkeys can be found here, here and here. Thanks Dave!]
The Abyss: The underwater scenes in this gripping over-two-hour science-fiction thriller were filmed at the Cherokee Nuclear Power Plant in South Carolina. Millions of gallons of water were brought in to fill existing unfinished structures on the site and The Abyss thus broke the record for the largest underwater movie set in the world. The power plant was never completed but the complex contained a turbine pit and incomplete containment vessel were used as primary and secondary sets and on-site warehouses for interior shots. For more images of this amazing movie set and a larger version of the one above check out HistoricDecay.
Session 9: This 2001 horror movie was shot almost entirely in the abandoned rooms and halls of the deserted Danvers State Hospital. In an unusual twist, the film’s overt premise is the remodeling of this real-life asylum rather than pretending the building is some other structure for the purposes of the movie. While many of the details are, of course, changed for cinema the building did provide a remarkably appropriate setting for the dramatic action of the film. The Danvers State Hospital is also rumored to be the inspiration for H.P. Lovecraft’s own Arkham hospital which, in turn, was the inspiration for the Akrham Asylum. Despite increased security many deserted-building urban explorers found their way into this abandoned building complex after the film popularized the site. During the demolition of many of the older buildings and construction of new buildings on the site in 2006 a mysterious fire laid waste to much of the complex and disabled an on-site web camera filming the grounds. For more images and information you can visit Opacity (the source of the bottom two images displayed above).
Stalker: This infamous Tarkovsky film is notorious not only for its impact on cinema but also for the strange and sad stories surrounding its filming. The movie was shot primarily in and around Tallinn, Estonia near chemical factories, power plants and other dangerous locations. Dreadful allergic reactions by the crew and Tarkovsky’s own cancer were blamed on the poisonous liquids pouring downstream from these nearby structures. When the film crew returned to Moscow much of the film was found to be improperly developed and the Soviet government, which frowned on the theistic undertones of Tarkovsky’s work, was suspect of having a hand in mishandling the film. Many Russian urban explorers and abandoned building hobbyists actually call themselves “stalkers” or variants of the word as a kind of tribute to the film and its setting, many of which have since been demolished. Know of other abandoned buildings used in films? Contact us with information for a follow-up article and we’ll thank you with a link! Also, thanks to Cineleet for helping compile this first collection of amazing abandonments from films.The company is launching its site to the masses and internationally today, available in English, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, Japanese and Chinese - enough to initially cover 40% of the global population. Its account balances will render in over 160 different currencies, responsive to the individual user’s IP address, and the same deposit and withdrawal limits will apply for all new users. Circle will slash or eliminate its $10 sign-up bonus, but that is AOK to me given the company’s continued commitment to fee-less transactions.
For a sizable portion of the Bitcoin early adopter crowd, Circle won’t feel like bitcoin, it will feel like banking 2.0.
Although anyone will be able to open an account with an email address and phone number, Circle’s international users won’t be able to connect bank accounts just yet. They will, however, be able to deposit money for a small fee from any Visa or Mastercard card. Perhaps more importantly, users will be able to send bitcoin to new email addresses or user anywhere in the world via the company’s beautiful, confidence-inspiring web wallet. Circle seems content to launch internationally and on-board early adopters before unveiling formal banking partnerships – an intriguing strategy. The second that Circle signs a deal with a bank in Latin America or Africa or Southeast Asia, free international remittances could actually become a reality.
The company’s mobile wallets are also “imminent,” and I was shown both the Android and iOS apps during my visit to the company’s rapidly growing office in Boston. The Android app will be full-featured from Day 1, while the iOS app will not allow deposits or withdrawals due to the App Store’s policies.
CEO Jeremy Allaire was characteristically tightlipped about specifics regarding his company’s underwriters (“they are highly rated”), banking partners (“we have a great US partner; not ready to talk about international banks yet”), future products (“we are focused on this initial roll-out”) and KYC/AML policies (“we’ve spent a lot of time on this during the beta”). Others will have more to say about the launch, but since I can’t get any proprietary intel out of the team, I won’t drone on.
Suffice it to say, I think they are continuing to knock it out of the park with their early products. Circle has been stress testing its site for months in anticipation of its broader public launch. We’ll see how it holds up as its user base explodes from low five figures into (probably) the six figures this week.
If this can’t spark a rally, I don’t know what can.
Circle’s Blog Post: https://www.circle.com/2014/09/29/circle-opens-doors-global-audience Oh baby, baby. All I have to say about Circle’s official public launch is that it is worth the wait.The company is launching its site to the masses and internationally today, available in English, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, Japanese and Chinese - enough to initially cover 40% of the global population. Its account balances will render in over 160 different currencies, responsive to the individual user’s IP address, and the same deposit and withdrawal limits will apply for all new users. Circle will slash or eliminate its $10 sign-up bonus, but that is AOK to me given the company’s continued commitment to fee-less transactions.For a sizable portion of the Bitcoin early adopter crowd, Circle won’t feel like bitcoin, it will feel like banking 2.0.Although anyone will be able to open an account with an email address and phone number, Circle’s international users won’t be able to connect bank accounts just yet. They will, however, be able to deposit money for a small fee from any Visa or Mastercard card. Perhaps more importantly, users will be able to send bitcoin to new email addresses or user anywhere in the world via the company’s beautiful, confidence-inspiring web wallet. Circle seems content to launch internationally and on-board early adopters before unveiling formal banking partnerships – an intriguing strategy. The second that Circle signs a deal with a bank in Latin America or Africa or Southeast Asia, free international remittances could actually become a reality.The company’s mobile wallets are also “imminent,” and I was shown both the Android and iOS apps during my visit to the company’s rapidly growing office in Boston. The Android app will be full-featured from Day 1, while the iOS app will not allow deposits or withdrawals due to the App Store’s policies.CEO Jeremy Allaire was characteristically tightlipped about specifics regarding his company’s underwriters (“they are highly rated”), banking partners (“we have a great US partner; not ready to talk about international banks yet”), future products (“we are focused on this initial roll-out”) and KYC/AML policies (“we’ve spent a lot of time on this during the beta”). Others will have more to say about the launch, but since I can’t get any proprietary intel out of the team, I won’t drone on.Suffice it to say, I think they are continuing to knock it out of the park with their early products. Circle has been stress testing its site for months in anticipation of its broader public launch. We’ll see how it holds up as its user base explodes from low five figures into (probably) the six figures this week.If this can’t spark a rally, I don’t know what can.Circle’s Blog Post: https://www.circle.com/2014/09/29/circle-opens-doors-global-audience
***
I joined fellow Bitcoin pundit David Seaman on his podcast this past Friday. Lot of fun, and I was happy with the final product. It would be so much easier to do this uncensored 45 minutes each day, than it would be to write, but I edit myself for your benefit.
If you are curious what I’m like on camera (which, let’s be honest, is a little weird of you),
Upcoming Events
Money 20/20 (November 2-5 in Las Vegas)
Money20/20 is the world’s largest event enabling payments and financial services innovation for ‘anywhere, anytime’ connected commerce at the intersection of mobile, retail, marketing services, data and technology. With 6,500+ attendees, including more than 500 CEOs, from over 2,250 companies and 50 countries, Money20/20 is critical to realizing the vision of disruptive ways in which consumers and businesses manage, spend and borrow money. The next Money20/20 will be held on Nov. 2-5, 2014 in Las Vegas, and will be preceded by the Money20/20 Hackathon, which runs Nov. 1-2.
Inside Bitcoins Conference (October 5-7 in Las Vegas)
College Crypto has partnered with Inside Bitcoins to offer 50% discounts on conference passes to students! Just use the code COLLEGECRYPTOSTUDENTS. (You will need to provide info that you are a full-time student, so send an email to
Coins in the Kingdom (October 4-6 in Orlando, FL)
The first family-friend cryptocurrency conference! This event will take place at Disneyworld and will serve as the College Cryptocurrency Network’s “Semi-Southern Conference.” Tickets are only $60 and hotel rooms are $99, but to students to whom the tickets would present a financial hardship should email jeremy@collegecrypto.org.
***I joined fellow Bitcoin pundit David Seaman on his podcast this past Friday. Lot of fun, and I was happy with the final product. It would be so much easier to do this uncensored 45 minutes each day, than it would be to write, but I edit myself for your benefit.If you are curious what I’m like on camera (which, let’s be honest, is a little weird of you), check it out. We talk about mining, China, derivatives, OTC markets, alt currencies, etc. You know, everything…Money20/20 is the world’s largest event enabling payments and financial services innovation for ‘anywhere, anytime’ connected commerce at the intersection of mobile, retail, marketing services, data and technology. With 6,500+ attendees, including more than 500 CEOs, from over 2,250 companies and 50 countries, Money20/20 is critical to realizing the vision of disruptive ways in which consumers and businesses manage, spend and borrow money. The next Money20/20 will be held on Nov. 2-5, 2014 in Las Vegas, and will be preceded by the Money20/20 Hackathon, which runs Nov. 1-2. Register here College Crypto has partnered with Inside Bitcoins to offer 50% discounts on conference passes to students! Just use the code COLLEGECRYPTOSTUDENTS. (You will need to provide info that you are a full-time student, so send an email to reg@risingmedia.com with copy of your student pass after registering.) Inside Bitcoins London and Las Vegas are the latest Media Bistro conferences on the calendar following shows this year in Berlin, Hong Kong, and New York. For more information on Vegas, you can sign up here The first family-friend cryptocurrency conference! This event will take place at Disneyworld and will serve as the College Cryptocurrency Network’s “Semi-Southern Conference.” Tickets are only $60 and hotel rooms are $99, but to students to whom the tickets would present a financial hardship should email jeremy@collegecrypto.org. Register here
Jobs, Jobs, Jobs
Have a position you’re dying to fill? You can pay to post it here, in the Bit’s new jobs section.
Senior Folks : Check out
Student Bitcoiners : Circle, the Boston-based digital currency venture, is looking for campus reps across the country to participate in a social media marketing program this fall! Each rep will receive a Circle account with $250 in Bitcoin to spend over the course of the semester. Reps are required to post at least five stories about using Circle and Bitcoin to their Facebook accounts (and/or other blogging platforms like Tumblr) and to cross promote these via Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and other social channels. To apply, send your resume to reps@circle.com click on
Today’s Tid Bits
Have a position you’re dying to fill? You can pay to post it here, in the Bit’s new jobs section.: Check out HoneyBadgr, which introduces top talent to early stage and venture-backed Bitcoin startups. They are a team of ex-Googlers residing at Boost VC in Silicon Valley, with a mission to help grow the Bitcoin ecosystem on a global scale.: Circle, the Boston-based digital currency venture, is looking for campus reps across the country to participate in a social media marketing program this fall! Each rep will receive a Circle account with $250 in Bitcoin to spend over the course of the semester. Reps are required to post at least five stories about using Circle and Bitcoin to their Facebook accounts (and/or other blogging platforms like Tumblr) and to cross promote these via Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and other social channels. To apply, send your resume to reps@circle.com click on this link to be redirected to the brief application.
US Military Meet With Bitcoin Foundation to Discuss Bitcoin
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-terror/u-s-military-probing-digital-currencies-terror-fight-n212371
Last week, the global policy counsel of the Bitcoin Foundation meet with officials from US Special Operations Command to discuss how crypto-currencies were managing to finance illicit terrorist organizations. Bitcoin was explained to the government as an open, transparent, financial system. The 100 attendees at the event ranged from Silicon Valley executives to representatives from the Department of Homeland Security. The event was organized by the Business Executives for National Security, a group that facilitates connections between American business leaders and the US military.
Diamond Circle Deploys World’s First Cashless Bitcoin ATM
http://cointelegraph.com/news/112612/diamond-circle-deploys-worlds-first-cashless-bitcoin-atm
Diamond Circle, an Australian Bitcoin debit card operator, announced the launch of the world’s first cashless bitcoin ATM. The machine only supports Visa and Mastercard for the purchase of bitcoin. It features AML/KYC compliance and is located at the Bluff Café in Surfers’ Paradise in Queensland, Australia.
Swedish Politician Elected to Parliament on Bitcoin-Only Donations
http://www.coindesk.com/swedish-politician-elected-parliament-bitcoin-donations/
Mathias Sundin, a digital currency advocate, has been elected to Sweden’s parliament after funding his election campaign exclusively through bitcoin. For the next four year Sundin will serve on Sweden’s Parliament, which has 349 members from across the country. As of now the Swedish Central Bank has declared that bitcoin does not yet have “any measureable impact” on the country’s retail payment market or financial stability.
Pheeva Launches Branded Bitcoin Wallet for Georgia Tech University
http://www.coindesk.com/pheeva-launches-branded-bitcoin-wallet-georgia-tech-university/
Love Will Inc, the team behind the Pheeva bitcoin wallet, has launched a bitcoin wallet specifically branded for Georgia Tech students. The wallet was unveiled at the kickoff event for the school’s bitcoin group, Bitcoin@Tech, and featured a representative from Pheeva and BitPay. Love Will Inc also plans to bring this type of specific college bitcoin wallet model to other universities soon.
4 Court Cases Helping Shape the US Stance on Bitcoin
http://www.coindesk.com/4-court-cases-helping-determine-us-stance-bitcoin/
SEC v Trendon Shavers, which ended with a $40m fine for Shavers, the operator of bitcoin-funded ponzi scheme. US vs Faiella, where Robert Faiella and Charlie Shrem plead guilty to charges of operating an unlicensed money transmitting business and paid nearly $1m in fines. Both cases above declared that bitcoin qualified as “money.” State of Florida vs Espinoza, where Reid and Michell Abner Espinoza were arrested for engaging in fake cash to bitcoin transactions. Finally, US vs Ross William Ulbricht, the operator of Silk Road who faces numerous charges and now waits for his trial on November 3rd.
Last week, the global policy counsel of the Bitcoin Foundation meet with officials from US Special Operations Command to discuss how crypto-currencies were managing to finance illicit terrorist organizations. Bitcoin was explained to the government as an open, transparent, financial system. The 100 attendees at the event ranged from Silicon Valley executives to representatives from the Department of Homeland Security. The event was organized by the Business Executives for National Security, a group that facilitates connections between American business leaders and the US military.Diamond Circle, an Australian Bitcoin debit card operator, announced the launch of the world’s first cashless bitcoin ATM. The machine only supports Visa and Mastercard for the purchase of bitcoin. It features AML/KYC compliance and is located at the Bluff Café in Surfers’ Paradise in Queensland, Australia.Mathias Sundin, a digital currency advocate, has been elected to Sweden’s parliament after funding his election campaign exclusively through bitcoin. For the next four year Sundin will serve on Sweden’s Parliament, which has 349 members from across the country. As of now the Swedish Central Bank has declared that bitcoin does not yet have “any measureable impact” on the country’s retail payment market or financial stability.Love Will Inc, the team behind the Pheeva bitcoin wallet, has launched a bitcoin wallet specifically branded for Georgia Tech students. The wallet was unveiled at the kickoff event for the school’s bitcoin group, Bitcoin@Tech, and featured a representative from Pheeva and BitPay. Love Will Inc also plans to bring this type of specific college bitcoin wallet model to other universities soon.SEC v Trendon Shavers, which ended with a $40m fine for Shavers, the operator of bitcoin-funded ponzi scheme. US vs Faiella, where Robert Faiella and Charlie Shrem plead guilty to charges of operating an unlicensed money transmitting business and paid nearly $1m in fines. Both cases above declared that bitcoin qualified as “money.” State of Florida vs Espinoza, where Reid and Michell Abner Espinoza were arrested for engaging in fake cash to bitcoin transactions. Finally, US vs Ross William Ulbricht, the operator of Silk Road who faces numerous charges and now waits for his trial on November 3In my past several columns, I’ve been making the case that it’s never been a better time for consumers to cut the cord from their current cable or satellite provider, due to the plethora of low-cost “Over The Top” (OTT) premium content services now available for streaming. When combined with an “Over The Air” (OTA) solution (which allows you to capture local channels in HD, free of charge) the decision to cut the cord almost becomes a no-brainer. A new solution called AirTV, while not perfect, delivers on this promise and should be seriously considered by any consumer looking to cut the cord.
The major accomplishment of AirTV—and it cannot be overstated—is that it captures OTA content at a single point and it distributes it within the home. In this regard, AirTV is ultimately an “OTA”-style Slingbox. It utilizes an OTA tuner and uses the Sling TV app to seamlessly integrate OTA and Sling TV channels together. The consumer simply attaches an antenna to AirTV’s coaxial jack, connects AirTV to their home network via wireless or Ethernet, and “streams” OTA channels to other TVs in the home, using any of the major streaming devices (Roku, AirTV, Amazon Fire TV or Apple TV, for example). The exciting thing about this approach is that OTA channels could be streamed from the home to any other mobile “on the go” device with an Internet connection—just like with a Slingbox.
The specs
The new AirTV is a small, unobtrusive, black, rectangular unit that measures a compact 180mm x 110mm x 45mm. From a design standpoint, Apple ’s Jonathan Ive won’t be jealous of AirTV’s utilitarian aesthetics—it screams “functional pragmatism,” with a plainspoken design and basic coaxial Ethernet, power jack supply and USB ports in the rear of the unit.
Ideally, you’ll want to set up this new AirTV unit near a window seeing as it will need to |
. Saldana did not say whether the brother was in the U.S. legally.
In January, police say, Mr. Mejia was street racing while drunk when he struck the vehicle driven by Sarah Root, 21. She died as a result of her injuries.
Mr. Mejia posted bond on the homicide charge, and ICE officers did not come pick him up for detention, allowing him to disappear into the shadows.
Now ICE is scrambling to try to find him. Ms. Saldana said her agency has asked Honduran officials to see if he shows up back there.
Mr. Sasse was not satisfied. He called Ms. Saldana’s response “an embarrassment” to her agency and elevated the issue to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, demanding to know who specifically was responsible for deciding not to send officers to pick up Mr. Mejia.
“Why did ICE decline to detain Mr. Mejia, despite several requests to do so by the Douglas County Police Department? Were each of these requests denied on a case-by-case basis?” Mr. Sasse said in his letter to Mr. Johnson.
Ms. Saldana, in her letter to Mr. Sasse, said being charged with vehicular homicide wasn’t enough to make Mr. Mejia a priority under standards set by Mr. Obama and Mr. Johnson in 2014.
In fact, even if he were convicted of the charge, ICE still wouldn’t have to hold him, Ms. Saldana said.
“Even if he were convicted of the offense, motor vehicle homicide — driving under the influence, the conviction would not constitute a crime of violence under the immigration laws, and consequently, would not constitute an aggravated felony,” she wrote. “The conviction would not render him subject to mandatory detention, nor would it significantly impact his eligibility to apply for relief or protection from removal.”
At a Senate hearing last month, Ms. Saldana had said her officers didn’t come to collect Mr. Mejia because Ms. Root was still alive, so the case didn’t rise to their priorities. Her letter Monday, however, says that even though she later died, her agents wouldn’t have necessarily considered Mr. Mejia a priority.
Under pressure from activists who said the number of deportations was too high, Mr. Obama and Mr. Johnson in 2014 announced a policy of deporting only those with the most serious criminal records.
Those policies mean that more than 9 million of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. have little fear of being kicked out.
Mr. Mejia, however, was already facing deportation under his unaccompanied minor case, though that proceeding has dragged on. His court appearance was slated for later this month — nearly three years after he first entered the U.S.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.Draw anything you like. There's a lot of Homestuck here.
About
UPD8: In light of no mod interest (we had a year backlog of requests), DoD being a lot less busy, and the comic being over, we're unlocking approvals. Be good to each other, kids. And keep using the report button.
===========
How to participate: hsdod.tumblr.com/group-faq
==> Like Homestuck.
==> Draw anything (even non-Homestuck).
==> No chainbreaking, no insults, no hate. Actually draw something.
Q: Why was I denied?
A: Your recent steps have hate, chainbreaking, writing instead of drawing, or your profile's almost empty. Contact the mods, or play nice for ~20 more steps, then apply again. We vet players to weed out bad trolls. Trust us, you don't want one rampaging through the session.
Chainbreaking with Homestuck themes is still chainbreaking. Hate includes racism and other *isms. When someone makes you frown by breaking rules or the chain, report it! Troll cops are on duty.
See the FAQ for our contact info.Microsoft’s new Windows 10 operating system is immensely popular, with 14 million downloads in just two days. The price of the free upgrade may just be your privacy, though, as changing Windows 10’s intrusive default settings is difficult.
Technology journalists and bloggers are singing Windows 10’s praises, often using the words such as “amazing,”“glorious” and “fantastic.” The operating system has been described as faster, smoother and more user-friendly than any previous version of Windows. According to Wired magazine, more than 14 million people have downloaded their upgrade since the system was released on Wednesday.
While the upgrade is currently free of charge to owners of licensed copies of Windows 8 and Windows 7, it does come at a price. Several tech bloggers have warned that the privacy settings in the operating system are invasive by default, and that changing them involves over a dozen different screens and an external website.
According to Zach Epstein of BGR News, all of Windows 10’s features that could be considered invasions of privacy are enabled by default. Signing in with your Microsoft email account means Windows is reading your emails, contacts and calendar data. The new Edge browser serves you personalized ads. Solitaire now comes with ads. Using Cortana – the voice-driven assistant that represents Redmond’s answer to Apple’s Siri – reportedly “plays fast and loose with your data.”
“I am pretty surprised by the far-reaching data collection that Microsoft seems to want,” web developer Jonathan Porta wrote on his blog. “I am even more surprised by the fact that the settings all default to incredibly intrusive. I am certain that most individuals will just accept the defaults and have no idea how much information they are giving away.”
As examples, Porta cited Microsoft having access to contacts, calendar details, and “other associated input data” such as “typing and inking” by default. The operating system also wants access to user locations and location history, both of which could be provided not just to Microsoft, but to its “trusted partners.”
“Who are the trusted partners? By whom are they trusted? I am certainly not the one doing any trusting right now,” Porta wrote, describing the default privacy options as “vague and bordering on scary.”
Alec Meer of the ‘Rock, Paper, Shotgun’ blog pointed out this passage in Microsoft’s 12,000-word, 45-page terms of use agreement:
“We will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to.”
While most people are used to ads as the price of accessing free content, writes Meer, Microsoft is not making it clear enough that they are “gathering and storing vast amounts of data on your computing habits,” not just browser data.
Opting out of all these default settings requires navigating 13 different screens and a separate website, the bloggers have found.
Real transparency starts with straightforward terms and policies that people can clearly understand https://t.co/nzTaCZbYz7 — Horacio Gutierrez (@horaciog) June 4, 2015
Meer was underwhelmed with Microsoft executives’ claims of transparency and easily understandable terms of use. “There is no world in which 45 pages of policy documents and opt-out settings split across 13 different Settings screens and an external website constitutes ‘real transparency,’” he wrote.
Tracking and harvesting user data has been a business model for many tech giants. Privacy advocates have raised concerns over Google’s combing of emails, Apple’s Siri, and Facebook’s tracking cookies that keep monitoring people’s browser activity in order to personalize advertising and content.Animal waste dumping threatens health in Kosovo
The unregulated dumping of body parts from slaughtered animals in landfill sites across Kosovo causes constant distress for people living nearby and also poses the risk of spreading disease.
The Gara family live right next to the Mirash landfill site in the village of Palaj in the Obiliq municipality in central Kosovo. The stench of garbage is pervasive; Xhejlane Gara says that her son has viruses constantly, and that she only rarely opens the windows in her house.
“Every time it’s hot outside, or when it rains, or when the wind blows, everything stinks. We’re endangered by stray dogs as well. They come to our door, and they continuously feed on the trash, and there are lots of birds, they’re always around,” Gara told Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN.
Her family, like many others, endures constant problems with the smell of the animal waste that is dumped at the landfill site – rotting organs that include the stomach, intestines, lungs, as well as blood, horns, hooves, bones and other animal parts, plus their feces and urine.
The slaughterhouses in Kosovo are small; there are no big ones because they cannot fulfil the official criteria. Meanwhile, the slaughtering of cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, and poultry is not supervised.
Even though the waste that is leftover after slaughtering is supposed to be transported in a controlled manner and then eliminated by burial or burning, neither happens in the country.
This unregulated disposal of animal waste not only pollutes the environment, but also carries the possible danger of distributing diseases or viruses that affect humans and animals.
The collection and transportation of this waste is done by public companies that are licensed by the Ministry of Environment and Spatial Planning to carry out the work, as well as firms that manage landfill sites. Officials at the ministry say that because there is nowhere else to dispose of animal waste, such as carcasses and by-products from the processing of meat, putting it in municipality landfills is currently the best solution.
“This was the best alternative since in Kosovo there is no proper infrastructure for this type of waste,” said Fadil Maxhuni, director of information at the Ministry of Environment and Spatial Planning.
The director of the Veterinary and Food Agency, Valdet Gjinovci, warned however that because there are no meat rendering plants in Kosovo where animal waste can be processed and recycled, there is always the possibility of disease spreading or being caused by cross-contamination if the slaughter is not supervised by an authorised veterinarian to ensure the animals are healthy and the process is hygienic.
In the former Yugoslavia, there were two such plants in Kosovo: one in the Gjilan region and one in Fushe Kosove. However, neither are currently functional.
“This waste is transported to general waste landfills, since for the moment a functional meat rendering plant, which could process the animal waste properly according to defined regulations in the legislation that the Veterinary and Food Agency is harmonising with the EU’s regulations, doesn’t exist,” Gjinovci said.
Skender Muji, a professor at the Agriculture Faculty at Pristina University who deals with hygiene and the wellbeing of animals, says that in Kosovo there are no big slaughterhouses, but only mini farms or butcher shops. According to him, the big slaughterhouses should have meat rendering plants.
“There are different ways of organising this. They could burn them, or bury them, but with the latter you should be more careful about where it’s done,” Muji told BIRN. He also said that the transport of animal waste should be done in the proper manner, so that there are no leaks – a suggestion backed by veterinarian Afrim Hamidi.
“It certainly brings viruses. Some are so small that they can be distributed through the air, bacterial diseases as well, but also other infectious diseases that are spread by stray animals,” Hamidi told BIRN.
According to Hamidi, the places where the waste is disposed of – generally in the suburbs of built-up areas – are the most at risk.
Even waste from healthy animals that were slaughtered for consumption can cause problems, as well as infections spread by stray animals, he said.
“If these stray animals get close to intensive farms, then through faeces, urine and the air, they can distribute different agents inside the farm. The most common pathogenic agents are salmonella, campylobacter, E coli, listeria, leptospirosis, clostridium, echinococcus, cysticercus, toxoplasmosis, trihinela, sarkosporidiose, bacillus bacteria, different viral agents that can infect animals and humans,” Hamidi explained.
The director of public health at the Food and Veterinary Agency, Flamur Kadriu, told BIRN that waste from slaughtered animals is not processed at all in Kosovo.
“In Kosovo, the way this waste is processed is not regulated by law. We’re working on legislation to fix this. There is no written rule that establishes what should be done with that waste,” Kadriu said.
“It can spread all animal diseases, which can be transmitted to other animals or even humans,” Kadriu admitted.
The National Institute for Public Health in Kosovo admitted that most slaughterhouses in Kosovo are not controlled and their waste is left anywhere, and it can transmit viruses and various diseases.
Antigona Ukehaxhaj, the chief of analytical and food laboratory at the institute, told BIRN that the institute has done no analysis on the impact of animal waste on human health because it is not in their domain.
“If animals aren’t slaughtered properly, if their waste is left outside in an open space for a long time where other animals have access to it, of course viruses are transmitted and they pose a threat to the environment and the residents around,” Ukehaxhaj said.
In late 2017, a plant that will be compliant with EU standards to process and eliminate animal by-products, including bones, is expected to start work and end the problem of dealing with this kind of waste. The first of its kind in the Western Balkans, it will be financed by EU funds, and its goal is to protect public health and the environment by introducing an effective and safe system for treating animal by-products.
Kosovo’s Minister of European Integration, Bekim Collaku, said that the project will cost of 7.7 million euros, of which 5.7 will be provided by the European Commission through pre-accession IPA funds, and the remaining two million by the Kosovo government.
Until the plant starts operating, people like the Gara family in the village of Palaj will have to keep putting up with the smell of putrid animal waste and the health risks it poses.
This article was produced as part of the Kosovo Fellowship for Quality Reporting, as part of the Media for All project implemented by Balkan Investigative Reporting Network and supported by the EU Office in Kosovo.BRUSSELS (Reuters) - EU antitrust regulators will investigate whether Aspen Pharmacare is charging excessive prices for five key cancer drugs in a move which could lead to a hefty fine for Africa’s largest generic drugmaker.
The European Commission said on Monday that it was looking into information that Aspen has imposed hefty and unjustified price increases of up to several hundred percent, and has withdrawn the drugs in some EU countries or threatened to do so in others.
Aspen acquired the medicines after their patent protection had expired. Its shares extended losses on news of the EU probe and were down 3.6 percent at 275.26 rand by 1307 GMT versus a 0.3 percent fall in Johannesburg’s Top-40 index.
The EU competition enforcer said the probe will focus on niche medicines containing the active pharmaceutical ingredients chlorambucil, melphalan, mercaptopurine, tioguanine and busulfan for treating cancer such as hematologic tumours.
“Companies should be rewarded for producing these pharmaceuticals to ensure that they keep making them into the future. But when the price of a drug suddenly goes up by several hundred percent, this is something the Commission may look at,” European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said in a statement.
Aspen said the EU probe concerned several of its European subsidiaries, adding that it would work constructively with the Commission.
The investigation will cover all of Europe except Italy, which hit the company with a five-million-euro fine in October last year for price hikes up to 1,500 percent for some key drugs.
The EU enforcer can fine companies up to 10 percent of their global turnover for breaching the bloc’s antitrust rules. It handed down multi-million euro penalties to a number of drugmakers in recent years for various offences.
Aspen, based in the South African city of Durban, has seen a more than nine-fold rise in its share price since 2008 on the back of its overseas expansion as it benefits from the expiry of patents on best-selling drugs.Shares
central bank of kenya
Last year, the Central Bank of Kenya released a statement warning Kenyans on virtual currencies like Bitcoin. The Central Bank called Bitcoin a form of unregulated digital currency that is not issued or guaranteed by any government or central bank. This statement was as a result of a tussle between Safaricom and BitPesa, a Bitcoin remittances firm based in Nairobi. The statement by the CBK further stated that as the regulator of domestic and international money remittances in Kenya no entity was licensed to offer money remittance services and products in Kenya using virtual currency such as Bitcoin.
During the MindSpeak forum held this past weekend, the Central Bank Governor Patrick Njoroge affirmed this stance on virtual currencies. The governor stated that Kenya lacks systems to handle virtual currencies as the CBK was yet to come up with proper policies on how to regulate them. The governor in his argument stated that the block chain technology powering bitcoin was the point of contention with questions on its security. ‘
What is Bitcoin?
Bitcoin is a global digital currency based on distributed computing instead of gold and banks. Bitcoin has evolved from a term for the nerds and geeks of the world with over $2 Billion transactions daily and over 400,000 businesses accepting the currency.
Bitcoin is particularly revered for its Block Chain technology. For those who are less familiar with the ins and outs of the currency, blockchain is a “general log of transactions” on which “you can see all transactions that have ever taken place or ever will take place.” In other words, if Bitcoin is used in a financial transaction, that transaction is permanently recorded in a public space which is an incorruptible universal record and tracking system.Golf fans takes a "selfie" with presidential candidate Donald Trump during the final round of The Barclays at Plainfield Country Club on Sunday in Edison, N.J. (Photo by Ross Kinnaird/Getty Images)
RICHMOND -- Donald Trump said Thursday morning that signing a loyalty pledge designed to block him from running for president as an independent would give him the best shot at winning the Republican primary.
Asked by conservative radio show host John Fredericks if he would sign a statement that the Republican National Committee circulated to presidential candidates Wednesday, Trump said he would make a final decision after a meeting Thursday with RNC Chairman Reince Priebus.
“It is possible. We’re going to have a meeting,” Trump said.
Already leading in the polls, Trump said he believes his popularity would increase should he rule out a third-party bid. He even appeared to slip at one point and say point-blank that he would sign the pledge.
“There are those that say you go up if you do, and I’m not doing it for that. I’m doing it for – I mean, we’re going to see what happens, we have a meeting – but certainly it would be advantageous to do it that way, and I think our best chance for victory is to do it that way. But I’m going to have to hear the chairman out,” he said.
The RNC pledge is similar to statements some state parties routinely ask candidates at all levels of elected office to sign. The Virginia GOP has had a version of the pledge and plans to discuss a proposal for presidential hopefuls at a meeting later this month. The move is widely seen as an attempt to box in Trump, but Virginia GOP Chairman John Whitbeck said it is intended to motivate Republican activists.
Trump said he’ll probably announce his decision Thursday at a 2 p.m. news conference.
“Look, my number one thing is to win, and the best way to win is as a Republican,” he said. “The third party thing is a tough thing, it’s a tough route. And I believe that it can be done, but it’s a tougher route, it’s a riskier route. And certainly it would give Hillary, or whoever’s going to be running on the other side, a better shot, let’s face it. They would love it.”
More on Donald Trump:
How Ted Cruz wooed and won Donald Trump
Here’s your daily Donald Trump interview, annotated
The media’s love-hate relationship with Donald TrumpCall it an elementary deduction, but it’s no mystery why Don Hobbs is a legend in the world of Sherlockians.
The first clue: He has amassed more than 11,000 volumes of foreign-language editions of books and stories about Sherlock Holmes — the fictitious British detective — in languages he can’t read.
That was his ticket to being admitted earlier this year to the Baker Street Irregulars, an exclusive, invitation-only club of Sherlock scholars formed in 1934. Only about 300 members belong to the BSI worldwide.
The group helped bolster Hobbs’ Sherlockian cred by crowning him with a prestigious BSI name: Inspector Lestrade.
The name comes from one of the characters in the “canon” of 60 Holmes short stories and books written by Britain’s Sir Arthur Conan Doyle primarily during the Victorian and Edwardian eras.
“It’s a very big honor,” Hobbs said, “because there are only two people in the canon of the Sherlock Holmes stories mentioned more, and those are Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.
“And those are never given out as names.”
By day, the 60-year-old Hobbs is a husband and father who lives in Flower Mound and works for a software company.
He’s “just a normal person,” he said, “who tries to lead a balanced life.”
“It’s not like I’m obsessed,” he insisted.
Heritage Auctions recently featured Hobbs and fellow Sherlockian Joe Fay, manager of rare books for Heritage, in a Sherlock Holmes discussion. The title: “The Maniac Collector.” About 50 enthralled Sherlockians attended.
Hobbs particularly prizes several items in his collection, including an Inuit (Eskimo) translation of The Hound of the Baskervilles that he picked up in Greenland.
He’s also fond of a Macedonian translation that took him more than four years to find.
Many of the individual books are not extremely expensive, Hobbs said. “You could find one for $25 to $75,” he said.
But he insures the entire collection, among the best in a tiny niche market, for $250,000.
The thrill of the hunt motivates him, he said.
“It drives me crazy when I find a new translation or somebody tells me about a book I don’t know about or I have never heard of,” Hobbs said
Hobbs said Doyle’s books and stories have been translated into 98 languages. His collection includes 92 of them.
He’s still missing translations in Kazakh, Telugu, Sindhi, Tatar, Fijian and Kyrgyz.
When Hobbs’ worldwide web of book dealers and contacts recently located several stories translated into Uighur, Hobbs was thrilled.
He also has a copy of a story translated into Choctaw by a friend.
“The first Native American language of Sherlock Holmes,” he said proudly. “He [the friend] sent me the file and I self-published it.”
Hobbs became acquainted with Holmes as a boy. “I like the way he logically approaches problems, the ways he did deductive reasoning,” he said.
“It was a very methodical way of solving a crime I just enjoyed.”
As he got older, he became fascinated by the myth around the character and decided to start collecting. After a few years of a “vacuum cleaner approach,” he focused on foreign-language editions.
Hobbs has been a guest at the annual BSI dinner off and on since the 1990s, but he didn’t know if he would ever be accepted as a member.
“The criteria for entry into the BSI … depend on who’s the head of the organization,” said Fay, who described the organization as “the major leagues of Sherlock Holmes.” “He has his own criteria for who gets in and who doesn’t, and no one knows what it is.”
When his name was called, Hobbs said, he “was totally speechless.”
Hobbs doesn’t know how it was decided to give him the name Inspector Lestrade. But, he said, “Maybe it’s because I’m always searching.”
Right now Hobbs, who carries a card with the inscriptions “BSI” and “Inspector Lestrade,” is hot on the trail of a copy of The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes published in Kazakh in the 1960s.
“Ten years ago, the Kazakh national library had a copy of it in their collection,” he said. “Since then, it’s listed as missing.”
Who better to find it than Don Hobbs, a.k.a. Inspector Lestrade?Up-and-coming e-sports site onGamers is staring down the barrel of a 50 percent drop in its traffic after being banned for a minimum of a year due to the actions of one of its editors. Senior editor (and onGamers' first employee) Rod "Slasher" Breslau had been privately messaging various redditors, asking them to submit certain posts to various subreddits. A month later, reddit admins responded by banning all onGamers content for at least a year.
This was not the first time onGamers has fallen foul of reddit's rules. The site was banned in April due to the high number of self-submissions, where onGamers writers submitted their own content to reddit. Self-submissions are permitted on Reddit, but risk being labeled as spam if they are not offset by an even greater number of other contributions; the April ban occurred because the various onGamers writers were submitting their own content almost exclusively.
That ban was lifted after onGamers staff, including Breslau, made personal appeals to reddit's admins and promised to behave better. It appeared that they were doing so, with third parties submitting links to the onGamers site.
However, it was then revealed that Breslau had been petitioning popular redditors to submit onGamers content on his behalf. In early June, Breslau approached guardcrushspecial, a prolific poster in the implausibly named /r/Kappa (a subreddit that has somehow become an important part of the fighting game community), to ask him to post a link to an onGamers story.
guardcrushspecial, having something of a trollish reputation (even calling himself "literally wors[e] than Hitler"), did so by submitting a link to a screenshot of Breslau's message.
A month later, Breslau's reddit account was banned, as were any and all submissions of onGamers content. Breslau was subsequently fired from onGamers, writing an apology in which he takes full responsibility for this attempt to game reddit.
The first ban, in April, had many in the reddit community divided. Although they appreciate that continued self-submissions may constitute spam, at least some subreddits, such as /r/Dota2, felt that the OnGamers content was likely to be posted anyway, and so having it self-submitted by story authors was essentially harmless; it simply saved someone else from having to do the work.
The rules are known, however, and onGamers was not the first site to be penalized in this way; in 2012, sites, including The Atlantic, were temporarily banned due to a high number of self-submissions.
The reaction to the second banning, and Breslau's attempts to get others to submit on his behalf, was more consistent, with many redditors incredulous that someone who'd only just avoided a long-term ban would continue to subvert the rules in this way.
The ban looks likely to have severe repercussions for onGamers. Kim Rom, CBS Interactive's vice president of e-sports, told Daily Dot that about half of onGamers' traffic came from reddit, and that losing so much traffic has "seriously endangered the livelihood" of onGamers' staff. onGamers and CBSi are now struggling to figure out what to do next. The site's presence on Facebook and Twitter is small, and the gap left by reddit will be hard to fill.Movie Night Turned Sexy Play Count: 14804
Proving you're gorgeous Play Count: 7144
Back to sleep, Baby Play Count: 13135
Vaggvisan no rain Play Count: 2096
Vaggvisan Play Count: 2914
There's a First Time for Everything Play Count: 9201
New Year's Day Cuddles Play Count: 4023
Verification GWA Backstage Play Count: 558
Do You Mind If I Stay Over? Play Count: 14966
Cold Wintersday Cuddles Play Count: 5653
Coming to terms with who you are Play Count: 4889
Afternoon Cuddles Play Count: 5425
Come Unwrap Your Gift Play Count: 11201
The half meter cumshot sesh <3 Play Count: 7933
Sweet Morning Cuddles Play Count: 6255
Extra Aftercare <3 Play Count: 4484
Picking up where we left off Play Count: 6769
Helping you fall asleep Play Count: 7483
Somna med mig Play Count: 3791
[M4A] Snuggling you to sleep Play Count: 9750
Give me the control Play Count: 6391
[M4F] Your Birthday Present Play Count: 19234
Swedish Morning Cuddles Bloopers Play Count: 1271
Morning Surprise Blooper Play Count: 1317
[M] verification on Pillowtalkaudio 11/4/2017 Play Count: 513
[M4F] [ramblefap] [heavy breathing] little bit of [Swedish] [moans] My mic was brushing against my shirt throughout the audio, sorry bout' that xP. This is my second ever audio, so I'm a little nervous, please be nice xP :). Hope you enjoy! Play Count: 8046
[M] asking for verification This is my verification (Nordic_Love). It is the 26th of March 2017. Play Count: 956Shortly after the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944, two Frenchmen on bicycles managed to cross the perimeter of the United States Army’s 23rd Headquarters Special Troops and what they saw astounded them. Four American soldiers had picked up a 40-ton Sherman tank and were turning it in place. Soldier Arthur Shilstone says, “They looked at me, and they were looking for answers, and I finally said: ‘The Americans are very strong.’”
Patriotic pride aside, the men of the 23rd were not equipped with super-human strength. They did, however, have inflatable tanks.
Shilstone was one of 1,100 soldiers who formed the unit, also known as the Ghost Army. They were artists and illustrators, radio people and sound guys. Handpicked for the job from New York and Philadelphia art schools in January 1944, their mission was to deceusuive the enemy with hand-made inflatable tanks, 500-pound speakers blasting the sounds of troops assembling and phony radio transmissions.
Over the course of the war, they staged more than 20 operations and are estimated to have saved between 15,000 and 30,000 U.S. lives. The illusion was never broken and not even their fellow soldiers knew of their existence.
Kept secret for 40 years, the story of the Ghost Army first broke in Smithsonian magazine in the April 1985 issue, when then-illustrator Shilstone shared his part in the war. Now, Shilstone and 18 other members of the 23rd are part of the new PBS documentary, “The Ghost Army.”
When he first began researching the story, director Rick Beyer says he was amazed. “First you think, maybe I’m misunderstanding or maybe it was just one time,” says the director. It’s a skepticism he’s since encountered on the road, including at a presentation for seniors at the Perkins School for the Blind in Massachusetts. “There was one guy, while I was setting up and he was just convinced that the whole thing was bullshit.” He told Beyer he had served in General Patton’s Third Army and never knew of any Ghost Army. But Beyer continued with his screening. Afterward the same man approached him and said, “This is the most amazing story I ever heard!”
“It’s a great example of how many fantastic, amazing, sort of mind-bending stories there still are 70 years later coming out of WWII,” says Beyer.
Deception has long been a part of war, the Trojan Horse being perhaps the most famous example. But what set the 23rd troops apart, says Beyer, is the way they integrated so many different strategies to create a multimedia roadshow capable of being packed up for another show the next night. To shore up potential holes in the line, the unit would set up its inflatable tanks and roll in the giant speakers with a 15-mile range to give the impression that a huge army was amassing. Coupled with decoy radio transmissions, the deceptions proved largely successful.
From the beaches of Normandy to the Battle of the Bulge, the Ghost Army saw a lot of action, but their biggest stunt would come near the end of the war. With the American Ninth Army set to cross the Rhine river deeper into Germany, the 23rd had to lure the Germans away. Posing as the 30th and 79th divisions, 1,100 men had to pretend to be more than 30,000.
Mixing real tanks alongside the inflatable ones, the troops appeared to be assembling a massive attack. Their fake observation planes were so convincing, American pilots tried to land in the field next to them. When the offensive finally made its move across the Rhine, with General Dwight Eisenhower and Prime Minister Winston Churchill watching, they were met with little German resistance. The riverbanks were left for the taking and the Ghost Army earned a commendation for its success.
Because the men had to keep their true purpose a secret, they regularly pretended to be other units. They’d mark their trucks with chalk or sew fake badges to throw off potential spies in the cities where they spent time off duty.
Set apart from other troops by their secret mission, the artists also brought an unusual perspective to war. Upon finding a bombed-out church in Trévières, several of them stopped to sketch the structure. When they stopped in Paris and Luxembourg, the men recorded everything from the beguiling women biking by to the scenic rooflines and street scenes. Beyer accumulated more than 500 of these sketches during the eight years he spent on the documentary, many of which were included in an accompanying art exhibit at the Edward Hopper House in New York.
“In war stories,” explains Beyer, “it tends to be about the guys on the line under fire or the generals planning strategy in the headquarters. What you don’t get always is the sense of what the experience is like for the people.”
“Whether it’s visiting a bordello or sketching a bombed out church or trying to comfort the orphaned Polish children in a [Displaced Persons] camp on a dreary Christmas in Verdun when you’ve just retreated from the Battle of the Bulge, those sorts of stories are part of the G.I. experience also and I wanted to convey this humanity as part of the story,” says Beyer.
The Ghost Army returned to the United States in July 1945, thinking they would join in the invasion of Japan. But after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and Japan’s surrender, the unit was deactivated on September 15, 1945.
Many of the members of the special unit went on to have careers in the arts, including painter and sculptor Ellsworth Kelly and fashion designer Bill Blass. Unable to tell their wives, family and friends about what they had done until the information was declassified, their stories didn’t make it into the official narratives of WWII. Beyer says there’s more still to discover, “There are things that are still hidden away about it.”
In the meantime, Beyer hopes his documentary can help counter the traditional assumption that British deception, most known for Operation Fortitude, which sought to divert German attention away from Normandy, was elegant while American efforts must have been clunky. “It shows how creative and imaginative American deception units were,” says Beyer.
Retired commander of NATO General Wesley Clark agrees in the documentary, saying, “The essence of winning is the defeat of the enemy’s plan.” And with imagination and creativity, that’s precisely what the Ghost Army was able to do.
“The Ghost Army” premiers on Tuesday, May 21 on PBS.Mystery as Cave Hill stone which guided pilots during WWII restored to former glory BelfastTelegraph.co.uk A huge rock on Cave Hill that was used to guide aircraft back home during World War Two has been painted white by an unknown person to remind walkers of the role it once played. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/mystery-as-cave-hill-stone-which-guided-pilots-during-wwii-restored-to-former-glory-34720601.html https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/article34720599.ece/98f02/AUTOCROP/h342/2016-05-17_new_21107245_I2.JPG
Email
A huge rock on Cave Hill that was used to guide aircraft back home during World War Two has been painted white by an unknown person to remind walkers of the role it once played.
An inscription was also added next to the stone, which was previously covered in graffiti, reading: "The white stone has been restored in honour of the family who painted it during WW2."
Cormac Hamill, chair of the Cave Hill Conservation Campaign, said he only recently discovered that the rock was used as a marker and that a man who lived in Cave Hill Cottage was paid a small sum to keep it painted white.
"For many years, I thought people had painted the stone green, orange, red and blue to reflect tensions in the area," he told the Belfast Telegraph.
"It was only recently that I discovered there was a chap who had a subvention during the war to paint the stone. It actually was a marker stone for aircraft to come in as they couldn't put the runway lights on."
Over the years, as its role was forgotten, people continued to paint the stone in various colours. More recently it became covered in what Cormac called "silly schoolboy graffiti".
"It had become a grotesque caricature of what it was," Mr Hamill said.
"My understanding is that somebody who knew the family went up and painted it white. It's a nod to the guy who slogged his way up there regularly. It was a contribution to the war effort and it seems an appropriate |
his entire family before the spell runs out of mana and he reverts back to normal. Or they attach the transformation shell too firmly to their soul and can't change back, and are then stuck in the form of a sparrow or something and can't talk to people or meaningfully interact with their environment. That's why a lot of people don't do transformation via invocations and rituals any more, and just buy transformation potions from people like me who know what they're doing – no chance of messing up, just drink a potion made by an expert and you're golden."
"Ah."
"On the other hand, when you're literally messing with your body chemistry and using alteration on your flesh, you're usually doing something totally irreversible," Lukav continued. "The human body is a complex thing, and I don't think anyone really understands enough about it to meaningfully improve it. Most potions that aim to enhance the real body with some exotic concoction are basically stimulant drugs with addictive properties or cause hard-to-cure damage if used often. And alteration spells that aim to alter the flesh directly have heavy drawbacks that make them hardly worth the effort and are often a total bitch to undo. I should know, I got called in often to help out with the fallout created by such magic. But we're getting off track. Come with me and I'll see if I can do something about your problem."
Lukav led him into his basement, past several locked doors, until they reached a spacious underground chamber. The huge spell formula on the floor in the form of two circles, one large one and one small one, each of which was ringed by lots and lots of magical glyphs, was a dead giveaway that this was some kind of ritual room. The fact that the room was perfectly cubical, with identical dimensions in all directions, was a further confirmation – flawless geometric shapes were always better for holding magic than anything remotely irregular, which was why Ikosian artifice featured a lot of circles, triangles, cubes, pyramids, cylinders, domes and so on.
Other than the ritual circle on the floor, the room was empty and featureless – likely to minimize magical interference from anything else. Zorian hoped he would not have to get naked for this – he had heard some of the more delicate magical scans were actually bothered by clothes and the like, and wasn't at all enthusiastic about that possibility.
Thankfully, Lukav's instructions didn't turn out to be that bad.
"Alright, leave any magical items on your person outside the room and then step into the center of the big circle, right into that big empty space," he told Zorian.
Zorian was more than a little apprehensive about leaving his magic items behind, since that would leave him totally defenseless. Especially the three innocuous-looking steel rings he had hanging on a necklace tucked into his shirt. Those rings were the latest iteration of his explosive suicide device that he had been steadily refining throughout the restarts. Anyone could make an explosive device with a bit of spell formula knowledge, of course, but making them stable enough not to go off by themselves yet capable of going off on a moment's notice whenever he gives a signal? Shrouding the explosive mana core with enough divination blockers to make the bombs invisible to wards designed to detect those very kinds of devices, thus allowing him to take those things literally everywhere he went, including the tightly warded academy facilities? Making them small and convenient enough that they weren't a chore to carry around? Not everyone could do that, he was sure.
In the end he decided to remove everything except the necklace. Getting killed by betrayal would suck but ultimately just be an annoyance, whereas getting stuck in some kind of soul mutilation ritual without means of suicide would be irreparably catastrophic. He just didn't trust Lukav that much, even if his empathy was telling him the man was honest enough and harbored no hostile feelings towards him.
He quickly put his spell rod, shielding bracelet, bag of small explosive cubes (kept for offensive purposes) and the experimental automation core he had been fiddling with in his spare time into a small pile next to the door and walked inside. Lukav was already sitting inside the smaller circle, which also had an empty space in the center of it that could accommodate him easily. Zorian copied the man and promptly sat down on the stone floor inside the larger circle. He had a feeling this could take a while.
Apparently Lukav's magic couldn't detect the necklace, because he said nothing about it.
"You don't have any kind of soul shell on top of your soul," Lukav decreed after 15 minutes of examination. "I kind of expected that. The sickness you said followed the spell that hit you strongly hints that part of your actual soul was affected. Let's see if I can detect any foreign bits in your soul then…"
Now this was the part that Zorian definitely cared about. He had been wondering for quite some time how big of a chunk of Zach's soul did he end up with and whether it was having some kind of effect on him that he was unaware of. Hopefully Lukav would be able to shed some light on that issue.
After more than half an hour of spellcasting and lots of frowning, Lukav was finally ready to give his report.
"Weird. You definitely have something woven into your soul, but it's not like anything I've ever seen. Actually, you have two somethings. One is some kind of complicated bit of spellwork woven incredibly tightly into your soul, definitely not soul-stuff but not something I recognize either. Very weird that something so complex could result from a botched spell. Not calling you a liar but it doesn't make sense to me. The other something… well, it's definitely a piece of foreign soul stuff fused into your own soul, but I don't think you have to worry about that much. It's not a spirit or some soul parasite, and it seems to have all but dissolved into your own soul. In a year or two it will be gone entirely, completely assimilated."
"What kind of consequences will that have?" Zorian asked worriedly.
"None, I think. Your soul appears to be converting it into just another piece of itself rather than trying to keep it distinct. So there shouldn't be any major personality shifts and you probably won't get any nifty abilities from whomever or whatever it was that donated a part of their soul to you. Though, I guess it is possible that the fragment had affected your personality to an extent when you first got it, before your soul had the chance to assimilate it sufficiently, and such influences may linger still. Do you think and act radically different ever since the incident?"
Zorian frowned. "To be perfectly honest, yes, I am quite different from how I used to be. But I'm not sure how much significance to attach to that. The incident was very traumatic, and so much has happened ever since then…"
"I understand," Lukav nodded sympathetically. "Your life has taken a completely different course after your fateful encounter with the darker side of magic. You would have changed anyway, and any changes caused by the soul fragment would have been lost in the noise. If you want my advice, you should not worry about it. You are who you are right now, and the fragment is all but gone. If shifters can claim to be the same person after stapling an animal soul to their own, then I'm not sure why a little nudge from a soul fragment should worry you."
"It's in my nature to worry," Zorian said. "Though admittedly the fact the fragment will be gone soon does make me feel better."
"Well," said Lukav, rising to his feet with an audible pop of his joints. "I'm glad to have allayed at least some of your fears, but this is as much as I can personally help you, I'm afraid. For the strange spellwork in your soul, you will have to talk to Alanic. He tends to be very suspicious of strangers and unannounced visitors, but I'll accompany you to smooth things over since you did save my life and all. Is there anything else you wanted my help with?"
"Well, not really," said Zorian. "But if I can trouble you some more, what can you tell me about shifters? You mentioned them several times while we talked today. Are you in contact with the local wolf shifter tribe by any chance?"
"No, not really," said Lukav, shaking his head. "I mean, I could locate them if I had a week or so, but I'd really rather not. Talking to them is annoying, and they don't like me very much ever since I tried to buy the shifter ritual off of them that one time."
"Ah," said Zorian with some disappointment. "It's just that I also talked to Vani, the local scholar in Knyazov Dveri, and he recommended I try to contact the local wolf shifters for help. Do you think the idea has any merit?"
"In terms of whether their soul magic expertise could have helped you? Maybe, though I wouldn't bet on it," said Lukav. "But I really, really doubt they would agree to help you. The shifter tribe he speaks of, the Red Fang tribe, is fiercely protective of their special magic and suspicious of anyone who takes an interest in it. Hell, they don't even talk to other shifter tribes about it! Having nigh-exclusive access to shifter magic is very prestigious for them, and they don't want to share it with anyone."
"Then why did you offer to buy it off of them?" asked Zorian curiously.
"Well I didn't know that then, did I? How the hell was I supposed to know these things when they barely talk to anyone in the mage community?" groused Lukav. "Okay, yeah, I may have been a little too insistent, but they could have explained things to me politely instead of making such a big deal out of it."
"I see," said Zorian carefully. Lukav probably wasn't the best person to help him contact the shifters, it seemed. Just as well, since he had a much likelier lead right now in the form of Alanic.
He agreed he would drop by tomorrow in the evening to pick up Lukav, and that they would then go meet Alanic together. The two men were old friends according to Lukav, and Alanic would be easier to deal with if he was there to vouch for Zorian's character and honesty.
Zorian hoped that the priest would be as useful as Lukav claimed he would be.
- break -
The next day Zorian spent an entire morning practicing the severing disc to make sure he could actually control it properly the next time he used it, switching to various levitation exercises when he got bored or ran low on mana. As evening approached, Zorian teleported to Lukav's village and spent an hour or so in idle chitchat with the man. Zorian wasn't sure, but it seemed to him that the man had hinted at the possibility of teaching Zorian some of his secrets. Of course, there would probably be an apprenticeship contract involved if he wanted to take Lukav upon that offer, but with the time loop in place, such entanglements wouldn't be permanent in nature. Perhaps he should set aside a future restart or two to see what the man had to offer, but transformation magic simply wasn't a priority right now. He needed information and defenses against soul magic before anything else.
Eventually, they both got on their way. Lukav had wanted to walk to Alanic's residence, but Zorian had vetoed the idea arguing that would be a waste of time when he could just teleport them next to the man's house instead. Admittedly his only experience in teleporting others had been when he had retreated from Vazen's house with Gurey in tow, but he was confident he could replicate that success. And as it turned out, he was right about that.
"I'm surprised someone as young as you can teleport," Lukav said conversationally, looking at their new surroundings to determine where exactly they ended up at. They were not far from the temple that Alanic worked at and which also served as his home, but Zorian opted not to teleport too close, as Lukav indicated that the man could be somewhat trigger happy about such things. "You're, what, 16? I guess I finally met one of those kid geniuses people talk about. You're not that Kazinski, are you?"
"No, I just happen to have the same last name as Daimen," Zorian lied.
"Figures," the man said. "You must get that question a lot."
"You have no idea," Zorian sighed. Thankfully, Kazinski wasn't that rare of a last name and no one had accused him of lying when he denied any connections.
Whatever Lukav had been trying to say next was promptly drowned out by the unmistakable sounds of explosions coming from the house in front of them, immediately followed by angry shouting in an unknown language and sounds of gunshots.
Zorian quickly drew his spell rod and scowled. He had been afraid of this. Whoever was behind the disappearance of the soul mages had noticed their assassination of Lukav had failed and decided to throw subtlety out of the window and move fast to eliminate their remaining target. They no doubt knew that Lukav and Alanic were friends and that Alanic would soon know all about the assassination attempt.
He cautiously advanced forward, Lukav trailing after him.
There were no undead this time, probably because the target was a well-known undead-hunter and was thus bound to be good against them. Instead, the attackers consisted of 15 men armed with rifles – probably non-magical mercenaries – and 2 mages acting like spell support. They were hesitant to simply storm Alanic's house for some reason, and instead waited outside for something to happen. Unwilling to charge into a group of riflemen like idiots, both Zorian and Lukav settled in behind some trees to observe the group.
"They're trying to bring down the wards before they move in," Zorian realized after a few seconds. "The mage on the right is trying to collapse the entire warding scheme, the one on the left is protecting him from all reprisals while he's busy and the riflemen are periodically shooting at the windows to keep Alanic from raining down offensive spells on them at will."
A ray of fire punctuated his whispered statement by erupting from one of the second story windows, aiming for the mage who was dismantling the wards. The other mage immediately shielded his companion from the attack, and the riflemen responded with a withering barrage of bullets at the offending opening.
"We have to help him," Lukav said firmly.
"The only option I see is waiting for a good opening," Zorian said. "I don't see a way to get involved right now that wouldn't immediately get us both killed."
"Can you deal with the two mages if I take care of the gun-toting idiots?" Lukav asked.
Zorian gave him a curious look. How did he intend to do that? Was he one of those idiots that still underestimated the effectiveness of guns even after the huge death toll they racked up against combat mages in the Splinter Wars?
"Well?" Lukav asked, a little more harshly.
Deciding to take some risk, Zorian skimmed the man's surface thoughts for a moment. He promptly realized that the man beside him cared deeply about Alanic and couldn't bear to see him killed if he could do something, anything about it. He was ready to move in with or without Zorian, but he honestly thought he could prevail against the riflemen. He was far less sure whether he could survive against them if he had to deal with the mage support as well, though.
"I can deal with them, yeah," said Zorian. "Wait for two minutes before you charge in."
He then promptly cast invisibility on himself and walked off in the direction of the two mages.
He wasn't walking for the sake of being dramatic – the invisibility spell he was using was a very delicate optical illusion that required his conscious attention to maintain. Any sort of distracting activity, such as fighting or casting spells, immediately unraveled it. He couldn't even run without turning into a shimmering humanoid outline that was far more attention grabbing than simply walking up to the mages with no cloaking attempts.
But a fast walk turned out to be sufficient. He was practically on top of the two mages when Lukav finally grew sick of waiting and charged into the fray with a battle cry.
At least he thought the creature that came charging in was Lukav. The huge bull covered in dark green, fishlike scales, its eyes glowing with malevolent red light, seemed like something a transformation expert would use and it sure as hell wasn't aligned with the attackers. The beast let loose a loud bellow that was laced with some kind of magical fear effect. Zorian ignored the mental attack easily enough, but three of the riflemen weren't as fearless and immediately fled screaming. The rest were shaken enough by the fear effect that they gave the bull a few crucial moments to close in before they started firing.
As Zorian expected, those scales weren't just for show, and the bullets didn't do much. The two hostile mages beside him seemed to realize their forces weren't going to fare well against this new threat because the defender suddenly started to cast a spell and the ward breaker sped up his work. Deciding that the defender was the bigger threat, Zorian decided to forgo any fancy spellwork and simply pulled out a knife from his belt and rammed it harshly into the man's neck, dropping his own invisibility in the process.
The other mage didn't react fast enough, too shocked at Zorian's sudden appearance, and received a swift kick in the groin a moment later. He immediately collapsed on the ground with a keening wail. After checking to see if any of the riflemen were gunning for him (they weren't, as they were too busy being trampled by the bull beast that Lukav had transformed into) Zorian reached into the mage's mind and blasted it with a crude telepathic assault. The man went unconscious like Zorian had been hoping he would, out of the fight.
Before Zorian could decide whether he should get involved in the fight against the riflemen (it seemed unnecessary, and he wasn't largely immune to gunfire like Lukav was), a trio of flaming projectiles rained down from the second floor and incinerated three of the riflemen that had been trying to rally the others. The bull-beast let loose another fear-laced bellow at this, and the survivors promptly fled.
Zorian watched them go, ready to erect a shield around himself if one of them decided to let loose a few parting shots. None of them did.
The bull beast let out a derisive snort and kicked the ground a few times before suddenly… folding upon itself, for the lack of a better word, and becoming a man. Specifically, Lukav.
Man, transformation was more useful than he had figured it was. He understood why Lukav had been reluctant to engage the attackers without someone to take out the mages though – without hands, the alchemist could not cast any defensive spells himself, and was very vulnerable to hostile magic.
Any conversation was postponed when a short, bald, muscular man literally dropped out of the sky in front of them. It took Zorian almost a second to realize that this was probably Alanic Zosk and that he had jumped down from the freaking two story window!
He looked unaffected by the fall, but still!
"Al, you idiot, I told you not to do that shit!" Lukav yelled. "I almost firebombed you before I realized it was you!"
"You, boy," Alanic said to Zorian, completely ignoring Lukav's anger. "Why did you let those men go? You could have picked them off as they fled."
"I… didn't think it was okay to kill fleeing opponents?" Zorian said, surprised at being put on the spot like that. "I don't know, it just seemed too bloodthirsty to just shoot them in the back while they ran."
A short silence ensued as Alanic gave him a blank look. His mind, though unshielded, was incredibly disciplined and gave Zorian no insight to the man's personality and mood. He idly noted that one of the man's eyes was blue, while the other one was brown. There was a horrid vertical scar over his blue eye, which really looked like it should have destroyed it as well when it was made.
"I see," he said finally. "You're young."
"What has that got to do with anything?" Zorian protested, annoyed at the man's attitude. They just saved the man's life, for god's sake!
"You haven't been fighting for long," he simply said. "You're inexperienced."
'Yeah, well, you're an asshole,' thought Zorian. But outwardly he just frowned instead.
Yeah, Zorian could already see Alanic would be one of those people. He really had the damnedest luck.
- break -
Alanic Zosk turned out to be pretty calm about the full blown assault on his temple by two dozen gun-wielding mercenaries, refusing Lukav's demand that they go and report the thing to the nearest Guild station right away with a dismissive statement that it was 'too soon to involve them'. He even had the unconscious mage that Zorian had disabled transferred to the dungeon in the temple's basement (why exactly did a temple have a dungeon, Zorian wondered but was afraid to ask), openly admitting he intended to have the man interrogated later.
In the meantime, he wanted to know what Zorian and Lukav came to him for. No, he didn't need time to calm down, why do you ask?
Zorian had to admit he admired the man's composure, even if he was a rude ass.
"Interesting," Alanic said after Zorian repeated the story he told Lukav. "Very well, I will see what has been done to you. Lukav, please leave the room while I examine mister Kazinski here."
Just like that? Apparently yes. Unlike Lukav, Alanic didn't use any fancy ritual rooms, and the examination took all of five minutes before the man had pronounced his verdict.
"You have a marker stamped into your soul," Alanic told him bluntly.
"A what?" Zorian asked.
"A marker is a combination of a beacon and an identification tag. It allows certain spells to find the marker very easily across great distances and unambiguously identifies whatever is tagged by the marker. They are often used by shopkeepers in fancier shops to track stolen wares, by high-security prisons and spies to track movements of marked individuals and in construction of certain wards that allow people to be 'keyed in' and therefore free of some or all of the restrictions that all other visitors labor under. Among other things. They are usually placed on items, as placing permanent markers on people is iffy and requires tattoos and such. Yours though, is stamped directly into your soul."
Zorian remained quiet, his thoughts churning. A marker. That was why he ended up caught in the time loop along with Zach, wasn't it? The spell wasn't keyed in to the originator's soul or some such, since those things were ambiguous and could fail – the original looper could end up with his soul damaged or slightly altered, much like what happened to him and Zach in the end, and then the spell could glitch and fail to loop them back like it's supposed to. No, the makers of the loop instead stamped Zach's soul with something unchangeable and unmistakable.
And then Red Robe and Zorian inherited it, because the makers of the loop were a little too smart for their own good…
"Removing the marker-" Alanic began, oblivious or uncaring about Zorian's obvious state of deep thought.
"I don't want it removed!" Zorian immediately protested, broken out of his thoughts.
Alanic gave him a considering look.
"I suppose you are fortunate then, because I do not think I could remove it even if I wanted to," Alanic said. "It is unlike anything I have ever seen. The marker is woven incredibly tightly into your soul, suffusing every corner of it. It is as if a chunk of your soul was replaced with it and it then grew to fill every nook and cranny it could find to root itself in as firmly as possible."
Oh hell…
He rose from his seat in agitation, pacing around the room. Alanic watched him impassively, silent and expressionless, until Zorian calmed down a little and sat back down.
"I need more information," he said. "And I need a way to protect myself from things like this in the future. Can you help me?"
Alanic nodded.
"But tomorrow," he added. "For now I have a prisoner to interrogate."Nov 13, 2014 - DeeJ
This week at Bungie, our Weekly Update found a new home.
If you’ve played Destiny since launch, you may have noticed a pattern in the chaos. Every Friday, we open a window into our world to share a little bit of what’s going on. We talk about what’s on our minds or drop hints about what you might find on our workbenches. Sometimes, the news is groundbreaking. Other times, what you see here are the ramblings of crazy people wandering around inside their own demented minds.
If you’ve been following Bungie for longer than that, you know that this is one of our favorite traditions – a greedy heartbeat between people who make games and the people who play them. For over a decade, we’ve been mixing it up and keeping you close. It’s become a hallowed ritual in our minds.
That will still happen (forever). It’s just gonna happen on Thursdays from now on. Please reconfigure your calendars. Reset your alarms. Clear the table of all other Internet nonsense, and save room for ours.
The wants and needs of the Bungie Community have changed. You’re a far more global population of armed combatants than we’ve ever served. Delivering our most important message after many of you have put your week to bed just didn’t feel right anymore. And, really, happy hour happens when you need it most.
Thursdate? Thupdate? Would you believe that Urk and I had a huge fight about that? Regardless of your name, welcome to your new home, Bungie Weekly Update. Let’s get down to brass tacks.
Iron Banner 2.0
Lord Saladin is poised for a return to the Tower. This time, his reappearance will be intentional. After a surprise ambush during what was supposed to be his sabbatical, we sent him packing again. More work was left to be done to realize his new potential.
Some of that work happened today during a planned maintenance window. If the next Destiny Updates stick their landing, we’ll light his shield again very soon. You’ll be invited to approach his altar of war and glory by the end of next week, if all goes well.
Days ago, I stepped into a place we call Hive. Inside Bungie, what used to be an executive war room secreted away behind sturdy double-doors has become a playtest lab. All are now welcome, but all who enter are expected to fight. It’s a place where our cabal of designers locks horns to see what works in our game - and what doesn’t. We also like to see who among us is the best.
It was the perfect setting to give the new Iron Banner a dance. Standing at left is Tyson Green. Weeks ago, he made some promises for how we intended to buff Iron Banner. With a package that you’ll install on Monday, we’ll be making a bid to keep them. As always, you’ll be the Judge. To wield that gavel, you’re gonna need to gear up.
[Disclaimer: Photo for illustration purposes only. It is widely known that DeeJ is not a brutish Titan, nor does he have a full suite of Raid gear. As you were.]
Here’s a confirmation of everything you’ll need to know if you’re to prosper in the new, improved, and exceedingly dangerous Iron Banner:
Power. Does. Matter! (no, really)
Only players Level 20 and above can lead a Fireteam
Players below Level 20 can accompany more powerful friends
Players within 3 Levels can be competitive with each other
Your DEFENSE rating affects how you take damage
rating affects how you take damage Wear your best (highest rated) armor
Players out of your league will seem like a Boss
Your ATTACK rating affects how you inflict damage
rating affects how you inflict damage Equip your best (highest rated) weapons
Lower-level players wielding fully-upgraded weapons should still be considered a very credible threat!
Claim victory to gain reputation.
Lord Saladin now has five ranks to obtain through victory
Your previous Iron Banner rank has been preserved
The Tempered buff is a twelve-hour boost in reputation gains
buff is a twelve-hour boost in reputation gains Activate Tempered later during the event to catch up faster
Acquire exclusive Iron Banner rewards.
Increase your Rank to unlock better gear
Reforge weapons to reset progression with new perks
weapons to reset progression with new perks Earn gauntlets and boots to move you closer to Level 30
See Lord Saladin for details!
Quitters never win.
Reputation gains are only awarded only to the winners
Defeat grants a token to be redeemed after a future win
You can carry up to five Iron Medallions at any time
at any time Partial reputation gains are earned instantly upon victory
Strike while the Iron is hot.
Your reputation will be reset at the conclusion of this Iron Banner
Like any competitive activity, each new event is a chance to regain your standing
Sound good? Feeling brave?
Good. Be at the ready. We promise that you might get twenty-four hours advance notice before the resumption of hostilities. Maybe.
Please stay tuned for updates as we deploy downloads to your console.
We Really Need To Chat
Before we lure you back to the most competitive challenge to be found in the Crucible to date, we’ll be opening a hailing frequency between you and other Guardians. It’s no secret that that the team who communicates with each other tends to win with each other. When used strategically, your most important weapon can be your voice.
On Monday, November 17th, we’ll be delivering the first of several Destiny updates scheduled for this month. This one will contain a Beta test for a new feature that will let you access a voice channel shared by the players you meet via Matchmaking. Click the Ghost to get the full story.
In summary: Navigation mode will connect you with willing allies on your side of a matchmade conflict – be it against man or beast. If they want to talk to you, the path will now exist. The question becomes: Will they choose it?
Think of this as a trial step into a more vocal world. We know that matchmade teammates aren’t the only people in Destiny to whom you want to speak. Your Mom told you never to talk to strangers. We think she was probably right, but we’re willing to provide you with an option where you need it for tactical gain.
Time will tell. We’ll be listening.
Tricks Up Sleeves
Next week, we’ll also let slip something we’ve been keeping a secret.
Did you acquire a Destiny collector’s edition that included an Expansion Pass? Did you acquire an Expansion Pass separately since then? If you have, we’ve got a special surprise for you. If you have not, but think you might still help yourself to The Dark Below, you’ll also be invited to enjoy.
The details are still secured in a crate. Early next week, the information we’re guarding will fly through the air with the greatest of ease. When it lands, we want there to be no doubt that this is for you, and that you’ll have a chance to enjoy it first.
We want to make sure that you traverse the next leg of your journey in outrageous style.
You Da Real DOC
It was a busy week in the Destiny Operations Center. We chased bugs. We updated our systems. We even took our own servers offline for several hours to rehab Lord Saladin’s Legendary Weapon kiosk. Let’s hear from the team who monitors the installation around the clock.
The latest Companion App update brought a makeover for the menus, as well as an easier way to recover from the “classified” condition on player stats. With the redesign, the Advisors and Stats have been moved to the main menu, and the Vault is now available via “the Tower’” screen. The Time Played statistics have been removed from the app, but is still available for viewing on your Bungie.net profile
Speaking of the Companion App, players are reporting issues with the Companion not updating their weekly event timers, and we are happy to help explain how to refresh your Companion App data. We have more help articles on Companion App questions that you can check out on the Bungie Help main page by typing “companion” into our handy search bar.
We’re aware that some people are having difficulty hearing some of their Fireteam members in chat. Sometimes this issue is due to audio settings, but other times it may be caused by someone having a strict NAT Type. Strict or Type 3 NATs will present a harder time giving you the best possible experience, including voice chat with all players in your Fireteam. To learn about NAT Types and how to change them for a better Destiny experience, visit our NAT guide today. If you cannot find a help article that answers your questions, please stop by the Help forum
The door to the DOC is usually closed, but our forum is always open. Unless we take it down for maintenance, of course. That’s our prerogative.
Alpha and Omega
Picture in the eye of your mind a Hive Knight. Three green eyes burn a hole into your bravery through the darkness. That hulking form encased in calcified armor is like an apparition from a long-forgotten nightmare. They’re quite real, however, as evidenced by the fact that they charge your position when you invade their citadel.
OmegaX711 is a Guardian who stands their ground. To date, 32,486 have met their end at the hands that wield an exotic arsenal. That’s a lot of Bounties - enough Knights to populate a small town. For this gamer, the entire Hellmouth is a loot cave. This is exactly the sort of ally you’d want in your Fireteam in the weeks to come. If you haven’t heard, we’re sending you back into the depths of the Hive stronghold to dismantle their best laid schemes.
You ready? You know that this Warlock is good to go.
Busy times ahead next week. Updates for you to download and apply. Announcements for you to enjoy. New battles for you to wage.
Talk to you again soon. On Thursday, even.
Thursdate? Thupdate? Urk?Poll Boost for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán
Viktor Orbán’s government retains its strong lead over opposition parties ahead of next year’s Hungarian elections, a newly released poll shows.
The Tárki Research Institute survey puts support for Orbán‘s Fidesz – Christian Democrat coalition at 35 percent overall, and 55% among decided voters. This represents an increase of 2, and 4% respectively since the last poll taken in April.
Orbán’s largest opposition party, Jobbik, formerly ‘’ultra-nationalist’’ but having moved towards the center, now stands at 11% (17% amongst decided voters).
Newly formed liberal party, ‘’Momentum’’, which models itself on the political movement of French President Emmanuel Macron, polls at 2% (3% amongst decided voters), competing with numerous left-wing parties on similar scores.
The Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) – one of several opposition parties which claim they will dismantle Hungary’s border fence – dropped three to four percentage points to 7% overall (11% among decided voters).
Orbán’s government defied Brussels earlier this year by completing a second hi-tech border fence to stop migrants entering Hungary via the Balkans, an effective measure which has dramatically reduced illegal immigration into the Central European country.
The election, set for April 2018, will be closely watched by the European Union; In addition to fortifying its southern border, Hungary has earned criticism and legal sanction from Brussels for refusing to partake in a migrant quota scheme.
Orbán has warned that he will face opposition in next spring’s election from the EU and what he calls the ‘Soros mafia network’, both keen to replace a government which has been a bulwark to their vision of a borderless Europe.
In recent months, the Hungarian leader has been engaged in a war of words with George Soros, having enacted legislation to limit the influence of his Open Society Foundation, and plastering the country in posters urging Hungarians not to let the pro-open borders billionaire ‘’have the last laugh’’.
Photos: Budapest Business Journal, Attila Kisbenedek/AFP via Getty Images, AFPIn October 2009 Toronto-based artist Josh Chalom, 51, first entered the Guinness Book of World Records with a 17-by-8.5-foot depiction of Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper" rendered entirely in three-inch Rubik's Cubes--4,050 Rubik's cubes, to be exact, all "solved." The piece was a mere coaster compared to Chalom's latest attempt, a 2,000-pound, 29-by-15-foot rendition of Michelangelo's "Hand of God" from the Sistine Chapel, incorporating 12,090 cubes. The work debuted at Toronto's Nuit Blanche arts festival on October 2. Today Chalom announced that he'd received the Guinness team's official certification of a new world mark.
Chalom's "Hand of God" (medium: Rubik's Cubes)
"Rubik's Cubism" is nothing new. The three-dimensional puzzle was created in 1974 by Hungarian professor Ernő Rubik and transformed into an icon in 1980 by Ideal Toy. As Chalom relates, "People have been creating art with Rubik's Cubes ever since, beginning with the first kid who took more than two and made a design." He adds, "I'm just taking it to a new level."
To reach world-record heights, Chalom faced several challenges, not least of which was the acquisition of material. He ended up buying Chinese Rubik's Cube knock-offs for about $1 apiece.
Because Rubik's Cubes offer just six colors -- white, red, blue, yellow, orange, and green -- Chalom faced difficult artistic choices too. "You couldn't have Adam looking like he just came out of a tanning salon or God looking too demonic," he says.
Finding adequate assistance presented still another hurdle. At the traditional source, art schools, the number of students longing for a paid assistant's gig is usually about the same as the total enrollment figure. But Chalom needed assistants who qualified as "Cubers"--capable of solving the puzzle in 30 seconds or less. "Like anything else you put it out |
association officers and claimed membership.
Jurors were told that Thompson directed telemarketers not to solicit funds in states that required financial audits of charities. The jury also quietly watched as stacks of cash found with Thompson when he was arrested were dumped on a table and displayed in an alluring exhibit of ill-gotten gains.
Through cross-examination of prosecution witnesses, the defense was able to show that telemarketers got upwards of 90 percent of the donations collected, and that there were funds spent by the USNVA on charitable projects.
Patituce also pointed out the USNVA could legally make political donations which met its stated mission of working for legislation to benefit veterans.
But his planned defense fizzled Tuesday when Thompson decided he would not testify, and Patituce subsequently rested his case without calling an witnesses and waived a closing argument on Wednesday.
Thompson's behavior and appearance became erratic in the closing days of the trial. He pounded his head against the walls of a holding cell adjacent to the courtroom and showed up for the trial Tuesday with disheveled hair and clothing. A similar condition on Wednesday prompted an angry Judge Gall to order Thompson to clean up his appearance before the jury was brought in.
Gall later told Thompson that he found those incidents "appalling" and wondered aloud if they were deliberate ploys.
When Thompson is sentenced, this chapter of his saga will be closed. But the book isn't necessarily finished.
Thompson, according to his defense attorney, plans to appeal.
Plain Dealer Reporter John Caniglia contributed to this story.Last month over 500 kayak anglers from around the world submitted their nominations for the 2013 Kayak Anglers Choice Awards (KACAs). The nominations have been tallied, and the first round of voting starts today.
Unlike last year’s awards, the 2013 KACAs will be run in a weekly elimination format. The votes will be tallied every Sunday, and the top nominations will move into the next round. This week the top thirty nominees from each category are competing for fifteen spots. Next week or week two, voting will narrow down the fifteen nominees to five. Week three will be our final week of voting, with the top five nominees battling to be the Kayak Anglers Choice Awards winner.
Congratulations to all the nominees, and good luck!
To cast your vote go to www.yakangler.com/choice
Angler of the year Allen Bushnell
Allen Sansano
Andy Cho
Andy Fonseca
Arnie Mears
Ashley Rae
Benton Parrott
Brad Hole
Brandon Barton
Brandon Campbell Callie Shumway
Casey Brunning
Chad Hoover
Dee Kaminski
Devin Hallingstad
Drew Gregory
Ian Harris
Isaac Brumaghim
Jason Self
Jay Brooks Jeff Little
Jim Sammons
Jim Van Pelt
John Oast
Josh Henson
Josh Holmes
Kayak Kevin Whitley
Marty Hughes
Matthew Frazier
Matthew Schaefer Mike Zilkowsky
Noah Heck
Richard Ofner
Rob Appleby
Rob Choi
Shawn Blunt
Stewart Venable
Symon Willman
Tino Mendietta
Tommy Fucini Kayak of the year Cobra Marauder
Diablo Paddlesports Adios
Eddyline Caribbean
Emotion Mojo Angler
FeelFree Moken 12.5
FeelFree Moken 14
Hobie Adventure Island
Hobie Outback Hobie Pro Angler 12
Hobie Pro Angler 14
Hobie Revolution 13
Jackson Kayak Big Tuna
Jackson Kayak Cruise
Jackson Kayak Cuda 12
Jackson Kayak Cuda 14
Jackson Kayak Kilroy Malibu Kayaks x13
Native Watercraft Slayer 14.5
Native Watercraft Slayer Propel
Native Watercraft Ultimate 14.5
NuCanoe Frontier 12
Ocean Kayak Prowler Ultra 4.3
Ocean Kayak Trident 13 Ocean Kayak Trident 15
Old Town Predator
Viking Kayaks Profish 400
Wilderness Systems Ride 115
Wilderness Systems Ride 115X
Wilderness Systems Ride 135
Wilderness Systems Tarpon140 Paddle of the year Angler Ace by Bending Branches
Angler Classic by Bending Branches
Angler Pro by Bending Branches
Angler Scout by Bending Branches
Assault Hand Paddle by Backwater Paddles
Axis 230 by Advanced Elements Camano by Werner
Cutback by Lendalna
Exodus Fishstix by Adventure Technology
Expedition Angler by Carlisle
Gullwing Paddle by Gullwing Paddles
Kaliste by Werner Magic Plus by Carlisle
Manta Carbon by Aqua Bound
Manta Ray by Aqua Bound
Navigator by Bending Branches
Orca V-Lam by Sawyer Pursuit Glass by Adventure Technology
Shuna by Werner
Skagit by Werner
Sting Ray Carbon by Aqua Bound
Surge Carbon by Aqua Bound Forum of the year Aquahunters - HI
Austin Kayak Fishing - TX
Australian Kayak Fishing Forum - Australia
Bayou Coast Kayak Fishing Club - LA
Canadian Kayak Anglers - Canada
Central Coast Kayak Fishing - CA
Forgotten Coast Kayak Anglers - FL
Hmong Kayak Fishing Club - GA Jax Kayak Fishing - FL
Jersey Cape Kayak Fishing - NJ
Kayak Anglers of Western PA - PA
Kayak Bass Fishing - TN
Kayak Fishing Down Under - Australia
Kayak Fishing New Zealand - New Zealand
Kayak-Angelforum - Germany
Lanier Area Kayak Anglers - GA Mississippi Kayak Fishing - MS
Modern Kayak Fishing - Australia
NCKA (NorCal Kayak Anglers) - CA
NCKFA (North Carolina Kayak Fishing Association) - NC
New England Kayak Fishing - NE
Northwest Kayak Anglers - WA
PCKFA (Panama City Kayak Fishing Association) - FL Pensacola Fishing Forum - FL
Southwest Florida Kayak Angler's Association - FL
Space Coast Kayak Anglers - FL
Tennessee Kayak Anglers - TN
Texas Kayak Fisherman - TX
TKAA (Tidewater Kayak Angler Association) - VA
Yakfisher - Canada Magazine of the year Blade
Chesapeak Angler Magazine
Coastal Angler Mag
Extreme Kayak Fishing Magazine Florida Sportsman
Kayak Angler Magazine
Kayak Fish Kayak Sailing Magazine
KFC Tournament Trail Magazine
Modern Kayak Fishing NZ fishing world
On The Water
Susquehanna Fishing Magazine Product of the year BlackPak by YakAttack
Bullwinkle by YakAttack
Columbia Omni-Freeze Zero Apparel by Columbia
C-Tug by Railblaza
Dry Pants by YakAssault
EGO S2 slider nets by Adventure Products
Falcon Sail by Falcon
Fish Grips by Fish Grip GT90 by YakAttack
Hero 3 Black by GoPro
Kayak Fishing Light Kit by SuperNova Fishing Lights
Lifeproof Case by Liefproof
Lowrance 4 DSI by Lowrance
Micro anchor by Power pole
Mustang MIT 100 by Mustang Survival
Overboard Rods by Overboard Rods Pro Series Camera Booms by Railblaza
Railblaza StarPorts by Railblaza
Rigging Bullet by YakAttack
Rip N Slash by Unfair Lures
Senzigrip rod by Bull Bay Rods
ShockStrap Ratchet Strap by ShockStrap
Sinister Swim Tail by Slayer Inc Lure Company SL GearTrac by YakAttack
Tactical angler power clips by Tactical angler
Tailwater Tackle Bag by NRS
Tommyhead Jigs by Tommy Schultz
VisiCarbon Pro by YakAttack
Vudu Shrimp by Egret Baits
Zooka Tube by YakAttack Location of the year Bay of Quinte, Canada
Boundary Waters, MN
CBBT (Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel), VA
Chesapeake Bay, VA
Columbia river, WA
Devils River, TX
Dry Tortugas, FL
Fort Fisher, NC Grand Isle, LA
Hobuck Beach, WA
Homer, AK
Indian River Lagoon, FL
Kiribati Flats, Christmas Island
Kona Coast, HI
Lady Bird Lake, TX
Laguna San Jose, PR Lake Cassayuna, NY
Lake Fayett, TX
Lake Guntersville, AL
Leeville, LA
Leffingwell Landing, CA
Matlacha, FL
Mosquito Lagoon, FL Orere point, New Zealand
Panama City Beach, FL
Pensacola, FL
Port Hope Lake Ontario, Canada
San Jose Lagoon, PR
Shelter Cove, CA
Susquehanna River, PAJust yesterday, we brought news of a new Blu-Ray release for the Back to the Future trilogy, including a set with the entire animated series from the 90s, for the first film’s 30th anniversary. Appropriately, the new Blu-Ray set arrives October 21st, 2015, the same day Marty McFly and Doc Brown traveled to the future in Back to the Future Part II.
It turns out that won’t be the only way you can celebrate the classic time travel trilogy, because buried in a press release for the new Blu-Ray set is word that the entire Back to the Future trilogy will also be returning to theaters that same day. And there’s another cool item fans will want to pick up this fall as well.
Find out more about the Back to the Future trilogy in theaters after the jump!
Since the release is still three months away, specifics on where the Back to the Future trilogy will be screening have not been revealed. The press release merely says to “Check local listings for show times,” so we’ll have to wait for more information on that front. But previously only the original film had been re-released for anniversary screenings, so this is pretty cool.
Something else we’ll have to wait for more details on is a new picture disc vinyl soundtrack release for Back to the Future, which will be available on October 16th. We’ll likely get to see the artwork for that as the release gets closer.
But if you’re really craving some Back to the Future this weekend, AMC is having a marathon of all three films in honor of the 30th anniversary. So if you’re one of those people who doesn’t own the movies for some reason, and you just like to watch them on television, then this Sunday, July 19th is your day. Here’s the schedule for the marathon on AMC this weekend:
SUNDAY, JULY 19th “Back to the Future” at 11:00 a.m. ET/PT
Teenager Marty McFly is sent back in time to 1955, where meets his future parents in high school and accidentally becomes his mother’s romantic interest. Marty must repair the damage to history by causing his parents-to-be to fall in love, and with the help of eccentric scientist Dr. Emmett “Doc” Brown (Lloyd), he must find a way to return to 1985. “Back to the Future II” at 1:30 p.m. ET/PT
McFly and Dr. Emmett “Doc” Brown travel to 2015 to prevent McFly’s future son from ending up imprisoned. However, their presence allows Biff Tannen (Wilson) to steal Doc’s DeLorean time machine and travel to 1955, where he alters history by making his younger self wealthy. “Back to the Future III” at 4:00 p.m. ET/PT
While stranded in 1955 during his time travel adventures, Marty McFly discovers that Dr. Emmett “Doc” Brown, trapped in 1885, was killed by Biff Tannen’s great-grandfather Buford. Marty decides to travel to 1885 to rescue Doc. “Back to the Future” at 6:30 p.m. ET/PT
Encore showing.
All this leads up to the premiere of AMC’s new eight-part sci-fi drama series Humans, which will begin at 9pm Eastern that night. You can check out the trailer for that new series right here.
Otherwise, stay tuned for details on all the forthcoming Back to the Future 30th anniversary celebratory releases coming later this year (like the Hot Toys version of the DeLorean and Marty McFly from Back to the Future Part II). As a huge fan of the trilogy, I know I’ll be on the lookout for whatever I can get my hands on.Photo: Angelina Castillo
If you've been bummed out about missing the church service of dance that is an LCD Soundsystem show since James Murphy & Co. resumed touring — and that's probably a fair number of you, since their outstanding set at Bonnaroo 2016 was pretty underattended — now's a good time to get excited.
At the close of the group's set at Forecastle on Saturday night, one of the big screens flashed the awesome piece of news below.
Photo: D. Patrick Rodgers
Looks like you'll be able to dance yrself clean on Friday, Oct. 20, at Municipal Auditorium, and tickets will go on sale this Friday, July 21, at 10 a.m. Neither the Municipal site, LCD's tour page nor Ticketmaster show confirmation of the show yet, but we'll update with relevant details when they're available.
Update July 17: Here's that link to buy tickets.President Michelle Bachelet says she will sign the bill into law
Chilean lawmakers have approved a bill that would legalize gay civil unions in the south American country.
The Chamber of Deputies passed the measure by a vote of 86 to 23, with two abstentions.
‘This is a law that does not discriminate and it gives protection to all couples and families in the country,’ government spokesperson Alvaro Elizalde said.
The Senate last October approved the legislation first introduced by former President Sebastián Piñera in 2011.
The amended bill will now return to the upper house, which is expected to approve the measure before the end of the month.
President Michelle Bachelet said she will sign the bill into law.
Rolando Jiménez, president of the Movement for Homosexual Integration and Liberation, welcomed the vote.
‘We dedicate this day, this moment, to the gay and lesbian families that have suffered a historic burden of misunderstanding and prejudices,’ he said in a statement.
‘Today it will be the state’s turn to strengthen them and protect them on equal terms.’
In December, Deputy Gabriel Silber Romo introduced a bill to legalize gay marriage, which is already recognized in Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina.The following is a guest post by Jeff Lockhart.
Two weeks ago, the LA Times ran an Op-Ed by Debra W. Soh on “The Futility of Gender-Neutral Parenting.” The central claim is old and fundamentally conservative: differences between men and women are biological truth, not to be meddled with by free will or society. Sex differences are facts to be accepted, not questioned or altered (two things feminists have always done). The op-ed circulated widely and was picked up by other outlets, including a New York Magazine piece titled “Yes, Biology Helps Explain Why Boys and Girls Play Differently.” Throw out your oatmeal baby room paint and desegregated toy isles.
Soh provides a number of common scientific claims to back this point. She mentions that babies exhibit gender-typical toy preferences at 18 months, before they exhibit awareness of their gender. This sounds like perfect proof: differences before babies are socialized into gender must be biological. Except babies are socialized into gender from birth, as shown in the famous 1975 “Baby X” study, which found adults offered different toys and described babies’ responses to the toys differently depending on whether they were told the child was a boy or girl (regardless of the child’s genitalia).
Soh also mentions the ‘masculine’ behavior of girls with a condition known as CAH. There are many problems with CAH research design as well. Biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling addresses many of them in an endnote that sprawls a stunning five pages in her 2000 book. Soh then cites findings that vervet monkeys, without human socialization, preferred toys appropriate to their sex. With some digging, we can find the original study. When the researchers found that female monkeys spent more time with the cooking pot toy than males, they took it as evidence of a biologically female attraction to toys humans code as feminine—never mind that the monkeys don’t understand cooking or its gendered implications. This choice left multiple scientific readers bewildered. The authors briefly mention a more compelling explanation—female monkeys are known to be more attracted to reddish colors, so perhaps they played more with the two girl toys (the pot and a doll) because they were also the only two red toys. But they do not control for this obvious confounding variable. Discussing the study in her later work, one of the initial authors mentions only the doll, omitting the confounding color variable and the meaningless cooking pot. Few people citing the study mention that the male moneys spent equal time with masculine and feminine toys, either.
In another example, Soh points to a study that correctly identifies 73% of participants’ sex based on brain scans. 73% can sound like a lot, but with two choices, randomly guessing would give us 50% accuracy. While their method is somewhat (23 points) better than guessing, it’s 27 points worse than perfect. That is, a lot of people’s brains do not conform to the model that sexes are binary and different. Perhaps that is why surveys of this literature find “no consistent evidence of brain based sexual dimorphism exists.” Moreover, observing biological difference doesn’t mean biology causes social differences. Gendered social behavior has been shown to change the structure of one’s brain. The same has been shown for hormone levels, even back in 1979. Social factors, then, sometimes cause biological ones.
A Large and Longstanding Body of Research Literature
The LA Times Op-Ed matter-of-factly informs readers that a “large and long-standing body of research literature shows that toy preferences, for example, are innate, not socially constructed or shaped by parental feedback.” This is technically accurate: research to this effect has been prolific and dates back at least several hundred years. But that research has also been heavily critiqued and frequently debunked by scientists over the last 40+ years. Research to the contrary is itself a “large and long-standing body of research literature.” Some prominent authors within STEM fields include Anne Fausto-Sterling, a biologist who has written 5 books and numerous articles on the subject; Ruth Hubbard, the first tenured woman in Harvard’s biology department; Evelyn Fox Keller, a physicist; and Rebecca M. Jordan-Young, a sociomedical scientist. There is even a pop-science summary of this research field by a neuroscientist, Cordelia Fine. By ignoring this entire body of work, which responds at length and with scientific rigor to her specific examples, Soh gives readers the false impression that all research unambiguously shows social resistance to current gender patterns is “futile.”
Then, of course, there is the social science. This is where we get studies like Baby X, Emily Martin’s demonstration of sexist assumptions clouding biological research, Nelly Oudshoorn’s research on the historical construction of “sex hormones,” and Beth B. Hess’ incisive quip that “for two millennia, ‘impartial experts’ have given us such trenchant insights as the fact that women lack sufficient heat to boil the blood and purify the soul, that their heads are too small, their wombs too big, their hormones too debilitating, that they think with their hearts or the wrong side of the brain. The list is never-ending.”
Sociology is also where we find evidence of how sex-stereotyped behaviors are learned, planned, and enforced—none of which would be necessary (or possible) if they were “predetermined characteristics” like Soh suggests. This is a huge area of sociology. Erving Goffman’s 1977 “The Arrangement between the Sexes” is an early classic, but much more empirical work has demonstrated gender socialization since then by Raewyn Connell, Lorena Garcia, Karin Martin, Tay Meadow, CJ Pascoe, Barrie Thorne, and countless others. And then there are the cross-cultural studies showing gendered behavior varies widely across places and historical periods. Margaret Mead’s classic 1949 Male and Female is among the most influential. Personally, I love this post on the pink costumes marketed for boys in the 1955 Sears catalog.
Agendas
What purpose does an Op-Ed like this one serve? Soh insists gender-neutral parenting is futile, and her disdain for it is palpable throughout the article. Soh is so invested in telling readers how (not) to parent (neutrally) that she ignores decades of scientific research showing that there are fatal methodological flaws in the studies of biological causes for gendered behavior. None of these critics say biology is entirely irrelevant—many are themselves career biologists. Even more to the point, she ignores decades of social scientific research demonstrating clearly that social factors do influence gendered behaviors like toy preference and STEM achievement. The data is in: gender socialization is not futile (but looking for evidence of biological sex determinism probably is).
Prescriptive claims based on innate biology present us with a telling paradox. If one really believes, as Soh professes to, that outcomes are biologically determined and socialization is irrelevant, why write an Op-Ed telling us we ought to socialize children into traditional gender roles? Why give any recommendations at all, if our actions have no effect? When the Borg tell us resistance is futile, they are trying to demoralize us into surrendering a fight we may otherwise win, into assimilating with their views even when it is painful or costs us our identities.
When sex difference research is used to make prescriptive claims (such as how to parent), a logical fallacy also takes place. Researchers look for differences between (cisgender) men and women, then build a model of what is masculine and feminine to describe what they see. This is a reasonable step (unless, of course, you consider the long history of research on intersex, transgender, and nonbinary people that complicates “men and women”). However, when someone turns around and says “this girl likes boy toys” or “boys’ rooms should be blue not oatmeal,” they mistake the model’s description of reality for reality itself. If she is playing with a different toy than the model of sex difference predicts, that is an error in the model, not in the girl.
Jeff Lockhart is a PhD student at the University of Michigan.
Share this: Twitter
Facebook
Like this: Like Loading... RelatedChelsea are leading the race to sign Ghana defender Baba Rahman from Augsburg, sources have told ESPN FC.
Manchester City and Arsenal have been credited with an interest in Rahman, but ESPN FC has been told that Chelsea are in pole position to land the left-back.
Chelsea scouts have been alerted to the 21-year-old's talents since his time at Greuther Furth and they have continued to monitor his progress.
Rahman was one of the stars for Augsburg as they finished fifth in the Bundesliga last season, and their president Klaus Hofmann told Sport Bild last month that they would only consider offers over €20 million.
"We are a very healthy club," Hofmann said. "Baba is one of the biggest talents in the world. Nobody needs to call us and offer €20m."
Baba Rahman was a key player for Augsburg as they secured a surprise fifth-place finish last season.
Earlier this week, Augsburg sporting director Stefan Reuter told Augsburger Nachrichten: "There is nothing new. We are not in contact. There have been no concrete offers for him. It does not concern us at the moment. We are totally relaxed.
"We want to keep our sporting potential at Augsburg, but if extreme sums are offered we will think about it. That's normal but it does not necessarily mean we will sell him."
However, ESPN FC has been told that Augsburg are now resigned to losing Rahman as they accept they cannot compete with what is on offer from Europe's top clubs, and the player has a preference for the Premier League.
Chelsea are in the market for a new left-back as doubts continue to surround the future of Filipe Luis at Stamford Bridge.
The Brazilian left-back struggled to hold down a regular place in Jose Mourinho's side last season and there have been suggestions Luis has failed to settle to life in England.
Atletico Madrid have confirmed their interest in taking Luis back to the Vicente Calderon just one year after selling him, and Mourinho has identified Rahman as his top target to replace Luis should he leave.Newly unearthed photos of President Obama in Muslim garb underscore his deep ties to the faith -- and possibly help explain his reluctance to call out radical Islam, Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly said Wednesday.
The photos, aired on “The O’Reilly Factor,” were taken at the wedding of Obama’s half-brother, Malik Obama, in Maryland sometime in the early 1990s, O’Reilly said. They were not offered as evidence that Obama is Muslim, as some of his critics insist, but to show his “deep emotional ties” to the religion of his father and stepfather, O’Reilly said.
“There is no question the Obama administration's greatest failure is allowing the Islamic terror group ISIS to run wild, murdering thousands of innocent people all over the world, including many Muslims,” said O'Reilly. “Mr. Obama has never, never acknowledged that mistake, nor does he define the ISIS threat accurately.
“That group is killing innocent people in order to impose a radical version of Islam on the world,” the newsman added. “The jihad is solely based on theology, perverted as it may be.”
A similar photo emerged in 2008, when Obama was running for the Democratic presidential nomination against Hillary Clinton. In that photo, Obama was seen wearing a white turban and Muslim dress. The photo was sent to the influential Drudge Report, and Obama’s campaign blamed Clinton for the “smear.”
"On the very day that Senator Clinton is giving a speech about restoring respect for America in the world, her campaign has engaged in the most shameful, offensive fear-mongering we've seen from either party in this election," then-Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said.
The president reportedly met his older half-brother for the first time in 1985. Malik Obama now lives in a rural Kenyan village near Lake Victoria.Sematext team is highly distributed. We are ex-Skype users who recently switched to Slack for team collaboration. We’ve been happy with Slack features and especially integrations for watching our Github repositories, Jenkins, or receiving SPM or Logsene Alerts from our production servers through their ChatOps support. The ability to add custom integrations is really awesome! Being search experts it is hard for us to accept any limitation in search functionality in tools we use. For example, I personally miss the ability to search over all teams and all channels and I really miss having no analytics on user activity or channel usage. Elasticsearch has become a popular data store for analytical queries. What if we could take all Slack messages and index them into Elasticsearch? This would make it possible to perform advanced analytics with Kibana or Grafana, such as getting like top terms used, most active users or channels. Finally, a simple mobile web page to access only the indexed data from various Teams and Channels might be handy to have, too.
In this post we’re going to see how to build what we just described. We’ll use the Slack API, Node.js, React and Elasticsearch in 3 steps:
Index Data from Slack
Analyse Data from Slack
Create a custom Web-App for search
Index Data from Slack
The Slack API provides several ways to access data. For example, outgoing webhook. This looks useful at first, however, this needs a setup per channel or keywords as trigger. Then I discovered a better way – the Node.js Slack Client. Simply log in with your Slack account and get all Slack messages! I wrote a little Node.js app to dump the relevant information as JSON to the console or to a file. Having the JSON output, it can be piped to Logagent-js a smart log shipper written in Node.js. I packaged this as “slack-elasticsearch-indexer” so it’s super easy to run:
npm install slack-elasticsearch-indexer
# Set Elasticsearch Server, btw. the Logsene Receiver is the default export LOGSENE_URL=https://logsene-receiver.sematext.com/_bulk # 1 - Slack API Token from https://api.slack.com/web # 2 - Index name or Logsene Token from https://apps.sematext.com npm start SLACK_WEB_API_TOKEN LOGSENE_TOKEN
The LOGSENE_TOKEN is what you can get from Logsene – the “ELK log management service”. Using Logsene means you don’t have to bother running your own Elasticsearch, plus the volume of most team’s Slack data is probably so small that it fits in Logsene’s free plan! 🙂
Once you run the above you should see new Slack Messages on the console. At the same time the messages will also be sent to Logsene and you will see them in the Logsene UI (or your local Elasticsearch server or cluster) right away.
Analyze Slack Messages in Sematext
Now that our Slack messages are in Logsene we can build our Kibana Dashboards to visualize channel utilization, top terms, the chattiest people, and so on. But … did you know, that Logsene comes with a nice ad-hoc charting function? Simply open one of the Slack messages in Logsene, and click on the little chart symbol in the field userName and channel (see below).
This will very quickly render top users and channels for you:
Slack Alerting
Imagine a support chat channel – wouldn’t it be nice to be notified when people start mentioning “Error”, “Problems” and “Broken” things increasingly frequently? This is where we can make use of Logsene Alerts and its ability to do anomaly detection. Any triggered alerts can be delivered via email, PagerDuty, Slack, HipChat or WebHooks:
While Logsene is great for alerts, analytics and Slack message search, as a general ‘data viewer’ the message rendering in Logsene does not show application-specific things like users’ profile pictures, which would allow much faster recognition of user messages. Thus, as our next step, we’ll create a simple Web Client with nice rendering of indexed Slack messages. Let’s see how this can be done very quickly using some cutting edge Web technology together with Logsene.
Create a Custom Web-App for Search
We recently started using Facebook’s React.js for rendering of various UI parts like the views for Top Database Operations and we came across a new set of React UI Components for Elasticsearch called SearchKit. Thanks to Logsene’s Elasticsearch API SearchKit works out of the box with Logsene!
After a few lines of CSS and some JavaScript a simple Slack Search UI is born. Check it out!
Edit the source code codepen.io
You just need to use your Logsene token as the Elasticsearch index name to run this app on your own data. For production we recommend adding a proxy to Elasticsearch (or Logsene) on the server side as described in the SearchKit UI documentation to hide connection details from the client application.
While this post shows how to index your Slack messages in Logsene for the purpose of archiving, searching, and analytics, we hope it also serves as an inspiration to build your own custom Search application with SearchKit, React, Node.js and Logsene?
If you haven’t used Logsene before, give it try – you can get a free account and have your logs and other event data in Logsene in no time. Drop us an email or hit us on Twitter with suggestions, questions or comments.
Share Twitter
Facebook
Google
LinkedIn
Reddit
EmailChrome OS devices, such as Chromebooks, now support the Google Play Store and Android apps. This article assumes you have an existing Android app designed for phones or tablets that you want to optimize for Chromebooks. To learn the basics of building Android apps, see Build your first app.
To get started, update your manifest file to account for some key hardware and software differences between Chromebooks and other devices running Android.
As of Chrome OS version M53, all Android apps that don't explicitly require the android.hardware.touchscreen feature will also work on Chrome OS devices that support the android.hardware.faketouch feature. However, to ensure your app works on all Chromebooks, go to your manifest file and adjust the settings so that the android.hardware.touchscreen feature is not required, as shown in the following example. Removing the requirement for touch input means you should also review your app's support for mouse and keyboard interactions.
<manifest xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"... > <!-- Some Chromebooks don't support touch. Although not essential, it's a good idea to explicitly include this declaration. --> <uses-feature android:name="android.hardware.touchscreen" android:required="false" /> </manifest>
Different hardware devices come equipped with different sets of sensors. Although Android handheld devices often have GPS and accelerometers, these sensors are not guaranteed to be available in every Chromebook. However, there are cases where the functionality of a sensor is provided in another way. For example, Chromebooks may not have GPS sensors, but they still provide location data based on Wi-Fi connections. See the Sensors overview document for an overview of all of the sensors that the Android platform supports. If you want your app to run on Chromebooks regardless of sensor availability, you should update your manifest file so that none of the sensors are required.
Note: If you don't require a particular sensor for your app but still use measurements from the sensor when it's available, make sure you dynamically check for the sensor's availability before trying to gather information from it in your app.
Some software features are unsupported on Chromebooks. For example, apps that provide custom IMEs, app widgets, live wallpapers, and app launchers aren't supported and won't be available for installation on Chromebooks. For a complete list of software features that aren't currently supported on Chromebooks, see incompatible software features.
By updating the targetSdkVersion attribute to the latest API level available, your app can take advantage of all the improvements in the Android platform. For example, Android 7.0 (API level 24) brings enhancements to multi-window support. It allows you to resize activities with free-form resizing, making them feel more natural. You can also access APIs for drag-and-drop operations across apps and custom mouse cursors.
Check for networking requirements
Chromebooks run the entire Android OS in a container, similar to Docker or LXC. This means that Android will not have direct access to the system's LAN interface. Instead, IPv4 traffic will pass through an internal layer of network address translation (NAT), and IPv6 unicast traffic will be routed through an extra hop. Outbound unicast connections from an Android app to the internet should mostly work as-is; but in general, inbound connections are blocked. Multicast or broadcast packets from Android will not be forwarded to the LAN through the firewall.
As a special exception to the multicast restriction, Chrome OS runs a service that forwards mDNS traffic between Android and the LAN interface, so the standard Network Service Discovery APIs are the recommended way to discover other devices on the LAN segment. After finding a device on the LAN, an Android app can use standard TCP or UDP unicast sockets to communicate with it.
IPv4 connections originating from Android will use the Chrome OS host's IPv4 address. Internally, the Android app will see a private IPv4 address assigned to the network interface. IPv6 connections originating from Android will use a different address from the Chrome OS host, as the Android container will have a dedicated public IPv6 address.
Use cloud and local storage effectively
One of the strongest features of Chromebooks is that users can easily migrate from one device to another. That is, if someone stops using one Chromebook and starts using another, they simply have to sign in, and all of their apps appear.
To further improve this experience, you should back up your app's data to the cloud to enable syncing across devices. That said, apps should not depend on an internet connection for normal operation. Apps should save a user's work locally if the device is offline and sync to the cloud once the device is back online. For example, Google Docs allows users to edit their docs offline and sync the changes to the cloud once the device gets connectivity.
Chromebooks can also be shared among a large number of people, such as in schools. Since local storage is not infinite, entire accounts—together with their storage—can be removed from the device at any point. For educational settings, it's a good idea to keep this scenario in mind.
If your app uses the Android NDK libraries, and its target SDK version is 23 or higher, ensure that text relocations are removed from both the ARM and x86 versions of your NDK libraries, as they're not compatible in Android 6.0 (API level 23) and higher. By leaving text relocations in your NDK libraries, you may also cause incompatibility errors with Chromebooks, especially when running on a device that uses an x86 architecture.
Note: To view more details on updating NDK libraries properly, see the Runtime section of the Android 6.0 Changes document.
Develop new test cases for your app
First, make sure that the proper manifest flags are specified. These flags include the desired orientation, where setting screenOrientation unspecified is best. If you specify the orientation as landscape, consider using sensorLandscape instead to make sure that the experience on a tablet is optimal. If you have special size or orientation requests you should also consider adding the new meta tags as size or orientation hints—which only affects desktop environments. If you also want to change it on phones, you should specify layout defaultHeight, defaultWidth, or minHeight instead.
If you are interested in specific input device handling for specific device categories, you should specify android.hardware.type.pc to disable the input compatibility mode.
If you are using any kind of networking, make sure that the app is able to reconnect to the network after a connection problem is resolved or the device wakes from sleep mode.
Google recommends checking the Test cases for Android apps on Chrome OS, which you can use in your own test plan. The test cases cover a wide array of common scenarios that Android apps should be prepared for if they are expected to run on Chrome OS devices.
Multi-window and orientation changes
Chrome OS's multi-window environment can make state persistence and recall issues more obvious. You should use ViewModel to save and restore your state when appropriate.
To test state persistence you should minimize your app for some time, start another resource |
the Ultimate Warrior made national news for all the wrong reasons.
In April 2005, I was a 22-year old daily newspaper reporter for the Willimantic Chronicle. Our top beat was Willimantic/Windham, our second top beat was Mansfield and the University of Connecticut. Just shy of my second anniversary at the paper, I got promoted to the second beat in March 2005. It was exciting. It was a lot of work.
Starting a beat, especially in a long-ego era when people still used fax machines, meant a lot of leg work. It meant attending a lot of meetings that were time-consuming but allowed me to shake hands, with UConn trustees, Mansfield town officials, and so on.
It also meant that when the Ultimate Warrior was on the docket to speak at UConn, they were not going to pay the overtime for me to cover it. I viewed it as a puff piece – former WWF champion speaks to college students. I’d get to meet one of my heroes and we’d have something light for the weekend paper.
To this day, it angers me that I wasn’t there. Since I wasn’t covering it, I decided against going. I had spent three straight nights at the UConn campus for work – I wanted a break. Besides, what was he going to say? I had some beers with some buddies, showed up to work Friday morning with a slight hangover and prepared for another day at the newspaper.
“Holy shit Sean!” my editor bellowed as I walked it. “He went fucking crazy!”
He plopped down the front page of UConn’s Daily Campus – then, printed at the Chronicle, maybe not still so today – and pointed to the article, “ Warrior Attacks.”
It included the now infamous quote, “Queering don't make the world work.”
I missed it, dammit, I missed it. That’s all I thought. But then I realized opportunity had arrived. The Daily Campus article – thank you pre-social media – had not hit the mainstream yet. Only UConn students and myself really knew what had happened. As an afternoon newspaper, I had about four hours to pump out the first story on this and I knew, oh I knew, that it would be big. I was a wrestling fanatic. I knew what sites to email. I had it all lined up.
There was just one itsy, bitsy problem – I needed to interview the Ultimate Warrior. The UConn College Republicans, who were mortified and in pure crisis mode, declined to give me his information and only repeated what they said the night prior.
The UConn police, likewise, repeated almost verbatim a quote from the Daily Campus story: “How do you think, I feel I have to protect him.”
I tried the WWE first – they basically laughed me off the phone as Warrior was persona non grata. I sent an email to the info@ or webmaster@ of several different Warrior websites that may or may not be associated with him. I emailed wrestling reporters, guys like Dave Meltzer, that may have info as they were “inside” the business but didn’t want to tip my hand, so I gave a generic reason why.
Nothing was happening until I got a response from someone who claimed to be the Warrior’s manager.
“Is this a big deal?”
That was the response. I told him, indeed it was, and I need to speak with him. We spoke on the phone for a few moments and he concluded with, “Okay, I don’t know if Warrior will call you, but we’ll have something to calm this down.”
I waited. I waited. Then 20 minutes to press, the most glorious statement of my life arrived. Here is the full thing. It literally made my heart jump for joy – it was the sort of gold you dream about as a reporter. Some of the choicest quotes:
“To top it all off, this World Class Crew of Crybabies is now attempting to have the UConn administration punish the [College Republicans] for words that Warrior spoke.”
“Yet, it now seems that the CRs have collectively decided to bow down and beg forgiveness from various extremist, anti-American, left-wing groups who infest the UConn campus.”
And by far my favorite:
“That his words have been mischaracterized and that the speech was occasionally interrupted by a relative handful of students (who, for some reason, all seemed to smell like patchouli oil and burnt flag) does not detract from the fact that the overwhelming majority of those in attendance had a wonderful time and agreed with most of Warrior’s points – a fact that is corroborated by dozens upon dozens of emails that Warrior has thus far received from attendants.”
Patchouli oil and burnt flag! The Warrior story made it to Page 1. I still have several copies of it in my childhood’s home. Though now lost to the Chronicle’s archives, it was linked to from several wrestling sites and it got a lot of attention.
From that story, the AP and Reuters ran with it. Seemingly every other paper in the state had something on it Saturday, a full day after we did. Sometimes, writing a great story is all about luck.
While the Warrior was roasted in the press, I thought he was unfairly railroaded. Sure, he started a mini-riot on the UConn campus, but that’s like a weekly occurrence in Storrs. He was asked to speak his views – as he said in his statement – and no one agreed with him. Those college kids did learn a valuable lesson in the First Amendment that night.
The Warrior turned that night into a bit of a cottage industry, being a go-to whenever a group wanted a whacked out speaker to draw some attention. He was a pro wrestler, through and through, and he knew how to work a crowd into a frenzy to make some money. It was essentially his heel turn.
I’ve watched a lot of Ultimate Warrior matches in the past 10 years as the WWE embraces its history and I still love the guy. It is very readily apparent why he was my first favorite wrestler.
It is also very readily apparent why the news of his passing caused a sleepless night. He was one of a kind, in more ways than one.Hawaiian Inspired Vegan Aloha Noodle Bowl made with fresh veggies. Perfect lunch or dinner idea and packed with delicious flavor
Note: This is a guest post by Michelle De La Cerda who is an amazing cook and happens to be one of my very good friends. She is a food connoisseur like no other person I know! She can whip up meals for any palate, regardless of their dietary restrictions and the proof is in this recipe she made for all of you. It is a common sight to see her guests licking their fingers after consuming any of her meals! She has a very delicious food blog and it is no surprise that she called it, “The Complete Savorist“. It is the perfect description for her cooking style and also for the reaction of her guests. You HAVE to try her signature dish – The Dark Chocolate Raspberry Pie
Hi everyone, My name is Michelle De La Cerda of The Complete Savorist. Rini, Ms Healing Tomato herself has been kind enough to allow me to share a recipe here on her website.
When she and I talked about me posting over here, I got my creative juices flowing. This was an exciting time for me because I am not a vegetarian or vegan blogger. But in order to work for all of you, that was the focus I had to have.
I was up for the challenge. But it turns out it wasn’t really a challenge at all.
Creating this recipe was easy and quite natural for me. I’ve been on a major pineapple kick lately and now that my weather is warming (until tomorrow when it rains again), I’ve dusted of the grill and fired it up.
First off, if you haven’t grilled pineapple, you are missing out one of the best things in life. Those caramelized bits of pineapple, combined with the spice in the sauce knock this dish out of the ballpark.
I’m all about quick meals but those loaded with nutrition. And I am a huge fan of the sweet-savory combination.
This recipe combines all those things into one. I hope you enjoy this dish as much as my family and I did, except the daughter omitted the mushrooms from her plate.
I hope you enjoy these Vegan Aloha Noodle Bowls as much as we did.
Vegan Aloha Noodle Bowl ~ Made with Grilled pineapple, zucchini, and red peppers then quickly stir-fried with mushrooms, edamame, rice noodles, and a sweet-spicy sauce for quick and utterly delicious dinner.
Aloha Noodle Bowl (Vegan)
1) Heat the grill
2) Once hot, lay the cut pineapple, zucchini, and red peppers on the grill. (If your grill is not well seasoned, some high heat cooking oil might need to be applied to the produce to prevent sticking.)
3) Grill times will be determined by the thickness of the produce, but each side should cook for around 5 minutes. Check frequently after 3 minutes
4) When done, remove from the grill and allow to rest for a couple of minutes
5) Mix the marinade ingredients together and set aside
6) While the produce rests, quickly sauté mushrooms, sprinkling them with a bit of salt and pepper
7) Soften the rice noodles according to package directions
8) Heat a wok or large skillet, add the oil once hot
9) Chopped the pineapple, zucchini, and peppers into chunks
10) Add the pineapple, zucchini, mushrooms, and peppers to the hot pan, cook for 2 minutes, stirring constantly
11) Add the noodles (drained) to the pan, mix well
12) Add the sauce, stir until mixed in
13) Add the edamame
14) Once mixed together and heated through, remove from heat
15) Serve and enjoy this delicious vegan aloha noodle bowl
Tell Michelle how much you loved this recipe. She is very active on all Social Media Platforms. You can follow her on Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Aloha Noodle Bowl (Vegan) Vegan Aloha Noodle Bowls ~ Grilled pineapple, zucchini, and red peppers then quickly stir-fried with mushrooms, edamame, rice noodles, and a sweet-spicy sauce for quick and utterly delicious dinner ~ By The Complete Savorist Print Pin Prep Time: 5 minutes Cook Time: 25 minutes Total Time: 30 minutes Servings: 4 servings Calories: 579 kcal Author: Michelle De La Cerda Ingredients 3 cups pineapple grilled
2 zucchini grilled
3 red peppers grilled
1 1/2 cup edamame
10 oz cremini mushrooms sliced
1/8 tsp Salt
1/8 tsp pepper
11 oz brown rice noodles
1.5 tbsp extra virgin olive oil For The Sauce 1/4 cup soy sauce
1/8 cup pineapple juice
3 tbsp agave
3 tbsp cilantro chopped
2 tbsp Sriracha adjust to taste Instructions Heat the grill
Once hot, lay the cut pineapple, zucchini, and red peppers on the grill. (If your grill is not well seasoned, some high heat cooking oil might need to be applied to the produce to prevent sticking.)
Grill times will be determined by the thickness of the produce, but each side should cook for around 5 minutes. Check frequently after 3 minutes
When done, remove from the grill and allow to rest for a couple of minutes
Mix the marinade ingredients together and set aside
While the produce rests, quickly sauté mushrooms, sprinkling them with a bit of salt and pepper
Soften the rice noodles according to package directions
Heat a wok or large skillet, add the oil once hot
Chopped the pineapple, zucchini, and peppers into chunks
Add the pineapple, zucchini, mushrooms, and peppers to the hot pan, cook for 2 minutes, stirring constantly
Add the noodles (drained) to the pan, mix well
Add the sauce, stir until mixed in
Add the edamame
Once mixed together and heated through, remove from heat
Serve and enjoy Notes Guest post by Michelle De La Cerda of thecompletesavorist.com Nutrition info is approximateGuest post by Michelle De La Cerda of thecompletesavorist.com Nutrition Serving: 6 g | Calories: 579 kcal Tried this recipe? Follow me @healingtomato1 and mention #healingtomato1
MORE FROM HEALINGTOMATOOn Media Blog Archives Select Date… December, 2015 November, 2015 October, 2015 September, 2015 August, 2015 July, 2015 June, 2015 May, 2015 April, 2015 March, 2015 February, 2015 January, 2015
Glenn Greenwald to move to The Guardian
Glenn Greenwald, the political columnist who joined Salon.com in 2007, is moving to The Guardian.
Greenwald, a former constitutional and civil rights lawyer based in Rio de Janeiro, will move his blog en masse to the Guardian's website on Aug. 20, and will also write a formal weekly column that will occasionally appear in the Guardian's print edition.
"Salon has been and remains an ideal place for me to write, but the Guardian offers the opportunity to reach a new audience, to further internationalize my readership, and to be re-invigorated by a different environment," Greenwald told POLITICO. "Salon has fully supported my work in every possible way, which makes it difficult to leave, but I'm an admirer of the Guardian's journalism and concluded that it was a great match."
At the Guardian, Greenwald will join other high-profile American columnists who have come on board over the last year — including Ana Marie Cox, Naomi Wolf, and Michael Wolff — as the progressive British paper has sought to broaden its reach in the United States.
"We're really, really happy with the people that we've signed; they're all good at attacking what they do in different ways," Janine Gibson, the Guardian's U.S. editor, told POLITICO. "Glenn has written for us before, and he is a really good fit. We love the way he talks to and with his readers."
Greenwald, the author of three New York Times bestsellers (two about the Bush administration's executive and foreign policy overreach), lives in Brazil with his husband, but makes frequent trips to the U.S.
"Brazil gives immigration rights to the same-sex spouses of its citizens, while the U.S. doesn't," Greenwald explains of his decision to live abroad. "So we can only live together in Brazil, not in the U.S."
UPDATE: Greenwald has published a post with more details about the move.Asked to pick an ideal Supreme court judge, Herman Cain had no trouble doing so. Which one? You can dismiss the four Justices on SCOTUS. He would never pick one of them. That leaves the five Injustices on SCROTUS. Figuring out the answer is easy. Just ask yourself, which Injustice has the most in common with 9-9-9?
In an interview with Meet the Press’ David Gregory this morning, GOP presidential frontrunner Herman Cain endorsed Justice Clarence Thomas as a model a President Cain would follow in making appointments to the Supreme Court…
…Watch it:
For the record, we on “the left” do not attack Justice Thomas for any reason other than the fact that he is a terrible judge. His record on the Supreme Court is marred by conflicts of interest and other ethical scandals, and he embraces a discredited understanding of the Constitution that would declare everything from child labor laws to the ban on whites only lunch counters unconstitutional.
Thomas accepted lavish gifts from wealthy benefactors and even from corporate-aligned interest groups with business before his Court. Leading conservative donor Harlan Crow, whose company often litigates in federal court, provided $500,000 to allow Thomas’s wife to start a Tea Party group and he once gave Thomas a $19,000 Bible that belonged to Frederick Douglass. The American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think tank which frequently files briefs in Thomas’ Court, also gave Thomas a $15,000 bust of Abraham Lincoln as a gift. This last gift is particularly egregious because Thomas continued to sit on three cases where AEI filed a brief.
Significantly, a justice was forced to leave the Court for a very similar gifting scandal. In 1969, Justice Abe Fortas resigned in disgrace after the nation learned that he had accepted tens of thousands of dollars worth of gifts from corporate executives and other wealthy benefactors. Justice Thomas, by contrast, remains openly defiant at the mere suggestion that he has done anything wrong.
Nor is Thomas’ taste for expensive gifts his only ethical lapse. Thomas unethically attended a political fundraiser hosted by right-wing billionaire Charles Koch. He illegally omitted hundreds of thousands of dollars of his wife’s income from conservative organizations from his financial disclosure forms. And he has not disclosed whether his wife, a Tea Party lobbyist, is lobbying on any laws that are before his Court — a problem that could potentially raise recusal issues in the Affordable Care Act case.A report on Wellington's mental health services highlights flaws in the system for the whole country, the Mental Health Foundation's chief executive says.
Photo: 123 RF
A review of the region's mental health services was set up after five mental health patients were involved in attacks, four of them fatal, between 2015 and the end of March 2016.
The review found specific problems in each case, and identified that in at least one of them no psychiatric assessment was carried out.
Mental Health Foundation chief executive Shaun Robinson said the report showed a lack of funding and staff was eroding the quality of the services and how they were co-ordinated.
"These were very unwell people at the time and the mental health system really let them down. They needed more support, a better standard of care and co-ordination of that care and had that happened, it's quite probable that these tragic events would have been avoided."
The report recommended, among other things, that a psychiatrist should assess all new patients within two weeks of their admission to mental health services.
Mr Robinson said some DHBs were reluctant to adopt that recommendation.
"Capital & Coast DHB has indicated that they don't think that is necessary. Well I think that is quite appalling to say that longer than a two-week wait is acceptable. It is simply not and it is a symptom of some of the deep problems that are emerging in the public mental health system."
In response to the report, the Capital & Coast DHB said some issues were being worked on, such as improving electronic record keeping.Earlier this month, The Hollywood Reporter decided to put five men from CNN on its cover. But it was CNN senior producer Josiah Daniel Ryan who managed to set off a social media firestorm when he tweeted an image of the cover with the caption, “This is what the future of media looks like.” It didn’t take long for journalists and others on Twitter to start pointing out that that “future” did not include any women.
It was exactly the type of unfortunate gaffe that comedians W. Kamau Bell and Hari Kondabolu would call out for its lack of woke-ness on their podcast Politically Re-Active. But this time, Bell, who also hosts the CNN series United Shades of America, was at the center of the controversy—and the return of their highly-anticipated second season was still weeks away.
On the one hand, Bell “never, ever thought” that being on the cover of The Hollywood Reporter would even be an option for him, so he was just happy to be included. “If, five or six years ago someone had called and said we’re putting you on the cover of The Hollywood Reporter I would have known it was one of my friends fucking with me,” he tells The Daily Beast by phone from Indianapolis before delivering a performance of his jokingly-titled talk “Ending Racism in an Hour” at Butler University. “I was blown away by the fact that I was asked.”
He felt like he was in good company with Anthony Bourdain, Jake Tapper, as well as his boss, Jeff Zucker. “And then when we were taking the photo, it was like, ‘Hey, wait a minute…’” he says, laughing. He remembers looking around and thinking, “Huh, there are a lot of dudes up here.’”
Bell confirms that he heard from women in his life who were not thrilled about his participation in the mini-scandal. “They lightly sauteed me, they didn’t totally burn me,” he says. “But it was a reminder to me that I need to do a better job.”
“The thing that I realized is that in that moment, I needed to have the ‘hey, wait a minute’ moment way sooner. That’s 100 percent on me,” he adds, comparing that feeling to a regular feature from Politically Re-Active called, “Hold up; wait a minute.” During their interviews with guests, if someone says something that needs a little fact-checking or explaining they stop the podcast in its tracks to make sure their listeners are all on the same page. For instance, during one early episode, they had to unpack the historical feud between Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony, which their feminist activist guest Kathleen Hanna claimed “everybody knows about.”
The two comedians first started working together on Bell’s short-lived late-night show Totally Biased in 2012. It was there that they formed a bond over their shared passion for progressive politics and an unwillingness to cater to the moral equivalency argument that drives cable news networks like CNN to insist on giving airtime to Donald Trump surrogates in the name of balance.
“I find it troubling, the idea that hate is a point of view,” Kondabolu says in a separate interview from Seattle, noting that it’s “not just CNN” that is guilty of this sin. “It shouldn’t be all capitalism and ratings. There’s a responsibility to inform the public.”
“When you do that, you’re allowing for white supremacy, which in my opinion is a form of terrorism,” he adds. “It’s something that has terrorized people of color since the beginning. And how does terrorism lead to a freer press?”
The most conservative guest they had on the podcast during their first season was S.E. Cupp, a vocal advocate for the #NeverTrump movement. There is a deliberate lack of white male guests, which made it notable when CNN’s Jake Tapper appeared on the final episode of the first season as an emissary from the “mainstream media.”
Among the guests scheduled to appear in season two are CNN commentator and political analyst Angela Rye, former Daily Show correspondent Aasif Mandvi, civil rights activist and filmmaker Michael Skolnik and writer/comedian Akilah Hughes.
Despite his role at CNN, Bell says he has little interest in becoming a talking head, preferring the long-form freedom of the podcast format. “You have to talk in soundbites and you have to talk quickly. And if you screw it up, the ball’s not coming back to you,” he says of cable news format. “I’m not good at that. There are people who are great at that,” he adds, citing his friend and another former guest on the podcast, Van Jones.
When First Look Media, the company founded by eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar, first approached Bell and Kondabolu with the idea of hosting a political podcast, it was intended to run only through Election Day. But once Trump won, they decided they weren’t ready to give up the increasingly popular platform.
“Kamau and I both assumed that Hillary would win,” Kondabolu says. “If Hillary had won, would we have come back? Possibly. There’s still a good chance. But we weren’t signed on for a second season and once Trump won, for both the people who listen to the show and Kamau and I, there was an urgency to come back.”
The show “got a lot more attention than anyone was expecting,” Bell adds. “Hari and I are not often associated with things that are hits. It took a while to coordinate the return, because we wanted to make sure we did it right and didn’t rush back out there.” They both individually stress that this is not some little project they are doing in their “basement,” but rather a “professional operation” that took time to get going again after an extended break.
“The ability to take in what’s happening along with everyone else as opposed to having to give an opinion about it every week has been good, at least for me,” Kondabolu says of their more than four-month break. “But at the same time, you’re itching to say some of this stuff.”
“Selfishly, every week Kamau and I spoke, in addition to getting to talk to one of my best friends, it allowed us to get a lot of things out. It was really tense last year and it’s going to be tense for a while,” he adds.
Some of that tension came from listeners of the show, angry with the hosts’ decision to cast their votes for Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who made her case directly to them on an episode that went up just two weeks before Election Day.
Based in solid-blue New York and California, respectively, Kondabolu and Bell both felt safe that their votes would not help tip the election to Trump but would rather help bolster the future of a legitimate third party. “I don’t regret voting for her,” Kondabolu says with some hindsight. “I sometimes regret talking about it. Only because it became such a distracting thing.”
“I don’t think Jill Stein should be president of the United States. I made a very logical, thoughtful decision,” he continues, stressing that he urged listeners in swing states not to make the same decision that he did. Kondabolu thinks anyone in Wisconsin or Michigan who thought they were safe to vote for Stein just weren’t paying attention. (Stein got more votes than Trump’s margin of victory in both states).
“I don’t regret voting the way I voted because I’m not an idiot. Neither of us are,” Kondabolu adds, letting out his frustration with the criticism he received from Democrats. “People fucking listen to the podcast, they love our podcast, and they tell us that we inform that. They listen to us because we have some insight and unique things to say and perspective. And then people get upset, because this doesn’t go in line with everything else. You’re listening to the same guys you were listening to before.”
As a meditation of sorts, Kondabolu begins each day by tweeting a reminder about how far into the Trump presidency we are, along with the message, “THIS IS NOT NORMAL.”
Calling that statement a “half truth,” he says, “Some of this stuff is very bizarre and has never been seen before. Some of it is just the veil being dropped. Because he’s not somebody who’s big on subtlety or keeping things to himself, you actually see the dysfunction.”
With that in mind, both men say they will be very careful not to make everything on their podcast about the president when it returns.
“Now we just have a clearer idea of what’s going on and the stakes are raised,” Bell says. “But I think the great thing about the first season of the show is that we weren’t really chasing the news, we were chasing the movements and the issues.”
That’s why they included segments about things like the #NoDAPL protests at Standing Rock that had nothing to do with the election specifically. As “political comedians,” Bell says he and Kondabolu have “always been about the movements and the cultural shifts, not about the individual things that happen in D.C.”
“This isn’t a Trump podcast. It isn’t about Trump,” Kondabolu concurs. “But certainly the president of the United States is a factor in how a point of view is shaped nationally or how we talk about an issue. We don’t want this to be just about him, because it’s not.”
“There will be Trump talk, but we also know that our listeners will let us get into the weeds about things that are relevant. Our government wasn’t functioning perfectly before Trump was in office,” Bell adds. “They’d be disappointed if we never talked about Trump, but they’d be more disappointed if we only talked about Trump.”It’s a sweaty mid-April afternoon in Beverly Hills, and Uffie’s pacing around a pebble-strewn pathway, lit cigarette in hand. We’re in the backyard of producer Benny Blanco’s private Los Angeles home and the singer/rapper — born Anna-Catherine Hartley — is psyching herself up for her first photoshoot in half a decade. “It’s been a while,” she says, letting out a bit of nervous laughter. Yes, it certainly has: A precursor to the radio-friendly hip-pop of the early 2010s, Uffie burst onto cool kids’ radars in 2005 with a self-assertive attitude and a keen understanding of how to captivate a crowd, racking up festival appearances at Coachella, London’s Lovebox, and Barcelona’s Sónar. She followed her occasionally confounding but undeniably vital debut album (2010’s brash and urgent Sex Dreams and Denim Jeans) with several years of breakneck touring, and then… nothing — professionally, anyway. After nearly a decade of hustling, the singer, now 28, receded from the spotlight entirely. Two months ago, though, Uffie reactivated her social media accounts. A Facebook message in early April: “Two more days until I am back in studio… cannot wait to continue this magical record for you all!” At the moment, she’s just shy of 200,000 Facebook fans. The wheels are turning. Now living in Seattle, Uffie decided she was ready to record again after her recent divorce from the father of her second child. During a quick trip to Los Angeles in early February, she went to a showcase thrown by Blanco’s record label, Friends Keep Secrets. Outside Blanco’s house at the show’s afterparty, she met pop producer Ammar Malik, the man responsible for Maroon 5’s hugely successful “Moves Like Jagger” and Nick Jonas’ gnashing 2014 single “Chains.” They shared stories — she of her two children, he of his nieces and nephews — and realized there was a friendship there. After connecting, Malik and Uffie booked sessions together just for fun. That was two months ago. Since then, the pair have recorded seven promising demos, and Uffie’s now planning her proper sophomore album. “I [used to take] a stance that I was cool and underground and didn’t like pop,” she says. “But he’s introduced pop to me in a way that I really understand and respect now.” The pop world has changed drastically since Uffie last stormed her way through the strobing synths of yesteryear, a fact she’s mindful of. Fans pay more attention to what’s happening behind the scenes; producers and songwriters are often as revered as the artists they’re paid to enhance. It also, of course, bears mentioning that white women who rap haven’t exactly curried public favor. But the culture’s not the only thing that’s evolved. Uffie herself is a different woman — and mother — than she was when 2006’s shimmering “Pop the Glock” ruled the web. With two very private divorces, several changes of scenery, and a quiet but onerous flameout all behind her, she’s ready to move forward. But the question lingers for her fans: Where the f**k has Uffie been?
Credit: Wilson Lee for SPIN
Born in Florida in 1987 to a Japanese mother and a British father, Uffie had an international upbringing, moving to Hong Kong at the age of four (she can still count to ten in Cantonese). She jumped back to Fort Lauderdale as a teenager with her mom after her parents split up before quickly jetting off to France to live with her father, studying at the International School of Paris. She wasn’t musical whatsoever as a child. “I was a dancer,” she says. “I would sing stuff, but my parents never gave me music lessons. Everything I know is self-taught. That innocence makes me who I am as an artist.” In 2005, Uffie picked up a mic for the first time at the behest of a DJ, then-boyfriend Fabien Pianta (whose stage name is Feadz). She wrote and rapped her first-ever song, “Pop the Glock,” that year, which quickly found its way to Pierre “Busy P” Winter, Daft Punk’s longtime manager and owner of the French electronic record label Ed Banger. Winter heard something special in Uffie’s voice — a bright burst of youthfulness matched with hard-scrabbled lyricism and off-measure rapping — and signed the teenager. “She did not know how to rap or sing,” Winter tells SPIN via email. “Feadz was a real musical conductor for her. He used her voice as an instrument. It makes it unique. I immediately wanted to sign it on the label.” Several EPs and singles followed, including 2007’s two-track Suited and Looted and standout jams like “Robot Oeuf” and the chest-thumping “Dismissed.” Uffie became an in-demand voice for other artists hoping to capture a piece of her disaffection. Crystal Castles chopped up her vocals on their (leaked) 2008 banger “Make It Hott”; Justice scooped her up for their † single, “TThhEe PPaARRtTYY.” As Uffie’s popularity grew, Ed Banger’s founder felt her career slipping out of his purview. “Uffie was an amazing project when it was about a little girl having fun with Feadz and [house DJ] Mr. Oizo,” Winter wrote in a 2014 Reddit Q&A thread. “It was fresh and new in 2008. Then, it became bigger and with more people involved… I lost control and lost the vibe.” “At the beginning she was the DJ’s girlfriend,” Winter adds in an email to SPIN. “Feadz and Uffie were real party animals… Her music was made of blood, sweat and tears. Feadz was a hard worker, he was pushing her to give her best in the studio. They were a couple in love, but sometimes it [sounded] like Tina and Ike.” Though Uffie racked up adulation and a strong fanbase early in her career, her music elicited gendered critiques and brutal takedowns. “The production is lovely, but the vocals and lyrics – in other words, her own contributions – are just stone-cold awful,” one of many commenters wrote in a PopJustice forum thread in 2010. “Let’s face it,” an iTunes reviewer agreed. “Uffie can’t rap.” To say Uffie can’t do those things overlooks her central appeal; born of the blogs and formed in the eye of the late-’00s Euro-pop that dominated New York City — interchangeable trance staples like Nadia Oh, Sébastien Tellier, and Space Cowboy — Uffie’s fundamental allure is how brashly her music colors outside the lines. She knows she’s not a traditional pop star, and not only does she wear that, she throws it in your face. “I’m an entertainer, not a lyricist,” she disaffectedly raps on “MCs Can Kiss.” It’s music as confrontational performance art. Her voice itself exists somewhere between straight-faced spoken word and sharp, faux-accented rhymes, cycled through a tinny processor. Lyrically unafraid to check a bitch, Uffie’s early songs quote Diddy (cribbing “Don’t worry if I write rhymes / I write checks” from “Bad Boys For Life”) and rep for partying, gossiping, and boasting. “Deadly when I start to shoot / My load is pretty heavy / But you swallow ’cause you think I’m cute,” she sneers on Mr. Oizo’s “Steroids.” At a time when Katy Perry’s kitschy, PG-13 “I Kissed a Girl” was topping the charts, Uffie was rhyming freely in French about sex, drugs, and never-ending nights.
Within a few years, Uffie graduated from the blogs to Balenciaga, joining stars like Peaches Geldolf in the front row at Paris Fashion Week and designing a line with Diesel for their spring collection. “Pop the Glock” played during an episode of Gossip Girl, the zeitgeist-strangling CW show that briefly dictated what was in or not for the city kids. In 2010, there was no question that Uffie was very much in. That same year, she dropped Sex Dreams and Denim Jeans on Ed Banger, a bold, frenzied album that highlighted Uffie’s uncanny ability to spit, half-sing, and sneer in the same breath. It’s music that predated and inspired the white-girl pop-rap that would go on to dominate Top 40 a few years later (Charli XCX has cited her as an influence), but none of those Uffie-ripping acolytes sampled the Velvet Underground’s “Rock & Roll.” Uffie can look objectively at Sex Dreams now — “I think a childish voice from a teenager mixed with these sick beats really did create a new sound,” she says — but her face crumples when discussing it. “I had no confidence as an artist because I got thrust in as a teenager,” she says, looking back, our feet dipped into Blanco’s heated pool. “I had this guilt complex [about its success] because the people who were opening for me had worked so hard for so many years to get there, and I felt like I hadn’t earned it.” She was also, at the time of the album’s release, embracing motherhood, having given birth to Henrietta — her daughter with graffiti artist and then-husband André Saraiva — in 2009, at the age of 22. “I wasn’t happy, and I think that became very clear very fast,” she remembers. “It felt a little bit like child slavery that I enslaved myself in. I wasn’t ready for it. I didn’t see myself as an artist.” Sex Dreams, Uffie admits, doesn’t embody any of her truth. Instead, it’s largely the product of her collaborators without much of her own input. “I was, like, crying, gagging in my mouth when I used to record,” she says. “There was nothing organic or natural about it. It was just so stressful. It wasn’t fun.” The album wasn’t received kindly by critics either. “You wonder if they should have bothered,” The Guardian wrote of Uffie’s collaborators. NME gave it a zero out of ten. “She’s missed the boat completely now,” added Drowned In Sound. Sex Dreams’ most telling moment in |
or weeks, the FSA will pull back into Turkey and the US agents, who are headquartered in Adana, will coordinate the safe and swift removal of the FSA and their wives and children. They will be put on chartered planes from the Adana airport to arrive finally at their new home, which could be Flint, Michigan.
Flint is a troubled community. It has severe water problems as well as economic problems. The Flint city and county officials could be more than happy to have special federal money coming their way, which would be tied to the “Syrian Refugee” settlement. The local churches, mosques and various charities would all rally around their newcomers. The American people are well known for their generous and welcoming nature. Everyone in USA can trace their ancestry back to newcomers at some point in time. America is a melting-pot and they are proud of that heritage.
At first glance, these Syrian refugees may appear to be war-weary and looking for a new life of security and peace. It might take years for some incident to happen, where their military training and terrorist background could re-surface. Their American neighbors will not be aware that the Free Syrian Army was founded on the principals of Radical Wahhabism. The founders of the FSA were all fighting for the purpose of regime change in Syria, in order to establish Sharia law, and to transform the secular government of Syrian into an ISIS.
The American CIA plan of attack on Syria was formulated in 2006, and the wheels put into motion. The Wahhabism ideology was keeping pace with the CIA regime change plan. The Muslim Brotherhood had infiltrated every major city in USA and UK, and had portrayed themselves as legitimate political persons, who just happened to be Muslims. Knowing that the US and UK protect religious rights; they found safe haven and grew stronger and stronger. The CIA decided to formulate the FSA, and describe it as “Freedom Fighters” to the western audiences, through the network of mainstream media. Political propaganda machines went to work through CNN, BBC, France24 and Al Jazeera as they cranked out story after story of Syrian ‘regime’ atrocities, while never mentioning the FSA war crimes and atrocities. Knowing that most Americans never check the details of news report independently, they could fabricate stories and use fabricated videos to change the hearts and minds of western viewers into believing that the “John McCain’s Army” were freedom fighters, akin to the founding fathers of America.
There are already hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees in Germany, and scattered through various European countries. The Europeans are fearful that terrorists could be hiding among the mainly normal refugees. They are fearful of future terrorist attacks which could be committed by the very refugees they welcomed in and housed, clothed and fed.
Welcoming in hundreds of past terrorists, such as the FSA, could have disastrous results in USA. When you ask the people of Aleppo: “Who made you leave your homes?” they answered, “The FSA.” When you ask the Christians in Homs: “Who destroyed your churches and killed the Priests?” they answered, “The FSA.” When you ask the 16 year old Christian girl near Homs: “Who captured you and gang raped you for 6 months in 2012?” she answered, “The FSA.”
Given the facts and past history of the Free Syrian Army, would you want them living next door to your family?Jordan Agar died the day after his 16th birthday. A fake Facebook profile was set up in his name shortly after and his mother Bridget was sent a series of messages from the account.
One claimed "I'm not really dead," while others asked for indecent pictures of Jordan's brother's girlfriend and invited Bridget to a birthday party for him.
Jordan, from Tutbury, Staffordshire, died at the University of North Staffordshire Hospital after hitting a brick wall at a junction near his home. He had passed his provisional driving test on his birthday, the day before.
Other members of Jordan's family also received insulting messages after they contacted the fake profile. A Facebook page had previously been set up in tribute to Jordan by his cousin Brandon Towner.
Facebook removed the fake profile and is investigating the matter with Staffordshire Police. A Facebook spokesman said: "There is no place for trolling on Facebook.
"It's against Facebook's rules to intimidate or harass others, and we provide everyone with the tools to report such content via specific links across every page of our site."
Mrs Agar said: "I want these callous people caught. I hope they are found and prosecuted."
Bullying on social networking sites can be classed as a criminal offence. Keeley Houghton, 18, received a three-month prison sentence in 2009 for sending death threats.
A Staffordshire Police spokesman said: "We can confirm we received a report of a fake Facebook profile page which has been created in Jordan's name.
The page has since been suspended by Facebook and officers will be working with them to find the person responsible.In the previous tutorial, I have discussed what is TypeScript, What are the basic features of TypeScript, and Why we use TypeScript. But now in this tutorial, I am going to show TypeScript in practically. First of all, I will show how to setup TypeScript Development Environment? And then I will cover some topics of TypeScript that are listed below with suitable examples.
TypeScript Types.
Variables in TypeScript.
Decision-Making Statements in TypeScript.
learn typescript practically with suitable examples
Let’s start working with typescript with very easy and suitable examples. learn typescript from very basics to advance.
Previous Tutorial
How to setup TypeScript Development Environment?
I will use Visual Studio Code Editor for this tutorial series due to some reason. First of all, it is a cross-platform editor. You can use it for Windows, Mac-OS, and Linux. The second one, If you are front-end developer and working with HTML, CSS, Jquery and etc, then you don’t need to install Visual Studio IDE which comes with the bulk of features.
Note: – You can use Visual Studio 2013 or up to the latest IDE for TypeScript.
Now, let’s see how to setup TypeScript development environment.
Install Visual Studio Code Editor
We need to install VS (Visual Studio) Code editor for typescript development. You can download VS Code Editor here (https://code.visualstudio.com/download ).
Install Node.js
Now, we need to install Node.js for installing TypeScript. Just go to this link(https://nodejs.org/en/download/) and download required Node.Js and then install it.
Install TypeScript
You can install the TypeScript using the node.js command prompt. Just write the below command in Node.Js command prompt.
npm install –g typescript
This is all that what you need to TypeScript development environment.
Types in TypeScript.
The Type System represents the different types of values that are supported by the language. The purpose of the type system is to check the validity of the supplied values before they are stored or manipulated by the program. The another purpose is to ensure that the code is behaving as expected.
TypeScript provides the data types as the part of its optional type system. There are three following three types.
Any (data type)
It is the super type of all the data types in TypeScripts.
Built-in types
String, Number, Boolean, Void, Null, Undefined are the built-in data types in TypeScript.
User-defined types
Enums, classes, interfaces, arrays, and tuple are the user defined data types.
How to declare variables in TypeScript?
The syntax for declaring a variable in TypeScript is to include a colon (:) followed by its type and after the variable name. We have four option to declare a variable in TypeScript.
Var identifier : type-annotation = value ; (E.g. var name:string = “Hello”;)
Var identifier : type-annotation ; (E.g. var name:string;)
Var identifier = value ; (E.g. var name = “Hello”;)
Var identifier ; (E.g. var name;)
Let’s understand with example in TypeScripts. Now we need to create a new project in TypeScript. Just follow the following steps.
Create a new Folder.
First of all, we need to create a folder where we can save our project files.
Note: – you can save it in your computer directory where you want.
Open Folder in Visual Studio Code Editor.
Now in this step, we will open our created folder in VS Code Editor. Open you VS Code Editor => go to file => then choose “Open Folder…” option => select your newly created folder. And you can also get folder by just pressing (Ctrl + K Ctrl + O).
Create TypeScript file.
Go to folder which you have created in VS Code editor. When you hover on the folder name, then you will see some icons. Just click on “New File” icon => enter file name with the extension of ts (E.g. Variables.ts)
Now I will write some code of TypeScript to understand how to declare variables in TypeScript. Just copy the below code and put in TypeScript file.
Create Html file.
Click on “New File” icon => enter the name with the extension of.html (E.g. Index.html).
Now add the below code. In this code, I have added variables.js file reference.
But the question is, we have no variable.js file in our project. Then why we added the reference of that.js file. The answer is simple. There is no browser that supported to typescript file. So now we will convert our typescript file code into javascript using TypeScript transpiler. See below how to convert typescript file code into javascript.
Go to View in VS Code editor => Choose “Integrated Terminal” option(It will show a new window in VS Code Editor) => write the command “tsc variables.ts” => and press enter button.
Then you will see a new file with.js extension is added in your project directory.
Now run your index.html file. To do it, right click on Index.html file => choose “Copy Path” => then put the copied path into the browser’s address bar => then press enter.
Then you will see a popup. And it will show your variables values that you have created.
Congratulation..! you have created your first TypeScript project.
Decision Making statements in TypeScript.
In TypeScript, Decision-Making statements are same as in other languages. There are four types of decision-making statements in TypeScript. if statement, if…else statement, else….if and nested if statements, switch statement. Let’s see how to use Decision-Making statements in TypeScript.
Note: – I will use the previous project, that we have created in “How to declare variables in TypeScript?” part, to show examples of Decision-Making statements.
Just create a new file. Click on “New File” icon (when you hover the mouse over a folder in VS Code, then you will see some icons) => Enter a name with.ts extension (E.g. DecisionMakingPrac.ts).
If statement.
Write the below code into DecisionMakingPrac.ts file.Then convert the TypeScript code into javascript using TypeScript transpiler. If you don’t know how to do, then go to the previous part “How to declare variables in TypeScript ” and see how we did it and why we need to do it.
Now, add the reference of DecisionMakingPrac.js file into Index.html file.
Now simply run the index.html file and check the output.
If…else statement.
Else…if and nested if statement
Swith statement
Share this: Facebook
LinkedIn
Reddit
Google
Pinterest
Twitter
Tumblr
Email
More
Telegram
WhatsApp
Skype
Pocket
PrintAs the market capitalization of bitcoin breaches $100 billion, and total cryptocurrency market cap nears $200 billion, investors from Wall Street and Main Street are starting to take the new crypto asset class much more seriously.
The cryptocurrency markets are attracting professional traders and day traders en masse as the volatility and price action creates favorable trading conditions. Combine this with an historic period of low volatility in traditional global markets, and it is no surprise that seasoned professionals with institutional trading backgrounds are allocating increasing amounts of time and capital to the crypto space.
Ari Paul is one of those seasoned trading professionals that recently left his career in traditional markets to concentrate his efforts in the crypto universe. Along with co-founder Matthew Goetz, Ari recently launched BlockTower Capital: “a leading cryptocurrency investment firm, bringing professional trading and portfolio management to an emerging digital asset class.”
Ari started his career as a market-maker of equity derivatives at Susquehanna International Group, one of the most successful and widely respected global derivatives trading firms. As an equity options market-maker, he provided liquidity for retail and institutional investors and managed large portfolios of risk. Market-makers monitor and interact with order flow every second of the trading day, and the best ones become experts in market psychology.
After 6 years in the proprietary trading industry, Ari attended graduate school at the University of Chicago, where he earned an MBA with concentrations in economics, entrepreneurship, strategic management, and econometrics & statistics. In 2015, he became a Portfolio Manager of the University of Chicago’s $8 billion Endowment, after serving as Risk Manager.
Ari saw the tremendous potential in bitcoin and the cryptocurrency marketplace, and wanted the University of Chicago Endowment to profit from the crypto opportunity. In a recent appearance on the popular podcast, Epicenter, Ari speaks of actually writing recommendations to a few of the early crypto fund managers he met with, explaining how to pitch the U of C Endowment. While most fund managers in the nascent cryptocurrency space were tech-savvy engineers, who could dissect programming language with ease, Ari knew the language, metrics, and presentation that translated into potential investment by a large endowment.
One thing became clear: there was an immediate opportunity to create an institutional quality fund in which University of Chicago Endowment, and other endowments, pensions and foundations could invest. BlockTower Capital was founded shortly thereafter. As the CIO of BlockTower, Ari Paul is ready to deliver major crypto alpha, with a broad skill set that includes a deep understanding of game theory, derivatives markets, order flow analysis, market psychology, and risk management spanning a wide range of time frames.
As institutions quickly become more serious about capital allocations to the crypto space, BlockTower has positioned itself to benefit from the new flow of capital. CryptoNinjas recently asked Ari some questions about the cryptocurrency market and BlockTower Capital.
CryptoNinjas: Mainstream media seems almost obsessed with calling bitcoin/crypto a bubble. This is not new to those who have been following crypto for a while. Now that you have taken the career risk and committed your waking hours to crypto, does it feel any different or strike any different chords when you constantly hear the word bubble associated with bitcoin/crypto?
AP: I mostly feel frustration when hearing brilliant economists and investors dismiss cryptocurrency. I can empathize somewhat since I raised similar superficial objections in 2011 in private conversations with friends, but by now, I would hope that people willing to express strong opinions in public would spend at least a half dozen hours learning about cryptocurrency first. Most of the critics dismiss Bitcoin by comparing it to Visa or Paypal – they fail to address its core value propositions as the world’s best censorship resistance money and unseizable store of value. It’s a reminder of how early we still are in the adoption curve.
CryptoNinjas: Do you foresee major changes to crypto market structure when futures and options contracts are listed at large “traditional” or “legacy” exchanges such as CBOE?
AP: LedgerX and CBOE will soon be offering Bitcoin swaps and futures. Bitcoin options and prime brokerage isn’t far behind. This will dramatically increase the liquidity in Bitcoin and make it more accessible to traditional investors. It will also make market neutral trading strategies far more practical to implement.
CryptoNinjas: Most crypto funds seem to use cash as their main risk management tool. Do you think this is an accurate assessment in general? For BlockTower? Do you see this changing as more futures/options products are listed on exchanges with growing liquidity?
AP: Today, cash is really the only risk management tool since correlations across cryptocurrencies are very high in a crash. Shorting can’t be used as a hedge now since you have to collateralize the short position, there’s insufficient liquidity in the lending markets, and exchange down time means that stop-limit orders can’t be relied upon. I expect this to change over the next few months as Bitcoin swaps, futures, and options, and cash lending facilities will soon be offered.
CryptoNinjas: What is your rough estimate/expectation of institutional/endowment/private/family office money flow into crypto funds over the next 12 months? 24 months? 5 years?
AP: It’s very hard to put concrete numbers to this. Large US endowments collectively hold about $200 billion. US family offices probably hold roughly $1 trillion, and US pensions another $4 trillion. If 0.5% of this money entered cryptocurrency over the next 5 years, that would be inflows of $25 billion into cryptocurrency solely from US investors. Globally, we’re probably looking at 4x this. We’ve already seen family offices starting to invest in cryptocurrency, next will be endowments, with pensions coming in last.
CryptoNinjas: What do you think are three of the most undervalued cryptos in the market right now?
AP: I can’t name specific cryptocurrencies, but two key themes I like are interoperability via atomic swaps, and “privacy coins.” We hold a few cryptocurrencies in each of these “buckets.”
CryptoNinjas: Does any particular US city stand out as having the most crypto “energy” or excitement right now? Any particular country?
AP: San Francisco is definitely a crypto hub, but we’re seeing tremendous energy in Manhattan and Brooklyn and smaller but meaningful communities across the country. Outside the US, Korea and Japan have burst onto the cryptocurrency scene in all regards.
To conclude the interview, Ari stated:
“We’re building BlockTower into a leading institutional quality cryptocurrency investment firm that will soon have multiple fund offerings. We’re very conscious of the scalability of our investment strategies and our assets under management will reflect the opportunities and liquidity in the market as it develops.”
For more information see:ANN ARBOR, MI - Police are seeking help identifying three suspects they believe spray painted hateful graffiti in an alley.
The suspects, caught on surveillance cameras, are described as three white men in their early 20s, said Ann Arbor Police Detective Lt. Matthew Lige.
The racist graffiti was discovered Sept. 16 in an alley off the 600 block of East Liberty Street. "Free Dylann Roof, I Hate N******" was painted in red over a mural in the alley.
Roof, 23, is a white supremacist and mass murderer who killed nine African Americans at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.
Racist graffiti discovered on mural in downtown Ann Arbor "It's definitely been hard to swallow, but also it's making a very important point that hate speech is real. The lid is off."
Two surveillance videos show the suspects in and near the alley in the early morning hours of Sept. 16.
The first suspect has light-colored hair and wore glasses, a dark-colored T-shirt and tan cargo pants, police say.
Photos were taken from two different cameras, Lige said. One was infrared, which made the the suspect's T-shirt look white, rather than dark.
Police have confirmed it's the same man, Lige said.
The second suspect was wearing a light-colored stocking cap, a dark jacket and pants. He carried a backpack, according to police.
Suspect No. 3 wore a dark-colored sweatshirt and pants, dark-colored hair and eyeglasses on the top of his head, police say. He also carried a backpack.
All were described as 5-foot-9 to 6 feet tall.
Police believe the third suspect wrote the graffiti while the other two kept a lookout, Lige said.
"We are in the process of identifying the individuals involved and ask that anyone with information contact the Ann Arbor Police Department tip line at 734-794-6949 or email TIPS@a2gov.org," he said.
There have been several incidents of racist graffiti in Ann Arbor in recent weeks.
Black students from UM were the target of a racist incident in which the name tags on their West Quad dorm doors were defaced with derogatory language on Sunday, Sept. 17.
On Sept. 1, an anti-Hispanic message was found scrawled on the Rock - a UM landmark on Hill Street and Washtenaw Avenue frequently painted by students.
Swastikas and racial slurs were found spray painted at the skate park at Veteran's Park on Aug. 18.The energy company founded by the late Bay Street financier Brad Griffiths pleaded guilty to bribery charges Tuesday and agreed to pay a $10.35-million penalty – the largest fine the RCMP has garnered since establishing specialized teams to investigate foreign corruption.
The plea by Griffiths Energy International Inc., a small privately held oil and gas company based in Calgary, stands to settle charges it faces under Canada's Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act after a company investigation unearthed payments made in an attempt to secure lucrative energy properties in Africa.
According to an agreed statement of facts filed in court, Mr. Griffiths and one of his business partners, Naeem Tyab, spent six months in 2008 establishing contacts within Chad's embassy and inquiring about oil and gas leases in the African country.
Story continues below advertisement
The pair, along with Parvez Tyab, founded Griffiths Energy, which considered bribing Chad's ambassador to Canada in September, 2009, but instead paid funds to a company controlled by his wife, according to the statement filed in court.
Canada has cranked up its pursuit of corruption by Canadian companies abroad after countries around the world accused Ottawa of dragging its feet.
It is illegal for Canadian companies to bribe foreign officials – transactions that were once viewed as routine business deals, particularly for resource outfits. The Griffiths case will mark the second conviction for the RCMP since it established teams dedicated to investigating foreign corruption.
The company's guilty plea reveals another dramatic slice of Mr. Griffiths' high-profile career. Mr. Griffiths was a top player in Canada's investment scene, helping domestic companies explore foreign opportunities. He co-founded the investment dealer GMP Capital Inc., and helped pioneer so-called "bought deals," giving companies an alternative financing option. Mr. Griffiths died in July, 2011, in a boating incident.
According to the statement filed in court, Griffiths Energy's outside legal counsel advised against paying off ambassador Mahamoud Adam Bechir, who was based in Washington, D.C., because he was a government official. Instead, Griffiths paid a fee to a company owned by the ambassador's wife, handing over a $2-million bribe in February, 2011, under the guise of consulting contracts, according to the filing. The Calgary judge hearing the case put off sentencing until Friday.
"Mr. Griffiths and Naeem Tyab made initial inquiries about acquiring [oil and gas] blocks in Chad and established contacts with the Chadian Embassy" between June, 2008 and November, 2008, according to the agreed statement of facts Griffiths and the Crown presented Tuesday. A company tied to Mr. Griffiths and the Tyabs were introduced to Chad's then Minister of Petroleum and Energy through the embassy. Years of negotiations followed, and Griffiths was eventually awarded production deals in Chad.
With leases in hand, Mr. Griffiths needed executives who could turn the company into an oil producer, the court heard. As a result, Gary Guidry became the energy company's chief executive on July 1, 2011. The company continued to bring in new executives and directors. They discovered Griffiths' bribery activities as they prepared for an initial public offering. They created a special committee to investigate and hired Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP. Griffiths argues that the judge should weigh its pro-active and co-operative approach to dealing with corruption when considering whether the $10.35-million settlement is appropriate.
Story continues below advertisement
Story continues below advertisement
The Tyab brothers are still connected to North America's oil patch. Naeem Tyab, for example, increased his stake in United Hunter Oil & Gas Corp. to 10.43 per cent in August, 2012, according to a statement he released. Mr. Griffiths was United's chairman, and the company trades on Canada's junior exchange. A receptionist at Mr. Tyab's office in Bermuda said he was travelling in Europe and unavailable to answer questions. United's chief executive Arthur Halleran confirmed that the Mr. Tyab who invested in his company is the same investor tied to Griffiths. Mr. Halleran said he is not concerned about Mr. Tyab's involvement with Griffiths because his outfit is "a total different company."
Parvez Tyab also remains active. For example, he serves as a director of Texas's Rift Energy Corp., which has operations in Africa, according to the company's website. Rift did not return a call seeking comment.
The RCMP racked up a major win when it pursued Niko Resources Ltd. That corruption case ended with the company paying $9.5-million for bribing Bangladesh's Energy Minister. Niko's bribes, which came in the form of an luxury vehicle and trips to the United States, were worth less than $200,000.
The difference between the two cases, Griffiths argues, is that it reported itself, while the RCMP had to chase after Niko. Griffiths, which had to cancel its IPO and instead raised millions in the private market, expects to produce its first drops of oil in Chad soon. Crown prosecutor Robert Sigurdson told reporters after the hearing that he expects the United States to back off its Griffiths investigation now that Canada has dealt with the charges.NASA's second human spaceflight program
Project Gemini was NASA's second human spaceflight program. Conducted between projects Mercury and Apollo, Gemini started in 1961 and concluded in 1966. The Gemini spacecraft carried a two-astronaut crew. Ten Gemini crews flew low Earth orbit (LEO) missions during 1965 and 1966, putting the United States in the lead during the Cold War Space Race against the Soviet Union.
Gemini's objective was the development of space travel techniques to support the Apollo mission to land astronauts on the Moon. It performed missions long enough for a trip to the Moon and back, perfected working outside the spacecraft with extra-vehicular activity (EVA), and pioneered the orbital maneuvers necessary to achieve space rendezvous and docking. With these new techniques proven by Gemini, Apollo could pursue its prime mission without doing these fundamental exploratory operations.
All Gemini flights were launched from Launch Complex 19 (LC-19) at Cape Kennedy Air Force Station in Florida. Their launch vehicle was the Gemini–Titan II, a modified Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM).[Note 1] Gemini was the first program to use the newly built Mission Control Center at the Houston Manned Spacecraft Center for flight control.[Note 2]
The astronaut corps that supported Project Gemini included the "Mercury Seven", "The New Nine", and the 1963 astronaut class. During the program, three astronauts died in air crashes during training, including the prime crew for Gemini 9. This mission was flown by the backup crew, the only time that has happened in NASA's history to date.
Gemini was robust enough that the United States Air Force planned to use it for the Manned Orbital Laboratory (MOL) program, which was later canceled. Gemini's chief designer, Jim Chamberlin, also made detailed plans for cislunar and lunar landing missions in late 1961. He believed that Gemini spacecraft could fly in lunar operations before Project Apollo, and cost less. NASA's administration did not approve those plans. In 1969, McDonnell-Douglas proposed a "Big Gemini" that could have been used to shuttle up to 12 astronauts to the planned space stations in the Apollo Applications Project (AAP). The only AAP project funded was Skylab – which used existing spacecraft and hardware – thereby eliminating the need for Big Gemini.
Pronunciation [ edit ]
The constellation for which the project was named is commonly pronounced, the last syllable rhyming with eye. However, staff of the Manned Spacecraft Center, including the astronauts, tended to pronounce the name, rhyming with knee. NASA's public affairs office issued a statement in 1965 declaring "Jeh-mih-nee" to be the "official" pronunciation.[2] Gus Grissom, acting as Houston capsule communicator when Ed White performed his spacewalk on Gemini 4, is heard on flight recordings pronouncing the spacecraft's call sign "Jeh-mih-nee 4", and the NASA pronunciation is used in the movie First Man.[2]
Program origins and objectives [ edit ]
The Apollo program was conceived in early 1960 as a three-man spacecraft to follow Project Mercury. Jim Chamberlin, the head of engineering at the Space Task Group (STG), was assigned in February 1961 to start working on a bridge program between Mercury and Apollo. He presented two initial versions of a two-man spacecraft, then designated Mercury Mark II, at a NASA retreat at Wallops Island in March 1961. Scale models were shown in July 1961 at the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation's offices in St. Louis.
After Apollo was chartered to land men on the Moon by President John F. Kennedy on May 25, 1961, it became evident to NASA officials that a follow-on to the Mercury program was required to develop certain spaceflight capabilities in support of Apollo. NASA approved the two-man program rechristened Project Gemini (Latin for "twins"), in reference to the third constellation of the Zodiac with its twin stars Castor and Pollux, on December 7, 1961. McDonnell Aircraft was contracted to build it on December 22, 1961. The program was publicly announced on January 3, 1962, with these major objectives:
To demonstrate endurance of humans and equipment in spaceflight for extended periods, at least eight days required for a Moon landing, to a maximum of two weeks
To effect rendezvous and docking with another vehicle, and to maneuver the combined spacecraft using the propulsion system of the target vehicle
To demonstrate Extra-Vehicular Activity (EVA), or space-"walks" outside the protection of the spacecraft, and to evaluate the astronauts' ability to perform tasks there
To perfect techniques of atmospheric reentry and touchdown at a pre-selected location on land[Note 3]
Team [ edit ]
The Canadian Jim Chamberlin designed the Gemini capsule, which carried a crew of two. He was previously the chief aerodynamicist on Avro Canada's Avro Arrow fighter interceptor program. Chamberlin joined NASA along with 25 senior Avro engineers after cancellation of the Arrow program, and became head of the U.S. Space Task Group's engineering division in charge of Gemini. The prime contractor was McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, which was also the prime contractor for the Project Mercury capsule.
Astronaut Gus Grissom was heavily involved in the development and design of the Gemini spacecraft. What other Mercury astronauts dubbed "Gusmobile" was so designed around Grissom's 5'6" body that, when NASA discovered in 1963 that 14 of 16 astronauts would not fit in the spacecraft, the interior had to be redesigned. Grissom wrote in his posthumous 1968 book Gemini! that the realization of Project Mercury's end and the unlikelihood of his having another flight in that program prompted him to focus all of his efforts on the upcoming Gemini program.
The Gemini program was managed by the Manned Spacecraft Center, located in Houston, Texas, under direction of the Office of Manned Space Flight, NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C. Dr. George E. Mueller, Associate Administrator of NASA for Manned Space Flight, served as acting director of the Gemini program. William C. Schneider, Deputy Director of Manned Space Flight for Mission Operations, served as mission director on all Gemini flights beginning with Gemini 6A.
Guenter Wendt was a McDonnell engineer who supervised launch preparations for both the Mercury and Gemini programs and would go on to do the same when the Apollo program launched crews. His team was responsible for completion of the complex pad close-out procedures just prior to spacecraft launch, and he was the last person the astronauts would see prior to closing the hatch. The astronauts appreciated his taking absolute authority over, and responsibility for, the condition of the spacecraft and developed a good-humored rapport with him.
Spacecraft [ edit ]
A cutaway illustration of the Gemini spacecraft
NASA selected McDonnell Aircraft, which had been the prime contractor for the Project Mercury capsule, in 1961 to build the Gemini capsule, the first of which was delivered in 1963. The spacecraft was 18 feet 5 inches (5.61 m) long and 10 feet (3.0 m) wide, with a launch weight varying from 7,100 to 8,350 pounds (3,220 to 3,790 kg).
The Gemini crew capsule (referred to as the Reentry Module) was essentially an enlarged version of the Mercury capsule. Unlike Mercury, the retrorockets, electrical power, propulsion systems, oxygen, and water were located in a detachable Adapter Module behind the Reentry Module. A major design improvement in Gemini was to locate all internal spacecraft systems in modular components, which could be independently tested and replaced when necessary, without removing or disturbing other already tested components.
Unablated Gemini heat shield
Ablated Gemini heat shield
Reentry module [ edit ]
Many components in the capsule itself were reachable through their own small access doors. Unlike Mercury, Gemini used completely solid-state electronics, and its modular design made it easy to repair.
Gemini's emergency launch escape system did not use an escape tower powered by a solid-fuel rocket, but instead used aircraft-style ejection seats. The tower was heavy and complicated, and NASA engineers reasoned that they could do away with it as the Titan II's hypergolic propellants would burn immediately on contact. A Titan II booster explosion had a smaller blast effect and flame than on the cryogenically fueled Atlas and Saturn. Ejection seats were sufficient to separate the astronauts from a malfunctioning launch vehicle. At higher altitudes, where the ejection seats could not be used, the astronauts would return inside the spacecraft, which would separate from the launch vehicle.
The main proponent of using ejection seats was James Chamberlin, head of the engineering division of NASA's Space Force Task Group. Chamberlin had never liked the Mercury escape tower and wished to use a simpler alternative that would also reduce weight. He reviewed several films of Atlas and Titan II ICBM failures, which he used to estimate the approximate size of a fireball produced by an exploding launch vehicle and from this he gauged that the Titan II would produce a much smaller explosion, thus the spacecraft could get away with ejection seats.
Maxime Faget, the designer of the Mercury LES, was on the other hand less-than-enthusiastic about this setup. Aside from the possibility of the ejection seats seriously injuring the astronauts, they would also only be usable for about 40 seconds after liftoff, by which point the booster would be attaining Mach 1 speed and ejection would no longer be possible. He was also concerned about the astronauts being launched through the Titan's exhaust plume if they ejected in-flight and later added that "The best thing about Gemini was that they never had to make an escape."[14]
Gemini was the first astronaut-carrying spacecraft to include an onboard computer, the Gemini Guidance Computer, to facilitate management and control of mission maneuvers. This computer, sometimes called the Gemini Spacecraft On-Board Computer (OBC), was very similar to the Saturn Launch Vehicle Digital Computer. The Gemini Guidance Computer weighed 58.98 pounds (26.75 kg). Its core memory had 4096 addresses, each containing a 39-bit word composed of three 13-bit "syllables". All numeric data was 26-bit two's-complement integers (sometimes used as fixed-point numbers), either stored in the first two syllables of a word or in the accumulator. Instructions (always with a 4-bit opcode and 9 bits of operand) could go in any syllable.[17][18]
Unlike Mercury, Gemini used in-flight radar and an artificial horizon, similar to those used in the aviation industry. Astronauts had no control over Mercury's flight path, and computers flew most of Apollo missions. Gemini crew had full manual control with control sticks for yaw, pitch, and roll and forward or backward.
The original intention for Gemini was to land on solid ground instead of at sea, using a Rogallo wing rather than a parachute, with the crew seated upright controlling the forward motion of the craft. To facilitate this, the airfoil did not attach just to the nose of the craft, but to an additional attachment point for balance near the heat shield. This cord was covered by a strip of metal which ran between the twin hatches.[19] This design was ultimately dropped, and parachutes were used to make a sea landing as in Mercury. The capsule was suspended at an angle closer to horizontal, so that a side of the heat shield contacted the water first. This eliminated the need for the landing bag cushion used in the Mercury capsule.
Adapter module [ edit ]
The adapter module in turn was separated into a Retro module and an Equipment module.
Retro module [ edit ]
The Retro module contained four solid-fuel TE-M-385 Star-13E retrorockets, each spherical in shape except for its rocket nozzle, which were structurally attached to two beams that reached across the diameter of the retro module, crossing at right angles in the center.[20] Re-entry began with the retrorockets firing one at a time. Abort procedures at certain periods during lift-off would cause them to fire at the same time, thrusting the Descent module away from the Titan rocket.
Equipment module [ edit ]
Gemini was equipped with an Orbit Attitude and Maneuvering System (OAMS), containing sixteen thrusters for translation control in all three perpendicular axes (forward/backward, left/right, up/down), in addition to attitude control (pitch, yaw, and roll angle orientation) as in Mercury. Translation control allowed changing orbital inclination and altitude, necessary to perform space rendezvous with other craft, and docking with the Agena Target Vehicle (ATV), with its own rocket engine which could be used to perform greater orbit changes.
Early short-duration missions had their electrical power supplied by batteries; later endurance missions used the first fuel cells in manned spacecraft.
Gemini was in some regards more advanced than Apollo because the latter program began almost a year earlier. It became known as a "pilot's spacecraft" due to its assortment of jet fighter-like features, in no small part due to Gus Grissom's influence over the design, and it was at this point where the American manned space program clearly began showing its superiority over that of the Soviet Union with long duration flight, rendezvous, and extravehicular capability.[Note 4] The Soviet Union during this period was developing the Soyuz spacecraft intended to take cosmonauts to the Moon, but political and technical problems began to get in the way, leading to the ultimate end of their manned lunar program.
Launch vehicle [ edit ]
The Titan II had debuted in 1962 as the Air Force's second-generation ICBM to replace the |
help. Most people who have to visit food banks say it is a slow, painful death of the soul."
He has found Canadian government papers dating back to the late 1980s in which officials agonised over the rise of food banks amid what were then assumed to be temporary cuts in public spending. They provide a stark warning for the UK, where food banks are in their relative infancy. "These papers called it 'a temporary emergency response' and proposed to 'bring the issue of food poverty back to government'," says Saul. That language has now "fallen off the radar … The 'food drives' [food collections by churches, schools and businesses] and fundraising walkathons have taken over the civic space."
But isn't The Stop, at its core, a food bank, albeit a very sophisticated one? Saul can see the point, but disagrees it is part of the problem. The Stop uses food to help the people it serves to organise, to create change, to understand poverty and to fight it, he says.
"For me, the power of the garden is when a Bangladeshi immigrant learns what he can grow in his own backyard and gets to meet some new people." Four-fifths of The Stop's clients report that they have made a new friend through the scheme. "That's an important statistic, given that poverty is so isolating," he says.
So what lessons does he have for the UK? Always remember people are hungry because they are poor. The key issues are fair wages, inequality, environment and health. Don't get caught in the "logistics trap", preoccupied with shipping crates of food around the food-bank network. "Don't ever get caught thinking you are an answer to the problem of food poverty. You have to speak out about why people are poor," he says.
Ideally, you wouldn't set up a food bank at all, he says. "Is it practical for there to be a moratorium on food banks in the UK?" he wonders. "Is it practical for the big food-bank players to say, 'We are not going to do this?'."
Above all, he says, don't get forget about the power of food. "Joy and cultural expression comes from food. It's a magical way to develop a community."
• This article was amended on 25 September 2013 to correct an inaccurate conversion of square feet.
Curriculum vitaeCalm down, everyone.
The latest buzz in Minnesota is the Harvin article posted on Saturday by Mike Max of WCCO.
According to the report, prior to being placed on the DL, receiver Percy Harvin had a tirade with coach Leslie Frazier with teammates present.
OK, but this report sounds awfully familiar.
Oh wait that’s right, Tom Pelissero of 1500 ESPN Twin Cities reported every exact detail back on Dec. 20, 2012.
It is the exact same report, but many things happened since Pelissero’s report back in December.
Harvin came back for an exit interview after the season ended—well after the “tirade” incident—and everything checked out fine medically. Frazier spoke with Harvin with every intention of repairing the relationship and reaffirming that he wants Harvin to play for the Vikings. Here are Frazier’s most recent comments on his talk with Harvin.
“I told him how much I love him and want him to be a part of our team,” Frazier said on KFAN. “I don’t want him to play for anyone else. And I tried to put that to rest with him. So he’s clear on how I feel.”
If there is anything new in Max’s report it is that the Vikings reportedly intend to trade Harvin. The truth is, general manager Rick Spielman is going to consider all his options for all his players, including the possibility of trading Harvin.
Imminent trade, as the WCCO article suggests?
Let’s slow down.
The other buzz around the Internet is Spielman’s supposed tip-toeing around Harvin questions in a radio interview on KFAN. The person who asked the questions asked very direct questions to Spielman and Spielman simply would not commit to answering on if Harvin will be a Viking next season.
Mike Florio of NBC Sports and other media outlets (even NFL.com picked up on the WCCO report) have already concluded that Harvin is out of the door because of Spielman’s non-committal stance. While a Harvin trade is still possible, everyone needs to step back and take a deep breath.
Spielman is a general manager and his relationship with his players—and future potential players—is very important. He is in a position that, in the face of the public, he needs to be honest about his players.
Was Spielman tip-toeing around questions? Absolutely. But he’s being honest, and that is what players like.
Spielman is still considering options, so of course he isn’t going to commit to where Harvin will be next season. A lot is involved.. What is the market for Harvin like? Can a relationship be fixed? Can the sides agree on an extension? Can the Vikings find players to make up for his production? Do the Vikings feel they can win with Harvin next season?
Reader: But he was quick to commit to Ponder as his starting quarterback next season!
Well, because he weighed his options and already concluded that Ponder will be his starting quarterback. You can almost certainly guarantee that Minnesota will not try to bring Brett Favre out of retirement or anything of that sort. (The Favre thing was more Brad Childress than anything)
Ponder will be the starting quarterback in 2013. Period.
Don’t expect a Harvin trade anytime soon. Expect Spielman and the Vikings to weigh all options and salvage any relationship they can with Harvin. There is no need to make a rash decision a week after the NFL season, and it is doubtful the Vikings already came to the conclusion that Harvin will absolutely be dealt.
If the opportunity arises, then opportunity arises, but the idea that a trade is imminent is silly.This article is over 4 years old
Both major parties have rejected legal reforms that would end the politicisation of the judiciary in Queensland and stop it being the only state in Australia that puts juveniles in adult prisons, say justice advocates.
The Liberal National party (LNP) and Labor have refused calls for an independent body to vet legal appointments in the wake of Tim Carmody’s highly contentious elevation to supreme court chief justice.
And neither party in power would stop jailing 17-year-olds with adults, in what one church figure said was a human rights abuse that violated international conventions.
Despite the appointment of Carmody and others emerging as a major controversy under the Newman government, Labor has sided with the LNP in opposing an independent judicial commission.
The state’s law society and council for civil liberties have called for a commission such as in NSW, which independently assesses prospective magistrates or judges.
Bill Potts, the prominent Gold Coast solicitor, said the Newman government had provoked “widespread questioning of the justice system” but Labor’s record in power was also “appalling”.
This follows warnings this week from former corruption fighter Tony Fitzgerald that Queensland politics was reverting to “the old style politics where the winner takes all”.
Anglican church reverend Peter Catt, a spokesman for the group Balanced Justice, condemned both parties’ refusal to immediately stop the jailing of 17-year-olds in adult prisons.
“My understanding is it’s a human rights abuse and we’re failing our international obligations to protect children,” he said.
Potts said both parties saw the appointment of magistrates and judges as spoils of office and had been guilty of putting political affiliations above merit.
“Without a doubt, both (parties) jealously guard it because it’s seen as an opportunity to affect the composition of the courts,” he said.
“This applied whether a government was seeking to enact a “punitive” policies or prone to appointing judges who were “soft touches, with a more left view view of law and order”, Potts said.
“The real problem is this: unless you take the political process almost entirely out of it, you have a system that is suspect.
“What we have now is a system where obscure people in the bar association and law society may be asked and the attorney general without any real consultation appoints who they want.”
Catt said Labor’s response to the law society call to stop treating 17-year-old offenders as adults - that it “would be moving from that position over time” - was disappointing.
He said attorney general Jarrod Bleijie had promised but never delivered a “blueprint” to balance out the LNP’s punitive youth justice policies.
These include “name and shame” provisions and “boot camps” which the state’s top children’s court judge has condemned.
“Our view is if you’re going to be really tough on crime you want to reduce the rate of recidivism… harsher measures like locking up a juvenile in an adult prison, how can that not help someone become a criminal in later life?” he said.
“Why has all this been done against all the evidence from around the world? Where’s the blueprint? Disappeared into the ether.”In television right now, some of the most elaborate visual effects work required is of the ‘invisible’ variety. These are the shots that you might just not notice, but have actually gone through the hands of many skilled effects artisans.
One show capitalising on this seamless type of VFX work is the Starz series Black Sails. For season 4, Dublin-based studio Screen Scene VFX was called upon to create a raft of period city shots by augmenting live action and creating photorealistic buildings and locations. In order to reach that photorealistic look, Screen Scene took advantage of Chaos Group’s V-Ray renderer, a plugin the studio has been using for more than a decade.
We asked Screen Scene visual effects supervisor Ed Bruce and senior 3D artist John O’Connell to break down their Black Sails work and discuss how V-Ray was part of the studio’s pipeline.
– Screen Scene’s breakdown of its Season 4 Black Sail’s visual effects work.
AV3: The amount of invisible visual effects work by Screen Scene in Black Sails is incredible – what was your brief when coming onto the show in terms of the style of VFX required?
Ed Bruce (visual effects supervisor): Ultimately the brief was the same as it always is. Respect the in camera material, be as invisible and seamless as possible, don’t let the VFX work distract from the director’s storytelling and bring something rewarding to every shot.
Season 4 of Black Sails gave us a great opportunity for delivering the unnoticeable visual effects but also the scope of many hero wide establishing shots that clearly must have been VFX due to period, environment/location and assets. These big wides really helped locate the story and were important for the audience whilst giving our crew in SSVFX the challenge and reward that fully CG shots bring.
AV3: Can you talk about the assets that had to be built or used for your shots – what reference did you look to in crafting and look-dev’ing them? What sets or areas had been shot for real that you needed to extend or replicate in CG?
Ed Bruce: The production’s visual effects team, headed by visual effects supervisor Erik Henry and producer Terron Pratt, collected a vast array of data from the set in sunny South Africa. Production also shared assets from previous seasons from multiple vendors, especially some very high resolution ship models.
Many of Screen Scene’s shots were based around the dockland area of 1720’s Philadelphia which we built in CG and populated with ships, masts and small vessels. In a post TV schedule, sharing assets to avoid any additional modelling work really becomes beneficial.
Recreating 1720’s Philadelphia was challenging. As with most things before the 1900’s there aren’t any photos of the time, thus making it more difficult to get good references. Being one of the first US cities to adopt the grid style layout this helped with reducing many layout decisions for the backgrounds.
Production themselves had stayed faithful to Philadelphia’s main square layout and some of the buildings featured in the show still stand. Production built the ground floor of each building on the streets that the actors walk along to the measurements of the current city. Firstly we were tasked with topping up all of the on-set buildings with their second stories and roofing. The art department had created SketchUp documents for their set construction plans and while they only physically built the first level of each house, they had completed the entire building in SketchUp. This is what we used as our guide for the building top-ups.
The on-set VFX team had also taken Lidar of the shoot set and supplied us mesh files to work with. We were then able to create the extensions cleanly and then lay them on top of the Lidar scans. As you’d imagine, the real world is never as mathematically perfect as what we create in 3D, therefore we made slight adjustments from our models to line them up with the Lidar to better fit the live action set.
The second task was creating the continuation of each street and the surrounding streets and buildings whilst populating the set with CG people and props. There’s some artwork and drawings of Philadelphia back in the 1700’s which was a great starting point to the style of period’s building construction that our modellers were then able to create generic houses around those themes. A few fun things popped up in our research too. Houses back in Philadelphia were quite often timber frame and since it was a new city which was gradually spreading out from a central docks, there weren’t always concrete foundations to build upon. As a result some houses were raised above the ground on posts and had the ability to be moved. If you hated your neighbours you could pop your house up on a trailer and pull it with a load of horses somewhere else!
Screen Scene also worked on harbour and water visual effects shots.
In terms of lookdev we find CG integration is far easier than fully CG shots. You’ve got rules and limitations set for you by the shoot location with most of the reference that you’ll need in the plate in front of you. We made a lot of use of Itoo’s RailClone for both the creation of the building cladding and roofing and as an overall layout tool to create city blocks driven by splines we’d traced from historical maps of Philadelphia’s streets.
For the Island and fort shots we did most of our vegetation population with their Forest plugin which is fabulous for environment layout. The Itoo guys have worked quite closely with the Chaos Group team to take advantage of their render time instancing. For some close up trees we used GrowFX giving us some gentle wind motion to match what was happening with the practical vegetation.
AV3: Can you talk about some of the lighting and rendering challenges in particular? What was it, do you think, that helped sell your CG shots and also integrate CG work into live action?
Ed Bruce: As always on TV schedules, time is our biggest challenge, especially with heavy CG renders. On a previous show we’d done large scale fully CG shots containing similar components and levels of detail. However, Black Sails had a lot more large CG extensions and fully CG shots within a single episode.
Filling out environments as complex and busy as the streets of Philadelphia leading down to its bustling docks required us to create a large variety of assets in order for the shots to become an environment that feels varied and lived in. The downside to this level of detail is you’ve got to deal with all of the data that you’ve produced within the 3D scene and of course when it comes time to render! We imagine we’re no different from any other VFX company in that we’ll try and push our resources as far as we can and in this case we were just about squeezing the renders into the available ram on the render nodes.
One of Screen Scene’s wider city views.
In terms of lighting and integration, the on-set VFX team did a great job of Lidar-ing the majority of the set where we had to extend buildings upwards and we were able to use these models to drive our matchmoving giving us very precise alignment between the on-set surfaces and our CG extensions.
Since the shoot was in South Africa, which had incredibly crisp blue skies and direct sunlight, we could use the Lidar surfaces and the on-set silver balls to match the direction and softness of the sun very easily and have something that flowed very nicely from CG shadow into the live action shadows. Our 3D Supervisor Krzysztof Fendryk spent quite a bit of time making sure that the weathering and breakup of our building textures were a close match to what was detailed practically.
The compositors played a big part doing the subtle and finer points of matching lens artefacts and overall levels taking advantage of shot Macbeth colour charts and lens distortion grids.
AV3: What were some of the advantages of using V-Ray on this show?
John O’Connell (senior 3D artist): We’ve been using V-Ray for around 12 years now and therefore our artists have a lot of familiarity with it. V-Ray doesn’t have many weaknesses as it’s been used for most aspects of 3D. So, while some renderers might have particular strengths, V-Ray is able to cover nearly anything you’d ask of it very well, without too much fuss. The frame buffer and render pass options give you a lot of feedback. We find it quite easy to isolate aspects of the render when we want to tweak one specific thing. The speed improvements in their V-Ray mesh format meant we could keep our working files quite agile and not get heavily penalised when it came to rendering shots out as the compositors like the amount of matte, light or other utility passes we can throw over to them with little fuss.
Before and after comparison showing Screen Scene’s effects work.
It’s a great performing renderer and it’s got pretty much everything you’d need out of the box. We are always interested to see where the development team are innovating. We’re especially interested in their porting of the auto texture mip-mapping of textures from the GPU renderer – we find with the jobs we’re doing, we always want to try and add in more “stuff” to make our scenes richer. Therefore if the Chaos team can find ways for us to do this on the same machines then that’s very much appreciated!
Overall there’s very few complaints about the software at SSVFX, it’s very well proven and if we ever run into anything specific, the support team is fabulous. As we keep trying to push ever more ambitious shots through our facility, having a renderer that continues to develop ways to solve and complete these tasks is vitally important.
AV3: Can you talk about how V-Ray is used in general in SSVFX’s pipeline, and perhaps on other projects? Did you use any other Chaos Group plugins or products on the show?
John O’Connell: Screen Scene has always been a 3ds Max-based house. We started off in the commercials market originally and the native Irish market. In the past this body of work wasn’t big enough to warrant large teams or R&D departments etc, therefore it was very handy for us to take advantage of the agility of Max and its wealth of off-the-shelf plugins. We’ve always got a variety of requests from clients, which can cover anything that they see on TV or in cinema so we wouldn’t have the resources, budgets or speed to build software to meet the project’s needs. It’s great to have a wealth of small developers that are making relatively inexpensive and high quality plugins to meet the market’s needs or fill in gaps in the base software’s capabilities.
In the early 2000’s there was a bit of a renderer battle going on between Brazil, FinalRender, Arnold (we had an early beta for Max before it was sold to Sony for development) and of course V-Ray. We had tried the lot of them and they all had their good points but we settled on V-Ray for our first HD job as it had a really solid implementation of all the basics – good geometry handling, high quality anti-aliasing, fast raytracing and 3d motion blur. It was the first renderer to do render time displacement too which was great for a character job we were doing at the time.
All the other major Dublin companies at the time were based around Maya or Softimage which meant their renderers were quite heavily behind. We were getting far nicer results purely because we were able to use GI from a very early point without murdering ourselves with render time and the likes of having light cache to fill out the brightness of an interior. That was a godsend. V-Ray was easy to get to grips with for the non-technical artists and gave great result right away. It’s been our renderer ever since.
A shot typical of Screen Scene’s work on the show – a rendered building appears in the background. The effects work was intended to be invisible.
When we set up a specific VFX department for long form TV and film in 2010, it was great to have a solid EXR implementation, render passes for free and all the other various image quality aspects it just kept on delivering. Since it’s been a faster raytracer and better GI solution than most renderers for years it’s been great that other VFX companies have picked it up and requested all of the other features you’d need in production.
In terms of the next wave for utilising V-Ray, we’re yet to implement it within Nuke but it’s very interesting to look at the “scene assembly” approach where everything is baked down into dumb caches and drawn together in a content management application to be fed to V-Ray.
We have been using Phoenix recently, the infinite ocean texture is terribly handy for a lot of our wide shots where we just need moving water with a matte painted opposite shore reflected. We’re using it heavily on a current project for a tonne of blood and gore too, it’s a very fast simulator. We completed a show with a lot of stormy ocean setups a few years ago, which was a very challenging process. We’re looking forward to when the Phoenix dev team have some time to blend a texture driven water tank into an infinite ocean for large rolling wave shots.
AV3: What were one or two of the most challenging shots to pull off in your work for Black Sails?
Ed Bruce: On the live action side there were a few difficult shots that were extremely long. We were dealing with getting very accurate registration of our building top ups, having to graft tree branches onto trunks that were purposely trimmed heavily to allow easier keying for the street extensions, the usual roto fun of having a heavily populated street with motion blurred people criss-crossing everywhere, which in the most challenging shots we shot handheld.
With long shots the tech can be difficult to spot until you see a full render. You think you’ve got it all perfect and then you spot one little mis-alignment in geometry in extension or render glitch. When this happens it’s back through another iteration and render. On the fully CG side it wasn’t bad, the main issue was the memory overheads. The scenes we generated were pretty close to the limits of our render node’s RAM capacity.
A live action plate is combined with a CG render of a fort.
John O’Connell: We have a good workflow on how to generate the scenes, laying everything out fast which gives us things to look at quite quickly. A big thanks must go to Paul Roberts in Itoo for helping us with a very elegant layout solution using RailClone to make generic city blocks very efficiently.
We started the scenes off in as realistic fashion as possible, again using the proper proportions of Philadelphia and the Delaware River from maps and references. It was also great to have Erik Henry pop in for a few days especially for setting up the fully CG shots camera angles. Erik knew the clients vision and desire. This helped reduce the design process and version count for each shot.
How did we pull them off? SSVFX has always had great, talented artists working on our shows and it’s always good to see their craft materialise in the finished product. The visual success of season 4 is a collective effort from the production team through to our contribution. We’re looking forward to working again with Starz, Erik Henry and Terron Pratt and their team.
You can find out more about Screen Scene at their website: http://www.screenscene.ie/
V-Ray is available to purchase on the AV3 StoreSchedules are still being drafted, but youth leagues and Hamline University men's and women's hockey teams likely will lace up during the first week or two of January. Open skating — as well as Wild team practices — are expected to follow.
The goal is to draw between 600,000 and 700,000 spectators a year to visit downtown St. Paul's newest attraction — a skyway-connected, 1,200-seat covered rooftop ice rink a block from Metro Transit's Green Line light rail station.
With ice time limited amid competing events at St. Paul's Xcel Energy Center, the Wild have long been forced to cobble together practice time at St. Thomas Academy in Mendota Heights and elsewhere in the western suburbs.
"We were practicing more in Edina, because a lot of our players live over there," said Jeff Pellegrom, the Wild's chief financial officer, during a recent building tour. "But this is the perfect solution for us."
It's a new use for a remodeled facility — which also sports a new name, Treasure Island Center, to reflect one of its leading corporate sponsors.
But hockey isn't the only offer at the remodeled building.
After Macy's vacated the space in 2013, the St. Paul Port Authority partnered with the Minneapolis-based Hempel Cos., the majority stakeholder, to jointly convert the former department store into a six-level commercial destination and parking ramp.
A two-level Walgreens opened at Sixth and Wabasha streets about six weeks ago, shortly after the Minnesota Housing Finance Agency moved roughly 250 employees to the fourth floor.
By April, a Tim Hortons doughnut shop and Stacked Deck Brewing will open onto Cedar Street. Also at that time, a restaurant — Cancun Billy's — is expected to start serving up the margaritas.
Additional confirmed tenants include the Hempel Cos., which will maintain a skyway-level office; the St. Paul Police Department and a TRIA Orthopedic Clinic. Artist Terrence Fogarty's giant outdoor hockey mural at Sixth and Cedar is about one-third complete.
The building, which spans 540,000 square feet, including an 800-stall parking ramp, opened as a Dayton's Department Store in 1963.
Randy McKay, a principal with Hempel Cos., is a former owner of the Frauenshuh Cos., which built out the downtown St. Paul home of Lawson Software.
"This one's pretty unique," said McKay, who acknowledges that none of his other office projects have set aside roughly 100,000 square feet of space for a National Hockey League team, or converted retail floors that once held jewelry counters into parking stalls. "There's not that many parking areas with terrazzo floors, I can tell you that."
The building sits on a 16-foot-slope from Wabasha Street down to Cedar Street.
As a result, Walgreens — which opens onto Wabasha Street at ground level — is officially located on Levels 2 and 3. The only level completely below grade is Level 0, where the Wild workout rooms are still under construction. A large section of the former department store has been converted to parking.
The Port Authority bought the property in early 2014 for $3 million, at the request of the city, and invested $5.5 million to prepare the building for redevelopment, including asbestos removal and sealing.
The Port Authority and Hempel Cos. are developing and managing the site together through the joint venture Go Wild LLC, with RJM Construction as the general contractor. Most, but not all, of the 31,000 square feet of leasable space has been accounted for.
Here's a tour:
LEVEL 0: MN Wild workout space
Located completely below grade, Level 0 is home to the Wild's workout and physical therapy facilities, including a room reserved primarily for the 40-foot-dash. A clean line-of-sight will allow trainers and physical therapists to work one on one with athletes while keeping an eye on the team as they do the dash.
A lounge area, with television and fireplace, allows the athletes downtime. A giant Minnesota Wild emblem will cover the ceiling of the locker room. The Wild space spans 27,000 square feet.
In addition, Level 0 includes at least 53 parking spaces for the team and 38 contract parking spaces where Macy's old River Room and jewelry and cosmetic counters once stood. Throughout much of the parking area, the department store's original terrazzo flooring is still visible.
Level 1: St. Paul Police
On street level along Cedar Street and below-grade along Wabasha Street, Level 1 is home to 11,400 square feet of office rooms and meeting space for the St. Paul Police Department. A large gathering room fits 50 or 60 people. The St. Paul Police Department recently vacated a public safety annex building on 10th Street and relocated to a new training facility on Lafayette Road, but certain functions will remain in the heart of downtown.
Level 1 is home to 72 contract parking spaces and 38 leased parking spaces. Another 11,500 square feet of space will be dedicated to Tim Horton's doughnuts, a Cancun Billy's restaurant and Stacked Deck Brewing, which will open onto Cedar Street through four large garage-bay doors. The tenants are expected to open by April.
Level 2: New St. Paul Walgreens
Rather than lease space within Treasure Island Center, Capital Real Estate paid $2.5 million to buy the footprint of the state's second two-level Walgreens. The pharmacy and convenience store opened at the corner of Sixth and Wabasha streets six weeks ago, spanning nearly 13,000 square feet of retail space on Level 2 alone.
The lobby next door leads toward the TRIA Orthopedic Clinic, which will offer sports medicine, sports surgery consultations and rehabilitation services such as physical therapy. TRIA is the official medical team of the Wild. The pre-existing parking ramp sits along Cedar Street. Some 7,000 square feet of space is still available for lease on Level 2.
Level 3: Walgreens, offices
Connected to ground level by escalators, the second floor of Walgreens spans nearly 6,400 square feet at skyway level. A skyway connection leads to Wells Fargo Tower, which offers a clean view of the city's new Palace Theatre concert venue on Seventh Place. The Hempel Cos. will maintain an office and event space. Some 6,000 square feet of space is still available for lease on Level 3.
Level 4: Minnesota state offices
Minnesota Housing Finance Agency occupies all of the leasable space along Level 4 — 62,300 square feet of office space dedicated to 250 employees.
Level 5: MN Wild's NHL-Sized rink
The official National Hockey League-size ice rink can seat 1,200 spectators. There's disability seating and a drink rail, as well as a glassy view over Wabasha Street that captures a good share of the downtown skyline looking southwest. Adjoining the rink are locker rooms dedicated to Hamline University and visiting teams, as well as a Zamboni storage area. The Wild space spans 59,000 square feet.
Treasure Island center at a glanceThe progeny of China’s rich and famous can have a hard time sticking to the socialist script that’s in fashion these days under President Xi Jinping. But at least now, their excesses won’t be broadcast to the world. China’s State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television has banned children of celebrities from appearing on reality-TV shows, according to an April 17 story carried by Xinhua, the state newswire.
Over the past few years, national airwaves have been deluged by reality shows featuring the pampered scions of China’s elite, often as they try to adjust to the kind of underprivileged existences the vast majority of Chinese live. The new regulations are supposedly designed to protect minors who could be exploited by stage parents — or money-hungry TV networks. Last fall, children younger than 10 were barred from serving as spokeskids in Chinese advertising campaigns. Yet tiny actors are still a mainstay in variety shows produced by state broadcaster CCTV, belting out patriotic songs or twirling to synthesized beats.
Instead, the prohibition may have more to do with discomfort with showing how China’s 1% — particularly its junior one-percenters — live. Since taking office more than three years ago, President Xi has tried to make the ruling Chinese Communist Party more relevant to people in an era when China’s wealth gap has widened alarmingly. Hundreds of thousands of wayward cadres have been netted in Xi’s anticorruption campaign, which stresses austere living for officials — banquet menus, for example, are only to consist of “four dishes, one soup,” rather than a table laden with delicacies.
But the national appeal to asceticism is undercut when spoiled Chinese youth, often single progeny born of the one-child family planning policy, spend their early hours revving their Ferraris or dropping tens of thousands of dollars on a single karaoke outing. Known as fuerdai (second-generation rich) or guanerdai (second-generation officials), these privileged kids can seem more interested in spending their parents’ wealth — itself only a generation old — rather than making their own billions.
In one infamous example, Wang Sicong — the son of Wang Jianlin, a real estate and entertainment magnate often considered China’s richest man — posted a picture on social media of his pet dog wearing not one but two gold Apple watches. Earlier this month, Coco, who is an Alaskan breed with her own social-media account, celebrated her second birthday with balloons, cakes and a pack of canine friends. Last year, Chinese state media attacked the younger Wang, with Xinhua opining that the now 28-year-old “recklessly disseminates vulgar information” that leads to the “worship of money” and “sex and violence.”
Another scion of China’s elite was at the heart of a political scandal that is still reshaping power politics. Ling Gu — the son of Ling Jihua, the former aide-de-camp to Xi’s predecessor Hu Jintao — died in a Ferrari crash four years ago in Beijing. His car companions reportedly included a pair of women in states of undress. The elder Ling’s downfall began after reports emerged that he had tried to cover up the accident; last year he was formally charged with accepting bribes, among other alleged misdeeds.
Xi’s administration has tried to rein in fuerdai, even as other members of China’s gilded class complain that their reputations are being unfairly sullied by a few show-offs. Last year, more than 70 children of billionaires from Fujian province were ordered to attend classes to promote their sense of patriotism and social responsibility, according to the Beijing Youth Daily. Meanwhile, Tian Liang, a former Olympic diver who appeared on the first season of Dad! Where Are We Going? with his then 5-year-old daughter, seems to have had second thoughts about their turn on the hit reality-TV show. Tian, who himself retired from diving after state sports authorities assailed him for spending too much time chasing endorsements and not gold medals, rued how his daughter showed more interest in commercial opportunities than in the classroom. He is discouraging Cindy, as his daughter is called in English, from spending more time in the entertainment world.
— With reporting by Yang Siqi / Beijing
Contact us at editors@time.com.Yes, we know, wolves have gotten an unfair rep. Just imagine it's an HMO executive.
Just when we think we're cynical enough, when we're fairly sure we've heard every possible variation on plans the Republicans are hatching to transfer wealth from the middle and even from the bottom up to the richest Americans, along comes something that tops those horrors and makes us go lie down. You'd think we'd be used to it by now, huh? But consider us once again whomperjawed at the sheer greedy class warfare at work in a policy that's already been proposed in Congress by Tom Price, Donald Trump's nominee as Secretary of Health and Human Services: A change in how Medicare works that would allow hospitals and doctors to use predatory billing to bankrupt elderly patients.
In an article in The Week that's guaranteed to raise your blood pressure, Ryan Cooper explains how medical providers already gouge uninsured patients, and how it could get even worse if Price is confirmed as head of HHS. The con profit opportunity is called "balance billing," and while it's currently not allowed for enrollees in Medicare, Price thinks it's a dandy idea, because it would allow free market forces to move money more efficiently from old folks to the Medical-Industrial Complex. Cooper gives us the short version of how "balance billing" currently works:
It's the practice of billing the patient for the difference between the sticker price and what insurance will pay. So if a hospital visit costs $1,000, but your insurance will only cover $300, some providers will "balance bill" you for $700. For unscrupulous providers, the method of exploitation is obvious: When doing any sort of expensive procedure, take a rough estimate of the absolute maximum the patient can pay, and jack up the price so the balance hits it. Or if you're short on time, just bill them into the stratosphere, and you'll get whatever the patient has during the bankruptcy proceeding.
Cooper notes the practice is illegal for patients on Medicare, and "heavily restricted" for those on Medicaid. The Affordable Care Act was supposed to restrict it for everyone, but providers have found a brilliant way to work around that: the practice of balance billing for out-of-network care, which is allowed under both the ACA's exchange plans and employer-paid insurance. And with restrictive networks, you might find yourself getting surgery at an in-network hospital with an in-network surgeon, then getting an astronomical bill from the anesthesiologist, who happens to be out of network. Surprise! You're responsible for that bill, which may not even apply to your annual out-of-pocket limits. Pretty neat scam, huh? And it's perfectly legal! As Cooper points out, the practice is becoming increasingly common, and is one of the reasons the ACA hasn't eliminated bankruptcies due to medical costs -- they've been reduced considerably, but they still happen, thanks to balance billing for out-of-network providers and services. Oh, but just imagine if it could be expanded to get at a population that uses lots of medical care and tends to have more savings socked away than the average American population!
Permanently obliterating the financial security of helpless families with no or bad insurance as a loved one dies slowly and painfully of a chronic illness is a nice little profit center for providers. But it pales in comparison to the gravy train they might get if they can bring balance billing to Medicare. Seniors use far more care than the younger exchange population, and there are a lot more of them — 55.5 million, versus 12.7 million people on the exchanges. Perhaps most importantly, they're quite a bit richer on average. Many seniors have been scrimping their whole lives |
award letter. But the fact that we don’t have a standard award process makes it really difficult for students to navigate understanding their award packages,” Fishman said. “For students applying to multiple schools, it makes it really difficult to understand how financial aid packages compare.”
NACAC’s staff is still gathering information on the issue in response to the motion at its annual meeting. David Hawkins, the association’s executive director for educational content and policy, said he couldn’t assess the scope of the problem without having more information.
Like NASFAA, the association does not support federal regulation of award letters. But it supported the release of an award letter template released by the Department of Education. The association’s main priority is not how financial aid packages are presented but that they make clear what is a scholarship or grant and what is a loan.
Hawkins said NACAC staff will gather more information about the PLUS loans complaints and present findings to the association’s board at its November meeting.Todays topic is Analogous Colour Schemes! Colour can make or break an image, and yet it is so often overlooked in illustration. There are a number of different techniques to use when trying to make an image cohesive, often revolving around the color wheel.
Analogous colours are colours that appear next to each other on the colour wheel.
Rather than get too in depth however, why don’t you check out these four colour scheme examples below. I should note, none of these images are mine until you get to the very bottom.
As you can tell, these images are really quite pleasing, despite the limited range of colour used.
Anders Zorn (1860-1920) became well known for using an analogous palette in some of his own paintings, sometimes limiting himself to only four colours. (It became so well known that the Zorn palette bears his name today.)
If you are interested in a great colour theory tool, check out kuler.adobe.com, it has an easy to use palette to create your own colour schemes.
Here is a bit of work I did as a part of a larger project. I used collage and found as many magazine images as I could fitting into two analogous themes. I then combined them to create a final image. Here are the two separate collages:
And here is the final image, out of context so it won’t make much sense, but thats ok. Red and green are complimentary colours, so by adding these two collages together I was able to create something that was visually cohesive.
Well, thats it! Thanks for reading. Get out there and make something.
AdvertisementsDrone sites may trigger windfall
The drone industry is hoping for a windfall after the Federal Aviation Administration announced six U.S. test sites for unmanned aircraft on Monday.
The site selection is an important step toward tapping into the economic and job creation potential of drones over U.S. soil, said the leader of the unmanned systems industry’s top trade group.
Story Continued Below
“Today’s announcement by the FAA is an important milestone on the path toward unlocking the potential of unmanned aircraft,” said Michael Toscano, CEO of the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, which represents more than 7,000 member companies in 60 countries.
( Sign up for POLITICO’s Morning Defense tip sheet)
“From advancing scientific research and responding to natural disasters to locating missing persons and helping to fight wildfires, [unmanned aerial systems] can save time, save money and, most importantly, save lives,” Toscano said. “Our hope is this will lead to the creation of more sites and eventually to full integration of UAS into our skies, which will help create lasting jobs and boost the U.S. economy.”
Vendors prefer the term “unmanned system” to “drone,” which tends to conjure up images of deadly strikes in places like Pakistan and Yemen. And the unmanned systems industry has long been pushing for integration of drones into U.S. skies for nonmilitary purposes.
First, though, they must be made safe to share the skies. To help get there, the FAA announced the selection of six test-site bids, from the University of Alaska, the state of Nevada, New York’s Griffiss International Airport, the North Dakota Department of Commerce, Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
Twenty-four states competed in the bid process for the opportunity to bring home drone tests — and jobs.
At AUVSI’s annual meeting in Washington in August, representatives of several states’ bids said that even if they were not chosen to be among the first six test sites, they anticipate the drone market in the U.S. to grow substantially in the near future.
( Also on POLITICO: Full defense policy coverage)
Drone advocates also predict that the eventual economic impact of widespread drone use in the U.S. could be significant.
“AUVSI’s economic report projects that the expansion of UAS technology will create more than 100,000 jobs nationwide and generate more than $82 billion in economic impact in the first decade following integration,” Toscano said.
FAA Administrator Michael Huerta cautioned Monday that the drone integration process would be phased in, more like waves than an explosion. The drone test sites announced Monday are scheduled to be operational within 180 days and conduct research at least through 2017.
“As we are conducting this research, I think the best way to think about it is it would be a staged integration,” Huerta told reporters, adding later: “As the research is going on, I think you will see that there will be particular activities that will be authorized as we move out in the operation of these test sites.”
But the move is a sign of possible upcoming changes in the U.S. approach to commercial drone use, which is currently highly restricted by the FAA.
( Also on POLITICO: Eyeing 2014, Western Dems condemn NSA surveillance)
The test sites are charged with demonstrating safe integration of drones by September 2015, and the FAA is expected to issue a proposed rule on small-drone usage in early 2014.
The test sites will also help officials explore privacy issues, how the FAA should regulate commercial airspace and the potential future uses of unmanned aircraft. The test site operators will have to comply with federal, state and other laws protecting an individual’s right to privacy and conduct annual reviews of privacy practices allowing for public comment, the FAA said.
For companies such as General Atomics, having domestic test sites in operation is good news.
California-based GA is now testing several sensor systems necessary for safe domestic drone use aboard its Predator B-model aircraft. Its sense-and-avoid technology could pave the way for “due regard” capability — which allows unmanned systems to autonomously detect and avoid other aircraft so that they can fly safely in U.S. airspace, the company said this month.
If the FAA begins to loosen restrictions on use in U.S. skies, it could open up business opportunities for drone-makers such as GA and Northrop Grumman, which so far have mostly sold aircraft to the Defense Department for military use.
( Also on POLITICO: Aviation schools prepare for boom in drone jobs)
“We are working closely with the FAA, NASA, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and our industry alliances to advance the safe and efficient integration of unmanned aircraft systems into domestic and international airspace,” said Frank Pace, president of GA’s aircraft systems group. “Our sense-and-avoid capability is a key part of that goal, and we continue to make ongoing progress towards this end.”
North Dakota officials hailed their state’s selection Monday after working for years to position the city of Grand Forks as a premier northern unmanned systems hub. The state has invested more than $14 million to establish a national test and research site.
“We’ve said all along that Grand Forks is an ideal location to test UAS integration, and now the FAA has agreed with us,” Republican Sen. John Hoeven said in a statement. “As a test site, Grand Forks will be integral in developing the future commercial use of UAS for our nation and the world.”
Grand Forks County is already working with the U.S. Air Force to develop Grand Sky, an unmanned systems technology and business park that will be built on more than 200 acres at Grand Forks Air Force Base. Northrop Grumman, which builds the RQ-4 Global Hawk drone, has committed to become the park’s first tenant, the North Dakota lawmaker said.
“We envisioned collaborations here in practical and original ways to create a dynamic environment for the military, industry and education,” Hoeven said. “Now all of those elements are coming together in a coordinated way to spur innovation, boost our economy and create jobs in the Grand Forks region.”
Kathryn A. Wolfe contributed to this report.Swiss reporter Karl Ammann and cameraman Klaus Sparwasser have arrived in Yerevan to produce a film for German TV station ZDF regarding Armenia’s role in the trafficking of endangered animal species.
It would seem that Hetq’s recent investigative series on the matter has caught the attention of those engaged internationally in the battle to stem the multi-million dollar illegal trade.
In their quest, Ammann and Sparwasser first met with Ara Fidanyan, who heads Interpol’s national bureau in Armenia.
Fidanyan told Hetq that his office first heard about the importation of two bonobo chimps to Armenia in August 2013 from their colleagues in the in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). He then passed the information to law enforcement agencies in Armenia and a criminal case was launched. (The case is ongoing)
Fidanyan was reluctant to say anything more given the ongoing nature of the case.
Karl Ammann said that according to information supplied by Armenia’s State Revenue Committee, the number of such animals imported into Armenia and then exported to Russia and the United Arab Emirates is large. He adds that the Armenian charged in the case has partners in Dubai.
When I asked if the name of the Armenian trader had been entered into an Interpol watch list so that law enforcement agencies could be alerted if he travels to the DRC, Indonesia or other nations, Fidanyan claimed that his office had never heard of the man before.
”This is the first time we’ve received information from our colleagues overseas about an Armenian connection in the trade of endangered animals. When we received the news, we conveyed it to our colleagues in Armenia’s Prosecutor General’s Office. Hopefully, after the investigation, we will have information about other such cases. Then, we’ll be able to collaborate with our colleagues overseas,” said Fidanyan.
Karl Ammann notes that at issue is not just the two bonobos but an entire list of other animals.
For example, chimpanzees, gibbons and other species enjoy the same legal status. The problem goes much deeper than the two bonobos that we know about. What about other endangered animals that have made it to Armenia via illegal means?
“We’ve provided the appropriate authorities with this information and must wait for the results,” Fidanyan said when referring to the wider picture.
When I asked Fidanyan if the DRC has demanded that Armenia hand over the animals in questions, he said that he hadn’t received any such request.
As to whether Russia or other countries had raised questions regarding the import and export of animals to and from Armenia, Fidanyan said his office hasn’t yet received any official requests for information from other nations.
Karl Ammann says that when the Interpol in the DRC first got in touch with its counterpart in Armenia, the Yerevan branch initially claimed that there weren’t any bonobos in the country.
It was only after Hetq broke the story, with actual photos, that the Interpol in Armenia changed its tune.
Ara Fidanyan says his office has amassed more than 100 documents relevant to the case and that they’ll do everything possible to uncover the truth.
Photo: Ara FidanyanPresident Barack Obama announced Thursday that he was ending a longstanding immigration policy that allowed any Cuban who made it to U.S. soil to stay and become a legal resident.
In a statement, Obama said the so-called "wet foot, dry foot" policy was "designed for a different era" of U.S.-Cuba relations.
Under the new policy, which takes effect immediately, Cubans who attempt to enter the U.S. illegally without qualifying for humanitarian relief will be sent back to the island.
"By taking this step," Obama said, "we are treating Cuban migrants the same way we treat migrants from other countries."
Obama added that the Havana government had agreed to accept Cubans ordered to leave the U.S., a concession that was a focus of months of negotiations. A senior administration official told the Associated Press the Cubans gave no assurances about treatment of those sent back to the country, but said political asylum remains an option for those concerned about persecution if they return.
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said the move "goes a long way to putting our relationship with Cuba on equal terms with our relationships with other neighbors."
Obama is using an administrative rule change to end the policy. President-elect Donald Trump could undo that rule after he is sworn in next week. He has criticized Obama's moves to improve relations with Cuba. But ending a policy that has allowed hundreds of thousands of people to come to the United States without a visa also aligns with Trump's commitment to tough immigration policies.
The "wet foot, dry foot" policy was put in place in 1995 by then-President Bill Clinton as a revision of a more liberal immigration policy. Until then, Cubans caught at sea trying to make their way to the United States were allowed into the country and were able to become legal residents after a year. The U.S. was reluctant to send people back to the communist island then run by Fidel Castro, and the Cuban government also generally refused to accept repatriated citizens.
The Cuban government has in the past complained bitterly about the special immigration privileges, saying they encourage Cubans to risk dangerous escape trips and drain the country of professionals. But it has also served as a release valve for the single-party state, allowing the most dissatisfied Cubans to seek better lives outside and become sources of financial support for relatives on the island.
Relations between the United States and Cuba were stuck in a Cold War freeze for decades, but Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro established full diplomatic ties and opened embassies in their capitals in 2015. Obama visited Havana last March.
U.S. and Cuban officials were meeting Thursday in Washington to coordinate efforts to fight human trafficking. A decades-old U.S. economic embargo, though, remains in place as does the Cuban Adjustment Act which lets Cubans become permanent residents a year after legally arriving in the U.S.
The official said that in recent years, most people fleeing the island have done so for economic reasons or to take advantage of the benefits they know they can receive if they make it to the U.S.
The official also cited an uptick in Cuban migration, particularly across the U.S.-Mexico border -- an increase the official said reflected an expectation among Cubans that the Obama administration would soon move to end their special immigration status.
Since October 2012, more than 118,000 Cubans have presented themselves at ports of entry along the border, according to statistics published by the Homeland Security Department. During the 2016 budget year, which ended in September, a five-year high of more than 41,500 people came through the southern border. An additional 7,000 people arrived between October and November.
The influx has created burdens on other countries in the region that must contend with Cubans who have yet to reach the U.S. border, the official said.
The Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program, which was started by President George W. Bush in 2006, is also being rescinded. The measure allowed Cuban doctors, nurses and other medical professionals to seek parole in the U.S. while on assignments abroad.
People already in the pipeline under both "wet foot, dry foot" and the medical parole program will be able to continue the process toward getting legal status.
The preferential treatment for Cubans reflected the political power of Cuban-Americans, especially in Florida, a critical state in presidential elections. That has been shifting in recent years. Older Cubans, particularly those who fled Castro's regime, tend to reject Obama's diplomatic overtures to Cuba. Younger Cuban-American voters have proven less likely than their parents and grandparents to define their politics by U.S.-Cuba relations. Exit polls show President Barack Obama managed roughly a split in the Florida Cuban vote in 2012, and Trump in November won the same group by a much narrower margin than many previous Republican nominees.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.He is an unlikely Jeremiah, a funds manager in a pinstripe suit with a résumé that includes a stint as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank in Richmond, Va. Yet Thomas Mackell Jr. is warning of a future in which the homeless elderly live under bridges and the old and the young engage in “intergenerational warfare” over disappearing jobs.
Mackell, a graduate of Seton Hall and Rutgers, spoke last week to a convention of Bell System retirees in Atlantic City. He got up to speak at the same time the lawyer for the Christie administration, miles away in Trenton, rose to tell the state Supreme Court it should not bother itself with “minor” breaches of constitutional law involving schools.
There is a connection between the two events. Peter Verniero, the former court member and state attorney general hired by the governor to defend cuts in school aid, represented a strain of political thought that the rich cannot be taxed further to help the poor. His governor regularly bashes public employee unions as “selfish” and “greedy” and wants to reduce pension benefits.
Mackell takes opposite views. Unions protect the middle class, he says, pensions are essential, and, if the rich do not pay a greater share of their wealth, then the “nation faces a horrendous future.”
“If something doesn’t happen soon, this country will go the same way as every other empire,” said Mackell. Citing the growing income gap between rich and poor, the deterioration of infrastructure, and, most of all, the problems facing the 77 million aging members of the Baby Boom, the financial funds manager called America’s prospects “abysmal.”
“What he had to say was pretty frightening,” said Jack Brennan of Hillsdale, chairman of the Association of BellTel Retirees, a group with 112,000 members throughout the country.
“But his purpose wasn’t to scare us, but rather to energize us into taking action.”
The action — protecting pension benefits and health care for retirees. “We have to keep fighting for what we fought for years ago,” Brennan said.
What’s worrisome about Mackell is his ability to see the future. Years ago, he predicted unemployment would top 9 percent, states would take bargaining rights from public employee unions, and Congress would seriously consider cuts in Social Security and Medicare benefits — all ideas that seemed over the top then.
Now Mackell, son of a former Queens district attorney, travels the country warning of the consequences of the shift in pensions from defined benefits — in which retirees are guaranteed a set amount based on the number of years they worked — to defined contributions — in which retirees contribute to and manage their own pension funds, mostly through 401(k) plans.
“It’s a recipe for disaster,” he said in an interview, noting the average 401(k) account amounts to some $50,000. In the past 30 years, Mackell said, the percentage of workers in defined benefit plans dropped from more than 80 percent to less than 30 percent.
“Fewer than half of the Baby Boomers have plans for their retirement and a third saved nothing at all,” he says, adding that 401(k)s were intended to supplement, not replace, pensions.
Many will be unable to retire, says Mackell, who heads an association of benefit administrators and is author of “When the Good Pensions Go Away” published by Wiley. He predicts growing hostility between young and old workers.
“Good jobs won’t be there for the younger workers because older workers will hold on to them,” Mackell said. Unless, of course, seniority rights are taken away as a cost-saving tool.
He says defined pension benefits were eliminated to help corporations improve profit margins and increase shareholder income.
“The risk has been transferred to workers who have no clue how to manage stock portfolios,” he says. “Even people on Wall Street don’t do well predicting how stocks will react, but you’re asking people who don’t know the difference between a stock and a bond to make decisions that could make the difference between a future of comfort and a future of poverty.”
In his speeches, he encourages workers and retirees to lobby Congress to require a restoration of defined benefit pensions. Mackell has a website, AmericansforBenefits. org, that posts a petition asking for the elimination of pension and health-care benefits for members of Congress until workers are guaranteed good pensions.
“If 5 million people sign it,” he says, “it will get their attention.”The agricultural industry in Idaho is pushing a bill in the state legislature that would prevent activists from recording mistreatment of farm animals.
SB 1337, which has cleared a state senate committee, would prohibit unauthorized video recordings on agricultural facilities. The industry has labeled such activity “ag terrorism.”
“There is an anti-animal agricultural agenda, which goes to great lengths to misrepresent what happens in our industry,” Jared Brackett, president of the Idaho Cattle Association, told the Twin Falls Times-News.
If the legislation becomes law, violators could face a fine of $5,000 and one year in prison. The bill also targets farm whistleblowers who attempt to document events without authorization by their employer.
Critics point out that the “ag gag” measure comes after an animal rights group used undercover footage to expose animal abuse at Dry Creek Dairy in Hansen, Idaho, two years ago.
That footage showed employees dragging a cow by its neck using a chain and tractor, workers hitting and kicking milk cows, and one employee caning a cow.
“I think the video speaks to itself,” Boise resident Sue Brooks told the Senate Agriculture Committee. “Now, if the employee stepped forward without that video, would that employee be believed? Do you see any cattleman here today believing that would have happened?”
Matt Dominguez, public policy manager for the Humane Society, said there are “good farmers in Idaho,” but “there are bad apples and you need a tool to root those out.”
Idaho is not the first state to adopt laws targeting animal rights activists involved in farm operations. Utah, Montana, and Kansas have passed similar bills. The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and other animal rights groups have challenged Utah’s law in court as a violation of free speech by making it illegal to gather evidence of animal abuse.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
To Learn More:
Ag-Gag Bill Banning Video Recording Moves Forward (by Drew Nash, Twin Falls Times-News)
Disputed 'Ag Gag Bill' Advances in Idaho Senate (by Jon Miller, Associated Press)
Animal Rights Groups Sue Utah over Law Criminalizing Undercover Photography of Farm Abuse (by Matt Bewig, AllGov)New demographic analysis of abortion data finds that the bulk of the procedures are on women who had sex in their teens, some as early as 12, drawing new attention to how sex impacts America's youth.
The Family Research Council on Friday revealed some of the details in a release to Secrets to promote an upcoming family policy lecture that will include longtime abortion foe Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J.
Among the details:
- Rather than the one-third of women commonly cited by abortion supporters as having obtained an abortion, the number is one-sixth.
– Almost three-quarters of abortions are performed on women who had sex at age 16 or younger.
– 40 percent of women who begin sexual intercourse very early (ages 12 to 14) have abortions.
– There is no great difference by income status in the percentage of women who have abortions.
Smith and Patrick Fagan with the Marriage and Religion Research Institute plan to provide more details at the lecture Jan. 15.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner's "Washington Secrets" columnist, can be contacted at pbedard@washingtonexaminer.com.On the night of Friday, August 19, Tyler Naquin provided the Cleveland Indians with what is to this point the highlight of their season, hitting a walk-off inside-the-park home run to beat Toronto. It was the first play like that for the Indians in a full century, and it was awesome. At the end of that play, Naquin was batting.316/.377/.603, with a wRC+ of 158, and was one of the two leading candidates for American League Rookie of the Year.
In the month since that incredible moment though, Naquin has hit just.238/.351/.286, with a wRC+ of just 74. He has struck out in 33.8% of his plate appearances during that time, with only three doubles and not a single home run. It's hard to say he's been unlucky, given that his BABIP during this time has been.395. His already high strikeout rate has climbed, his very high BABIP hasn't been as high, but the biggest culprit seems to be the quality of his contact. Up through August 19, his hard-hit percentage (found at FanGraphs) was 42.0%, but since that day it's been only 26.3%.
Earlier in the year, Naquin was killing the ball when it was thrown near the center of the zone, or when it was low and, but pitchers have adjusted, and he's not seeing as many pitches there. Instead he's getting more pitches up in and just above the zone, and generally having a more balanced attack thrown at him.
Here's his zone chart (from Brooks Baseball) for earlier in the season:
...and here is his chart for the last month:
Because Naquin was so good early on, his batting line for the season is still the best among any of the ten Indians players with 200+ plate appearances. During the last month though, his poor hitting and questionable routes in center field have combined to make him a replacement level player.
With two of the team's top three pitchers likely out for the season, the lineup is likely going to have to shoulder more weight if the team is going to be successful in the postseason. In recent weeks it appears pitchers have made adjustments in their approach to facing Naquin, and whether he's worn down by his first season in the Major Leagues, or just hasn't been able to adjust to those adjustments, he isn't producing at a level that can help the team win. Perhaps some additional time spent watching video and working on things in the bating cage can get him turned back around, I don't know. As is, Naquin's struggles make center field an area of weakness for the Tribe, even if looking at Naquin's overall numbers this season would seem to say otherwise.It was only a few days ago that I found out one of the most interesting things about Texas. Did you know Texas still has a mutual combat law? In essence, dueling is still legal according to sections 22.01 and 22.06 in the Texas penal code.
The law states that any two individuals who feel the need to fight can agree to mutual combat through a signed for or even just verbal or implied communication and have at it (fists only, however). As long as no “serious” bodily injury occurs and both participants know what degree of risk they are hazarding, mutual combat is a defense for a criminal or civil suit that may be leveled against you.
Several states still have this as an active law, but the restrictions vary. For example, in California, the law is only applicable under the authority of a professional fighting association. But not in Texas!
I was decided on my career as a journalist until I made this discovery through a random Internet search and the chance reading of a few comments on Reddit. Now that I know dueling is still legal, there is no reason for me to pursue truth and justice through words.
Forget hoping that more people will muster the wherewithal to pick up a newspaper and get informed on important issues. Forget arguing with people through editorials and columns on problems we can’t really solve. As a result of this discovery I’ve decided to shed the veneer of civility and educated reason and replace it with the simplest answer to everything: physical violence.
I can easily see how things might escalate between two parties who seriously think they’re going to fight and not reap any legal consequences. But what if the restrictions for this law were the ultimate code of honor? What if honor in a fair fight was still a respectable way to handle disagreements? Wouldn’t it be beautiful? In a perfect world, if mutual combat was the first and last course of action in any conflict, then we would have our arguments, fight with respect and honor and leave the problems at the door the next day. But alas, I dream. I also have dreams where everyone knows kung fu and can speak any language they want with no effort.
I suppose it’s too much to ask that our modern, supposedly more civilized society, not degenerate every argument into childish slap-fests or passive aggressive actions that only make things worse for everyone involved. The world we live in is way too complicated and trivial to ever have the seamless coordination and equal codes of honor all around that I envision. And perhaps the prolific use of automatic weapons since their invention has complicated things.
But now that you know about this law, think twice about the next argument you have with a friend (or enemy). It may just save your relationship. You can decide not to complicate matters with excuses and rack your brain for eloquent (or not so eloquent) arguments and instead duel (the legal way) and accept the outcome.
Ashley Davis is a senior journalism major from Killeen. She is a copy editor at The Baylor Lariat.Mr Barnett, also the state’s Science Minister, said the role was key to building the state’s science industries.
“Professor Klinken brings a wealth of knowledge, expertise and enthusiasm to the role and I very much look forward to working with him.”
A leading WA medical research scientist and visionary leader, Professor Klinken is highly regarded for advancing the understanding of genes involved in leukaemia, cancer and anaemia and his many research achievements include the discovery of a gene that suppresses the growth of tumours.
Professor Klinken played a key role in establishing the state’s premier adult medical research institute, the Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research, previously the Western Australian Institute for Medical Research.
Under his stewardship, the institute attracted world-class national and international researchers to the state and made many acclaimed medical discoveries.Looking for news you can trust?
Subscribe to our free newsletters.
Over the weekend, the Environmental Protection Agency took a cue from President Donald Trump’s media-bashing playbook and issued a press release titled “The EPA’s Response to the AP’s Misleading Story.” It accused the Associated Press of an “incredibly misleading story” about flooded Superfund sites in the greater Houston area.
The AP reported that the EPA was not on the scene to survey the area’s Superfund sites that were underwater because of Harvey. The EPA put out a statement Saturday condemning unnamed “inaccurate reporting” about Superfund sites, while confirming that 11 sites were inaccessible because of the flooding. The next day the EPA followed up with an even more accusatory press release. Without challenging any of the facts in the AP report, the release attacked one of the bylined reporters, Michael Biesecker, personally:
“Despite reporting from the comfort of Washington, Biesecker had the audacity to imply that agencies aren’t being responsive to the devastating effects of Hurricane Harvey. Not only is this inaccurate, but it creates panic and politicizes the hard work of first responders who are actually in the affected area.”
Attempting to further discredit Biesecker’s previous reporting, the EPA release went on to cite Breitbart and the Oklahoman‘s editorial board. Breitbart, where Trump’s ex-adviser Steve Bannon has returned to the helm, followed up on the AP-bashing press release, calling the report “fake news.” What the unsigned EPA release didn’t mention was that AP had reporters on the ground assessing the damage, and that the agency had actually confirmed to the AP that its teams hadn’t yet assessed the 11 flooded Superfund sites in person.
Many observers noted the EPA’s media strategy has taken a Trump-like turn.
Stunning EPA response to the AP’s reporting. Attacks the reporter personally. Calls the report ‘yellow journalism’. https://t.co/69aKXBcFYP pic.twitter.com/yg9Yf9ufCQ — Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) September 3, 2017
But EPA Administrator Pruitt has been pursuing similar tactics for months, turning the EPA’s public outreach into a spin-machine that amplifies a conservative echo chamber of positive coverage. Back in July, I looked at the gulf between the EPA’s media narrative and certain realities:
The EPA’s public affairs staff now focus on promoting mostly right-wing outlets, some with ties to the Trump administration, on the EPA’s social-media feeds and in news releases. The result? An echo chamber cheerleading the EPA’s regulatory rollbacks, Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, and its newfound anti-science denial.
Since taking office, Pruitt has repeatedly given interviews to friendly interviewers or sympathetic conservative pundits while ignoring interview requests from mainstream outlets. One of his favorite venues is with radio show host Hugh Hewitt (who has a son working for Pruitt). In an appearance on another conservative Alabama radio program, Pruitt even seemed to agree with the host’s suggestion that his ultimate goal was to eliminate the EPA. The EPA administrator has rarely taken questions from the public except at conservative and industry-friendly events. Media Matters confirmed the EPA’s skewed press strategy, finding that Fox News outranked all other networks as Pruitt’s favorite TV venue, appearing 12 times as opposed to a total of six appearances on the other five major networks.
We’re now seeing the same strategy play out, but the stakes are much higher, as the EPA responds to an environmental crisis in real time. So far, its public response has involved dialing up the spin for its conservative audience instead of briefing the public on Harvey’s environmental damage.
Breitbart has remained a go-to shop for Pruitt’s team at the EPA. Last Monday, when Houston was already under 30 inches of water, Breitbart‘s radio host Alex Marlow interviewed Pruitt about the storm, asking him to respond to “media fallout” about climate change. “I think at this point to look at things like this and to talk about a cause and effect really isn’t helping the people of Texas right now,” Pruitt said, adding it’s “opportunistic [of] media to use events like this to, without basis or support,” engage in a “cause and effect type of discussion, and not focus upon the needs of people.”
The recent attack on the AP reporter is another example of the symbiotic relationship. For example, the EPA press release complained that “Biesecker has a history of not letting the facts get in the way of his story.” Breitbart’s version made the same charge when alleging the reporter had “invented an imaginary meeting” between Pruitt and the Dow CEO. In fact, there was no invention at all; evidence of that meeting came from Pruitt’s FOIA’ed calendar, though the actual encounter was only a handshake instead of a closed-door meeting.
Naturally, in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, the EPA has enough to deal with: A flooded chemical plant, bad air quality, sewage in the floodwaters. In the past, the EPA’s longtime regional career staff came together with high-level political appointees and related offices to respond to a crisis and offer advice to residents in harm’s way. Pruitt instead has alienated and criticized the EPA’s career staff.
Liz Purchia, a former Obama EPA spokesperson, said in an email that in the middle of catastrophe, the statement was “one [of] the dumber things that the politicals in the EPA press office could have done.”
More so, she says, because the disinformation campaign distracts from the more important problems on hand. “It created a sideshow while they should be focused on communicating to the public about the agency’s response efforts to help the people impacted by Harvey,” she said. “It is a waste of government resources to spend time being petty in the midst of a public health emergency when crisis communications is critical.”A New Hampshire lawmaker with a history of surprising statements suggested on Thursday that married couples who want to use contraception should practice abstinence instead of using birth control pills.
State Rep. Lynne Blankenbeker (R-Concord) made the claim -- noting that abstinence is available "over the counter" along with condoms -- during a legislative committee hearing on a resolution urging the Obama administration to drop the birth control requirement for religious organizations. Blankenbeker was trying to explain her position on why the administration's requirement to provide insurance coverage for birth control should be overturned.
"People with or without insurance have two affordable choices, one being abstinence and the other being condoms, both of which you can get over the counter," she said.
The comments came at the same hearing where state Rep. Jeanine Notter (R-Merrimack) claimed that birth control pills lead to prostate cancer. In an interview with Merrimack Patch, Notter said that she was referring to studies discussing potentially high levels of estrogen in the environment through birth control pills and a connection to prostate cancer.
Blankenbeker was engaged in a dialogue with Sylvia Kennedy, a New Hampshire doctor, who was testifying in support of Obama's plan. Kennedy urged the coverage of birth control and responded to Blankenbeker that condoms are not a foolproof means of contraception, and also suggested that abstinence does not work all the time, a notion Blankenbeker disagreed with.
"Abstinence works 100 percent of the time," she said.
Blankenbeker also asserted that condoms and abstinence offer married couples a wider range of family planning options than oral contraceptives.
"If you decide you want to get pregnant you can refrain from abstinence," she said.
Blankenbeker declined a request to comment.
The resolution was introduced last week in the Tea Party-controlled New Hampshire House by Majority Leader D.J. Betencourt (R-Salem) with the goal of urging the Obama administration to reverse course on the contraception coverage mandate. Betencourt's resolution came the same day that Obama changed the original mandate for religious groups to provide birth control coverage to employees, shifting policy to make insurance companies provide the coverage for employees of religious groups.Learn about where your visitors are coming from and deliver an effective business plan. Learn what search terms they are using to find you.
Most of the internet traffic comes from a smaller mobile screen. It is important that your website is reponsive enough to fit these smaller screens. Capture a larger audience by being flexible enough for it to display on all screens.
Your website completely tailored to your needs. It's very important that your website delivers clear and perfect content. I keep this ideal mindset in mind when creating your website.
Domain Hosting Focus on what matters to you the most: Delivering your product. Let me worry about hosting your website and finding a server that will meet you needs.
Customer Service Receive unmatched customer service. When you have a question or concern, I am availble around the clock. I only build websites that |
to serve the American people, no more, no less, and it is time that our elected representatives begin to remember that fact.
Philip Giraldi is the executive director of the Council for the National Interest and a recognized authority on international security and counterterrorism issues. He is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served eighteen years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was Chief of Base in Barcelona from 1989 to 1992 designated as the Agency’s senior officer for Olympic Games support.We almost missed this one! If you couldn’t score passes to the sold out Coachella weekends but still want an amazing music festival experience we strongly suggest that you make your way to the Moon Block Party in North Palm Springs. This ten day street festival (yes we said ten days) features some of the absolute best from the Southern California music scene. Expect performances by The Moving Units, Bleached, Henry Clay People, Races, The Soft Pack, Allah Las, Crystal Antlers, The Entrance Band, Breakestra and many many more. The Block Party kicks off on Thursday, April 12th and keeps on going until Sunday, April 22nd at 64647 Dillon Rd in North Palm Springs. So even if you’re in the area for Coachella, it's definitely worth stopping by in between weekends.
You know what the best part? This event is free and only asks for a $5 donnation if you have it. Each day of music starts at 4pm and is all ages until 10pm, but the 21+ crowd can party until 2am. You can check out the poster above for the full line up or head over to the Moon Block Party website for details.According to a recent worldwide poll called The Global Index of Religiosity and Atheism, Africa is the world’s most devout region. Even with a global decline in religiosity, the black continent has the smallest number of self-proclaimed atheists in the world. I think this poll clearly mirrors the state of religion and atheism in the region. Nigeria trails behind Ghana in terms of religiosity with 93 percent of the respondents saying they were religious. I guess fewer Nigerians would identify themselves as religious if there were assurances of safety and no victimization if they proclaimed and declared themselves atheists. In Nigeria, people who do not profess any religion or belief in god find themselves in a perilous predicament. They are ostracized, maltreated and discriminated against. But the situation of atheists is not the same across the country. How one is treated as an atheist depends on so many factors, such as the part of the country where one is living – is it in the Christian dominated South or in the muslim dominated North? Is it in the rural or urban areas? It also depends on one’s family background, gender, level of education, employment and income. Male atheists who are highly educated and are financially independent face less risk than their female counterparts.
In Nigeria, atheism is a taboo. It is abominable for anyone to proclaim openly that god does not exist. It is not safe and normal for persons to admit being atheist. The reactions include sardonic incredulity, shock, anger, and hatred. Atheism goes with huge costs – social and political consequences – which many people cannot afford. Generally atheists are not accorded respect. They are not treated as human beings with equal rights and dignity. In fact in Nigeria it is better and more socially acceptable to profess a belief in any god or any religion than to profess no religion and lack of belief in god. Many people will not welcome an atheist to their homes. The general misconception is that atheists are horrible human beings, the agents of the devil who lack common moral decencies. Many people are made to believe that atheists can corrupt their minds or ‘souls’, cause them to derail from the path of truth and righteousness, and lead them to hell fire and eternal damnation. In fact the whole idea of atheism is scary to many Nigerians. Most people would want not to be associated with that label or perspective. Most Nigerians believe all initiatives should be founded on god, no matter how absurd or vaguely conceived such an idea is.
Again, most Nigerians socialize and marry along religious and theistic lines. The issue of the religion or belief in god plays prominent role when marriages are contracted. So atheists – self proclaimed atheists – may find it difficult to get partners unless they are ready to convert or to renounce atheism or to conceal their atheism. Unfortunately the dream of most young Nigerians is to marry in churches or mosques or to have their marriages blessed by a clergy even when such marriages are contracted in a court or registry. There are no indications that ‘blessed marriages’ succeed better than those contracted without such theistic theatrics.
In Nigeria, anyone who goes open and public with his or her atheism risks losing family support, care and solidarity. In 2003, a Muslim woman from the North who is acclaimed nationwide as liberal and progressive in her views visited our humanist stand during an event in Abuja. After a short brief on what humanism was all about, she said she would have nothing to do with any of her children who renounced Islam. Many children are not ready to go against what is often perceived as the divine will of their parents particularly when it comes to religious or theistic matters. They prefer to pretend and to present themselves as religious and theistic. In Nigeria, family and community links are very strong and important. The Nigerian state is not as developed as states in the western world, and many people rely on their families and community members for care and support. So, families often tyrannize over the lives and choices of members. For example, most people who are born in Christian families are brought up in a christian way, attend christian schools and marry christian partners. Parents regard it as a duty to bring their children up in a religious and theistic way. For a child to profess atheism is generally seen as a mark of parental, family and societal failure. Atheism goes with a stigma which most families abhor and do not want to associate with.Share:
To conclude our series on PE portfolio management strategies and how they have evolved over the past several years, here is a summary of key themes from our Q&As with industry experts, as well as some contextual data and analysis:
Increasing Multiples and Industry Maturation Driving Focus on Building, Add-ons
As Bertram Capital’s David Hellier said, the move toward buy-and-build “has been driven by the increase in multiples which has necessitated private equity firms to adopt value creation activities beyond the traditional LBO model.” Mr. Hellier saw the active buy-and-build approach as more of a response to market conditions, while The Riverside Company’s Ron Sansom stated that both market conditions and evolving general PE strategies were likely drivers of the shift toward buy-and-build, adding it “has been taking place for a number of years.” In Mr. Sansom’s words: “You cannot generate successful results through financial engineering or any other tricks that might have worked in the go-go days of the industry.” Mr. Conner Searcy of Trive Capital stated that “operational synergies are the most attractive element” regarding add-ons, especially given rising purchase price multiples.
Whatever the primary cause, it’s clear that add-ons have spiked as of late to command a dominating share of all buyout activity. In the U.S. alone, they hit 60% of buyout activity last year, according to PitchBook’s 2015 Annual U.S. PE Breakdown.
Perhaps the push to add-ons and the middle market is what caused median debt percentages in buyouts to stay steady from 2013 to 2014, hovering around 65%. Even if they require more operational management, adding on companies can be worth it from the onset. Not only can add-ons be cheaper, with Wafra Partners’ Andrew Thompson mentioning their potential structure with a “lower cost of capital,” but they also are “very attractive for how quickly they can accelerate a platform company’s growth,” he added. Mr. Hellier pointed out how they “help drive multiple arbitrage” and “accelerate capital deployment opportunities.”
Growth in Focus on Operations and ESG
“Operationally focused private equity groups have received a lot of attention the past few years,” said Mr. Thompson.
“Operating partners are definitely the buzz in the PE world today,” added Mr. Hellier, whose firm also utilizes an in-house IT services team to assist portfolio companies in software development, selection and deployment, as well as Internet services.
“There has been an increase in the use of operational resources in the past few years (consultants, operating partners, etc.). This is the natural evolution of the maturing of the PE industry and being forced to create value in new ways,” said Mr. Searcy.
“Our operating teams, which once only addressed portfolio company challenges, (are) now part of the deal sourcing process and helping evaluate opportunities,” noted Mr. Sansom.
Mr. Sansom doesn’t see this increased focus on operations going anywhere soon: “I think PE firms will all need to deliver much more than capital if they are to generate solid returns.” Mr. Thompson’s thoughts were much the same, adding that he expected it to increase even further in the middle market. With PE’s focus shifting more and more to the middle market—its share of overall PE activity in the U.S. only swelling—that makes sense, as does PE turning toward operations-dedicated personnel.
Another growing focus for PE firms is the adoption of ESG programs, according to survey results from our most recent ESG Report, and Mr. Sansom said Riverside was no exception: “We grade every prospective portfolio company on ESG metrics, and these grades have a significant impact on our decision to invest.” He cited it as “simply a form of good due diligence.” Mr. Thompson similarly stated his firm only invested in “companies that meet certain ethical standards and sensibilities, as well as avoiding certain risks.” That inclusion of risks is telling, as LPs are often the true drivers behind ESG adoption, and one of their primary areas of concern is risk management.
Honing Industry Targets
Mr. Thompson was optimistically generalist about buy-and-build with regard to industry: “So long as you have a scalable platform and a team capable of identifying and assimilating accretive acquisitions, a buy-and-build strategy can work across industries.” In addition, he stated Wafra has had success partnering with industry-specific executives to assist in sourcing and portfolio management.
“Very broadly speaking,” Mr. Sansom said, “companies that come with a strong management team and possess a secure recurring revenue stream do well under our selection process, while material customer concentrations and poor systems and infrastructure materially temper our enthusiasm.”
Bertram Capital focuses on three industry verticals: business services, consumer and industrials/manufacturing. Mr. Hellier explained that his firm’s operating approach was well-suited to opportunities found within those sectors, such as sales and marketing improvements, supply chain and manufacturing optimization and more.
An increasingly niche focus on specific industries makes sense in an expensive investment climate. It also speaks to PE’s maturation as an industry, where buying and building, as the natural culmination of PE’s core strategy, only works if you know how to build what you buy. General operating improvements work up to a certain level, but in a costly environment with plenty of competition, PE firms who can demonstrate industry expertise will win more bids.
Want more data? Click here to check out our reports library; for a free trial of our platform, contact us here.
Featured image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons user Tuxyso.Pilgrim Power Plant in Plymouth was taken offline line Saturday in anticipation of the weekend snowstorm. According to a statement from Entergy, the owner of Pilgrim, the plant was taken off line in preparation of "a potential loss of offsite power or the grid's inability to accept the power Pilgrim generates".
This is the second time this season the plant has been shut down due to storm conditions. On January 27 the facility was taken offline after the two main power transmission lines were knocked out by blizzard conditions. Although the transmission lines were restored within a few days, the plant remained offline until February 7 at which time it was reconnected to the grid.
While offline, plant workers reportedly conducted maintenance that can only be done when the plant is offline, according to Entergy. During that time, a special Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) team visited the facility to review what occurred during the shutdown.
This time around the facility was taken offline prior to the possibility of any storm-related outages or issues.
"As always, safety is our number one priority and there is no threat to the safety of plant workers or the general public," said Entergy Senior Communications Specialist Lauren Burm.Independent right-wing journalist Mike Cernovich tipped off BuzzFeed to the John Conyers (D-Mich.) sexual harassment story, instead of trying to break the story himself. According to a Medium post by Cernovich, he decided to hand off the “career-making” scoop to prevent “the Democrat-Media establishment hacks” from quashing it due to the source. He also explains that he chose BuzzFeed because the NYT didn’t source him once and CNN lies about him, which seems fair enough.
Often dismissed as a conspiracy theorist, Cernovich claims millions of fans (his Twitter has 376k followers) and routinely lectures the rest of the media about journalism. A Medium post Wednesday, titled “An Open Letter about Sourcing,” responds to critics who question the voracity of Cernovich’s information network,
Whenever I break a big story, members of the fake news media freak out. Here’s why they look silly. Chances are you can’t figure how I get sources. This seems completely stupid to me. I’m famous, and that’s where my sourcing comes from. You might not like me, but millions (maybe tens-of-million) of people do. In fact, here’s a powerful life lesson. The fact that you and so many other journalists hate me is proof that a lot of people like me. (Think it through. You hate me because you know about me, which means I’m notable. Now start doing the math on my notoriety.) “Sources” aren’t magical creatures. They are human beings. Like all human beings they have jobs and obtain information. These people who like me talk to me, and come to me with information. Other sources come to me to play out personal grudges, or maybe even to get someone fired. If the information is true, personal motive is irrelevant to my reporting. Say it again — Sources are not magical creatures! They are people.Sometimes they talk to journalists because getting a bad story out about a rival will boost their own profile. Who knew people live according to their own self-interest? Other sources want to be whistle blowers and are high-minded. Still others like to give me information because they enjoy watching the media freak out when I break another story. Have I ever paid for information? That’s none of your business. It’s also a dishonest and hypocritical question, because y’all ran that Steele dossier, which was paid for (fake) information, and y’all run stories originating from paid opposition researchers. Anyhow, y’all look silly when share conspiracy theories about my sourcing. But please continue to do so. Every stupid article you run about me helps me step right over your heads on my way to the top. Love, Mike Cernovich
Author, journalist, and filmmaker
According to the Washington Post, mainstream media outlets usually consider paying sources to be an “ethically dubious practice” that creates an incentive for potentially illegal information gathering and encourages sources to say more than they actually know. Basically, while it isn’t illegal to pay sources, it is frowned upon.
Regardless, BuzzFeed “carefully vetted” all documents provided by Cernovich to ensure their authenticity, as they would do with any story of this magnitude. While there’s nothing to link Conyers with the ‘shitty men in media’ list Cernovich allegedly purchased, BuzzFeed admitted they were unaware of those allegations at the time. According to The Cut, Cernovich recently paid $10,000 for the list that was making the rounds on the internet,
Extreme right-wing blogger Mike Cernovich says he has gained access to the “shitty men in media” list, which circulated among women in publishing and journalism last week. The vocal anti-feminist activist who was charged with rape in 2003 offered a $10,000 bounty for a copy of the list on October 16. On Saturday night, he promised to publish it “in full,” and has already listed two names, along with the unsubstantiated allegations against those individuals. In a post on his site DangerAndPlay, Cernovich says he wants to “give the men accused of sexual misconduct time to reply” before adding the others — though, he apparently didn’t seem to take the same consideration for the men he outed today. The allegations about one of the individuals on the spreadsheet appeared to be exactly the same as those listed next to another man, suggesting that one entry is a copy of the other. He later tweeted the name of a second man on the list, who had also not commented by early Saturday evening.
If true, this decision soon proved premature when the list was published on Twitter and Reddit, but it’s a good example of Cernovich’s willingness to believe and pursue unsubstantiated claims. His usual indiscretion makes it difficult to believe that he was ever planning to do the work necessary to properly expose the John Conyers scandal, regardless of what he now claims after the fact. This means that passing off the story, and trying to claim some credit as a tipster, was really his only viable option.
Ultimately, Cernovich did the right thing (even if for the wrong reasons), and provides a lot of credit to BuzzFeed in his post. However, it doesn’t assuage the feeling that his real goal was to use this as a way to generate more money for himself — the article ends with a sob story about how he’s losing lots of money exposing these powerful people and some links to donate to his “high impact journalism.” I don’t know if I buy it, Mike.
Related Reading
Alt-Right Blogger Posts Names From ‘Shitty Men in Media’ List
Blogger amends vow to publish list of ‘Shitty Media Men’
Why BuzzFeed teamed with a far-right figure to break the John Conyers scandalHow $1 trillion hides in plain sight
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The government does without roughly a trillion dollars a year because of a slew of tax breaks -- everything from the mortgage-interest deduction, to education and child credits, to low rates on investments.
The irony is that all those breaks can translate into higher tax rates and a federal budget that is much bigger than advertised, according to tax experts Len Burman, a professor at Syracuse University, and Edward Kleinbard, a professor at University of Southern California.
Anyway you slice it, a cool trill is not chump change. In fact, it's equal to nearly a third of the federal budget.
But you won't actually see that highlighted in the federal budget process every year. That's because lawmakers focus on the money the government will spend and how much it will raise in taxes. But "total revenue passed up" doesn't really come up.
Burman and Kleinbard think tax breaks should be treated as a form of spending.
"Like direct spending programs, tax expenditures crowd out other spending and require higher tax rates than otherwise needed," Burman wrote in a paper co-authored with Eric Toder and Christopher Geissler.
Even though tax breaks lower the tax bite for eligible individuals and corporations, they end up raising taxes on others.
"Targeted tax relief is just another name for government spending, in which taxes extracted from those of us who are not targeted fund hidden spending on those who are," said Kleinbard, who used to run the Joint Committee on Taxation, in a speech last fall.
If lawmakers did treat tax breaks as spending, the size of the federal budget -- defined by how much the government will spend in a year -- would be more like $4.6 trillion, not $3.6 trillion.
Tax breaks on auto pilot
The number of tax breaks has quadrupled since 1972. No one advocates that all tax breaks be abolished. But Burman has suggested lawmakers cap how much they spend on them.
Done right, such breaks can advance government-favored activities such as giving to charities, boosting retirement savings or purchasing health insurance.
But even when the mission is clear, lawmakers' aim isn't always dead-on. For example, a tax break might encourage behavior that would have happened without a government subsidy.
Done wrong, tax breaks can squander resources that could be put to better use.
"These revenues could be used to lower marginal tax rates, fund more social programs, improve infrastructure, eliminate budget deficits, or promote various other purposes," Burman and his colleagues wrote.
The problem, Kleinbard and Burman say, is that most tax breaks don't get much scrutiny once they become law. By contrast, Congress each year must review discretionary spending, such as that on defense, education and infrastructure.
Some tax breaks, of course, have expiration dates. But even then they're often lumped together with other expiring tax breaks and renewed en masse.
"If we can force tax expenditures into the sunlight, by subjecting them to the full rigor of the budget process, we can make better choices," Kleinbard said.
Aiming for fiscal stability
In view of the country's looming fiscal shortfalls, the discussion about tax breaks isn't just academic.
Tax experts have been saying for years that streamlining tax breaks and simplifying their rules is key to reforming the tax code. And let's face it, you'd have to pay someone an obscene amount of money to say without laughing that the code, with its mind-bending complexity, is just fine.
As it is, tax breaks can increase the sense that the tax code is unfair and make people feel better about cheating. It's always the other guy it seems who's getting more breaks and the wealthiest corporations getting the sweetest deals.
Among the benefits of rethinking tax breaks: it could lead to a broader base of people paying into the federal income tax system.
Today, because of the multitude of tax breaks, nearly half of all tax filers will end up owing no federal income tax, according to Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center.
With fewer tax breaks, more people will end up with some federal income tax liability. But with more people paying in, that could also mean tax rates wouldn't need to be as high as they otherwise might be.Cupid Media found in breach of privacy laws after dating sites hacked and personal information stolen
Updated
An online dating company has been found in breach of privacy laws after hackers accessed the personal information of about 245,000 of its Australian users.
Australian Privacy Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim found Cupid Media breached the Privacy Act by failing to take reasonable steps to secure data held on its websites.
Cupid operates more than 35 niche dating websites such as ChristianCupid, MilitaryCupid, SingleParentLove and other sites based on ethnicity, religion and location.
Hackers gained unauthorised access to Cupid webservers in January last year and stole the personal information of the Australian Cupid site users.
It included full name, date of birth, email addresses and passwords.
Commissioner Pilgrim said the investigation found that at the time of the incident, Cupid did not have password encryption processes in place.
"Password encryption is a basic security strategy that may prevent unauthorised access to user accounts," he said.
"Cupid insecurely stored passwords in plain text, and I found that to be a failure to take reasonable security steps as required under the Privacy Act."
He said the incident also demonstrated the importance of securely destroying or permanently de-identifying personal information when it is no longer required.
Commissioner Pilgrim found Cupid had not done so.
"Holding onto old personal information that is no longer needed does not comply with the Privacy Act and needlessly places individuals at risk," he said.
"Legally, organisations must identify out-of-date or unrequired personal information and have a system in place for securely disposing with it.
Businesses, customers must be vigilant: Pilgrim
"I would also remind consumers using internet dating sites to regularly update your privacy settings, change your passwords and be careful about the personal information you share.
"You don't want to become a victim of identity theft or a scam."
The commissioner said the company had cooperated with the investigation and had taken major steps to fix the problems.
He said businesses must remain vigilant about information security.
"Cupid's vulnerability-testing processes did allow it to identify the hack and respond quickly," he said.
"Hacks are a continuing threat these days, and businesses need to account for that threat when considering their obligation to keep personal information secure."
The commissioner said the company had addressed the office's concerns and it had closed the investigation.
Cupid has not yet responded to the ABC's inquiries.
Do you know more? Email investigations@abc.net.au
Topics: social-media, internet-culture, information-and-communication, law-crime-and-justice, australia
First postedWomen speaking out about the men who have sexually assaulted, abused or harassed them will take to the national stage on Wednesday where organizers and past victims will call for Sen. Al Franken (D-MI) and Reps. John Conyers (D-MI) and Joe Barton (R-TX) to resign.
All three lawmakers have been accused of sexual misconduct, including unwanted sexual advances and groping, and, in Barton’s case, texting explicit messages and a photo of himself naked.
Some of the women who will be at the National Press Club in D.C. have been speaking out for years about former president Bill Clinton assaulting or abusing them, including Juanita Broaddrick (who said Clinton raped her), Paula Jones (whose suit against Clinton for sexual harassment was settled before a trial) and Leslie Millwee, (who said she was stalked and assaulted three times by Bill Clinton while she was a TV reporter in Fort Smith, Arkansas.
Melanie Morgan, a radio talk show host and co-founder of Media Equalizer, which organized the Media Equality Project and Wednesday’s event, will share her experience with Franken.
Morgan told Breitbart News that she met Franken in 2000 at a roundtable discussion about the federal budget. She said he got in her face several times and then, after getting her phone number from a producer of the event, Franken called here repeatedly.
“I felt very threatened, very intimidated by his behavior,” said Morgan, who finally stopped the harassment after she told Franken she was going to contact the police.
“He completely freaked me out,” Morgan said. And that’s also what resonated with her after hearing radio talk show host Leann Tweeden’s story about Franken groping her when she was sleeping and force kissing her while they were taking part in a USO trip abroad.
“I knew in that moment that her story was true,” Morgan said.
https://twitter.com/MelMorgan1350/status/935221070944124929
“Dozens of women and other victims of sexual harassment are joining together this Wednesday with this message: #ShowUsTheList of representatives or staffers who received taxpayer-funded pay-outs,” the press release announcing the protest and press conference said.
The Media Equality Project wants to confront these abusers and hold them accountable.
“We believe that this effort should be in a spirit of bi-partisanship in order to end sexual harassment on Capitol Hill and across the country,” the press release said.
And yet, according to Morgan, efforts to get the women in Congress who have spoken out again sexual misconduct and harassment on Capitol Hill have not responded to the invitation to join the event on Wednesday.
Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, (D-NY), Diane Feinstein (D-CA), and Reps. Jackie Speier, (D-CA) Kathleen Rice (D-NY), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-VA) and Melanie Sloan, head of the liberal watchdog group Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility, were invited.
As of Tuesday morning, none had agreed to attend the event.
“If they are serious about ending sexual assault and other degradation of women then they should stand with us,” Morgan said.
Other speakers include radio talk show host Blanquita Cullum and Alveda King, niece of the late Martin Luther King Jr.
“Our message is clear: Senator Franken, Congressmen Conyers, and Barton must resign now! And Congress must end taxpayer-funded payouts to harassment victims in an effort to silence their voices and complaints,” the press release said.This Man-Made Phenomenon Will Kill Off Marine Life in an Area the Size of Connecticut
Shoal of sardines swim in the new tank at Yokohama Hakkeijima Sea Paradise on March 19, 2009, in Yokohama, Japan
Shoal of sardines swim in the new tank at Yokohama Hakkeijima Sea Paradise on March 19, 2009, in Yokohama, Japan Junko Kimura_Getty Images
This year's dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico will kill off marine life in an area the size of Connecticut, government scientists said Thursday.
Dead zones are created by excess nutrients, in this case from the Mississippi River, that drain into the water and drive a rapid growth of plankton. These plankton are consumed by fish, which in turn leave increased levels of waste at the bottom of the ocean. That waste decomposes in a process that uses up oxygen and leaves organisms unable to breathe.
The about average 6,000-sq.-mi. area, formally known as a hypoxic zone, brings low-oxygen conditions that could harm marine life like fish, shrimp and crab that live in the region, according to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report. That loss of marine life in turn threatens the fishermen and communities that rely on seafood.5 reasons the Sixers will make the playoffs by Christopher Kline
The Philadelphia 76ers always are facing issues about injuries no matter what time of year it is, and not surprising Joel Embiid is still the main topic.
The offseason is nearing its conclusion and the hype continues to build for the start of the season for the Philadelphia 76ers.
But as always, the team is fighting off speculation about injuries.
Joel Embiid has yet to be cleared for five-on-five scrimmages after having surgery on his torn meniscus back on Mar. 24, per Keith Pompey of the Philadelphia Inquirer.
It certainly appears Embiid is not yet fully healed, which is concerning because the surgery happened nearly six months ago.
Perhaps a conservative approach
The Sixers have used this approach before when dealing with injuries.
They are more than willing to keep players out (sometimes to a fault) for long periods of time just to make sure the player is 100 percent.
Maybe the team wants Embiid to get in better shape before he steps out on the court against other players.
Any way you want to categorize it, this is not atypical of the Sixers. People shouldn’t start panicking about his health status.
No panic, but show concern
Just like I said we should not panic but we shouldn’t pretend this is a non-issue.
Whenever the words injuries and Sixers are in the same sentence we should always be paying attention.
If Embiid enters training camp without being cleared to scrimmage five-on-five, it’s a tough blow but not a big deal.
But by the time preseason rolls around, Embiid needs to be ready to go.
If he is not ready by the preseason, then panic will start to set in. Missing the entire preseason would likely keep him out of the first few games of the season.
Embiid needs practice time to not only test his mobility, but to develop timing and chemistry with his teammates.
Let’s cross that bridge when we get there, but for now we need to have guarded optimism he will get the all-clear sooner rather than later.Time is of the essence when treating a patient undergoing a heart attack. Cardiac surgeons attempt to quickly stabilize the heart by applying reperfusion, a technique that restores oxygen to the heart by opening up blocked vessels with balloons and stents. While reperfusion can restore cardiac function, such sudden infusions of oxygen can also further injure severely depleted regions of the heart.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” says Anthony McDougal, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “The rapid return of oxygen is necessary for the heart to survive, but it could also overwhelm the heart.”
Now McDougal has developed a model that predicts a single heart cell’s response to dwindling supplies of oxygen. Specifically, it evaluates a cell’s ability to keep producing ATP — a cell’s primary fuel source — and stay alive, even as it is increasingly deprived of oxygen.
The model is a first step in predicting whether reperfusion techniques will aid or further harm a depleted heart. It may also help to determine the optimal amount of oxygen to apply, given the degree of a heart’s deterioration.
“Part of the reason we’re interested in reperfusion is we’re not sure what is the timescale during which we can reintroduce the oxygen,” McDougal says. “If the tissue has been oxygen-deprived longer, you run into more risk of oxygen damaging the tissue. That becomes more of a problem as you try to address these issues, especially in rural locations that might have less access to hospitals.”
The results are published this month in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. McDougal’s co-author and advisor is C. Forbes Dewey, emeritus professor of mechanical engineering and biological engineering.
Changes of heart
McDougal and Dewey sought to trace the metabolic, energy-producing conditions within a heart cell as it is progressively deprived of oxygen. While some scientists have explored this through various cellular models, most of those models have been limited to short timescales, around one to two minutes after healthy cells have been deprived of oxygen.
McDougal wanted instead to see how a heart cell changes over a much longer timescale, to understand how a patient’s heart may evolve from the time it becomes oxygen-deprived to the point at which a patient may receive reperfusion.
“We decided to see what is the state of the cell up to the moment of reperfusion. How is it faring, and what are the main pieces to consider when you begin to reperfuse it?” McDougal says.
The team focused on modeling the effect of declining oxygen supplies on the chemical reactions responsible for producing ATP in a heart cell.
McDougal identified 32 general molecular species involved in separate chain reactions to produce ATP. He then looked through the scientific literature to find enzymatic equations that describe how each individual reaction works, including its dependence on oxygen. He then compiled the equations for all 32 reactions into one model.
“There were a lot of cases where he had to estimate the reaction rates, because two different papers would have different results, based on different animal experiments or different conditions, and he had to work backward to try and normalize the results to see what biological relationships he could get out of them that were meaningful,” Dewey says.
Once he compiled all the equations into the model, McDougal ran more than 200 simulations, to see how a cell’s total ATP production changed as each ATP-producing reaction adapted to various levels of oxygen over various lengths of time.
Steady, steady, then a crash
Surprisingly, the model’s simulations show that heart cells can continue generating ATP, even with oxygen levels as low as 10 percent of the optimal concentration in healthy cells.
With healthy supplies of oxygen, ATP is produced via glycolysis, an aerobic process that requires oxygen to kick off a cascade of chemical reactions involving various molecular species, all ending in the healthy production of ATP. To release useful energy, the cell uses an enzyme to snap off a phosphate molecule from the three-phosphate ATP structure, leaving ADP (adenosine diphosphate) and using the single phosphate to feed various cellular activities.
As oxygen supplies plummet to around 10 percent, these oxygen-dependent reactions produce less and less ATP. That’s when anaerobic “backup” processes come online. For example, the molecular species creatine phosphate combines with an enzyme to cleave its phosphate group, attaching it to ADP to form more ATP. When reserves of creatine phosphate run low, a cell’s glycogen steps in to fill its role, maintaining ATP levels.
“Glycogen is just a big hair ball of glucose, and at a certain point, with even more pressure on ATP, the cell can pull individual glucose molecules off that hair ball and turn it into energy,” McDougal says.
In short, the team found that, even though oxygen may be severely limited, cardiac cells appear to dig deep into their energy arsenals to maintain ATP levels and keep themselves alive.
However, eventually, as oxygen approaches zero, even backup reserves shut down, causing levels of ATP to crash — a point of no return for a fatigued cell. Interestingly, McDougal observed an intermediate stage, in which a heart cell’s ATP levels drop but have not yet crashed.
“These are your knife-edge cases, where any small perturbation to the cell could cause it to spiral and die, or come back and stay alive,” McDougal says.
It is therefore essential to know just the right amount of oxygen to introduce to ischemic portions of the heart that are in such precarious states. For instance, in some cases, rather than introducing a rush of oxygen directly to a depleted region, Dewey says scientists might consider introducing small amounts of oxygen to the newly opened vessel so that it could slowly diffuse into the injured areas, without shock or harm. “Some animal experiments suggest that this might be beneficial,” Dewey says. “We now have a model that can begin to evaluate many new treatment methods, seeking ones that have exceptional promise.”
“Hopefully with time, we can create a better map of exactly how much oxygen to give, at what time point,” McDougal adds.
This research was initially supported, in part, by the Singapore-MIT Alliance program in Computational and Systems Biology.While it seems logical that Netflix will debut a few clunkers once it kicks its original programming into high gear, the most recent release, Bloodline, is proof that we’re barely scratching the surface of how amazing the service’s series can be. Some will disagree, but I foundto be the best drama that Netflix has delivered thus far, easily topping the soapy dark politics of House of Cards and the fractured dramedy of Orange is the New Black Even though it’s mildly difficult to cull together all of my gushing praise into concise sentences, here are five reasons whyis the greatest of Netflix’s current dramas. (And “Because it’s nothing likeisn’t one of them, but it certainly could have been.) I’ll be keeping things spoiler-free as well, so don’t worry about major plot points dropping.Created by the Damages trio of Glenn Kessler, Todd A. Kessler and Daniel Zelman,is basically about a large well-to-do family whose lives change drastically once the oldest sibling, played by the always incredible Ben Mendelsohn, returns home after years of being the disregarded black sheep to everyone but the matriarch. But how did he become that way? How does the rest of the |
:14
printer-friendly format OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2014 Fantasia International Film Festival For more in the 2014 Fantasia International Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2014 Hawaii International Film Festival For more in the 2014 Hawaii International Film Festival series, click here.Infowars
A man based in Scotland has revealed to BuzzFeed News how he tricked the right-wing conspiracy site Infowars into publishing a completely fake report about president-elect Donald Trump. Markus Muir, a 27-year-old marketing professional from Glasgow, sent direct messages on Twitter to Infowars editor-at-large Paul Joseph Watson claiming BuzzFeed News and CNN were due to release harmful footage of Trump. The report, which has now been shared over 15,000 times on Facebook, directly quoted the messages, which claimed the footage of Trump showed him using the n-word in a previously unseen outtake of The Apprentice. Muir, who claimed in the messages to work for NBC, has revealed he was the single source for the report in the form of an account which he set up solely for the prank. He said Watson did not ask for any evidence that he worked for NBC or about how he gained the information. It was not until after the Infowars report was published that Muir contacted BuzzFeed News in New York and revealed his role in it. To verify his claims and view his messages with Watson, a reporter then met Muir in person in Scotland. "I said I worked at NBC and couldn't say any more," said Muir. "It was only two direct messages and I thought he might ask for more confirmation. I went to bed, forgot about it, then I checked his feed on the train to work and it was just him saying there was huge news about to come out.
"I couldn't believe it. It was a cut-and-paste job of what I said to him and it was all bullshit – I made it all up."
Twitter / BuzzFeed News
Infowars was created by right-wing radio host Alex Jones, who has been described as "America's leading conspiracy theorist". Jones believes the US government was behind the 9/11 attacks and the Oklahoma City bombing, and described the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting, in which 20 children and six staff were killed, as "completely fake". The site was strongly pro-Trump during the US election and frequently denounced Hillary Clinton. In the message exchange with Muir, Watson pledged that Jones would pass on the information to "Steve B" or Steve Bannon, the former executive of Breitbart News who has been appointed Trump's chief of strategy.
Muir said he watched in astonishment as the news spread on right-wing news outlets and social media profiles, sometimes with other false information – such as that it proves CNN owns BuzzFeed – added to his original lie. The 27-year-old is a former journalism student who became interested in fake news during the US election and wanted to see how it was generated, and he spotted that Watson was directly contactable via Twitter. "I was watching a CNN discussion on fake news and I got interested in it. That guy [Watson] was retweeted into my timeline, some horrible thing he posted about mental health, and I saw his profile had direct messages open," Muir told BuzzFeed News. "I wondered how fake news starts so I quickly set up a fake account, didn't bother following anyone, used a stupid picture of a bad guy from a film... and sent him a message. I didn't think he'd get back to me, because it was ludicrous."
Twitter / BuzzFeed NewsScreengrab from Yahoo!
If you’ve seen Guardians of the Galaxy (and this is a bit of a spoiler if you haven’t), you already know that the best part of the movie is Baby Groot’s mid-credits dance to “I Want You Back” by the Jackson 5.
But did you know that Baby Groot is great at dancing to all sorts of other songs, too? We made some videos to show he can groove to just about anything. His moves are so versatile they’ll make you say “I am Groot.”
Advertisement
“Teach Me How to Dougie” by Cali Swag District:
“He’s the Greatest Dancer” by Sister Sledge:
“Harlem Shake” by Baauer:
“Doin’ It Right” by Daft Punk:
Advertisement
“Crank That (Soulja Boy)” by Soulja Boy:
“Hips Don’t Lie” by Shakira feat. Wyclef Jean:
“Pony” by Ginuwine:
“Hot N*gga” (the Shmoney Dance song) by Bobby Shmurda:
Advertisement
“Dancing on My Own” by Robyn:
“Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” by the Backstreet Boys:
“Maple Leaf Rag” by Scott Joplin:Ridley is in Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, but he isn’t playable. The well-known Metroid villain only appears in the Pyrosphere stage.
Super Smash Bros. director Masahiro Sakurai was recently asked by IGN why Ridley isn’t playable in the new Smash Bros. Here’s his explanation:
“I definitely know that Ridley’s a much-anticipated name for fans, but if we made Ridley as a fighter, it wouldn’t be Ridley any longer. It’d have to be shrunk down, or its wings reduced in size, or be unable to fly around freely.” “Providing accurate portrayals of characters is something I want to pay ample attention to. If I don’t stick to that thought, then we’d have to lower the quality or break the balance of the game. Something that goes way off spec could break the entire game.”
Sakurai continued by noting Ridley’s presence in the Pyrosphere stage, which he felt would be more appropriate.
“Instead of going through a lot of very convoluted hocus-pocus to make Ridley a fighter, I figured it’d be better to keep Ridley as it currently is, the correct way, and have it feel like a truly threatening presence. There are other icons, too, like Metal Face and the Yellow Devil, which help effectively portray each of their world settings. They go a long way toward deepening the game world, and I think it’s been fun to experiment with.”
Source
Share this: Twitter
Facebook
Reddit
Tumblr
Google
More
Email
Print
LinkedIn
Pinterest
PocketMargaret Maurice, 69, was scared as she lay on an operating table in Prince Albert on Jan. 21, waiting for a surgeon to take out her appendix.
A couple of hours later, after the anesthesia wore off, Maurice woke up in a recovery room at Victoria Hospital and discovered three bloodied bandages on her belly and a surprising revelation.
"One of the nurses told me, 'You had no appendix.' And that was it," Maurice told CBC News. "Then I couldn't ask any questions, because they weren't around anymore."
I wanted to know what [the surgeon] did to me, what he did inside. - Margaret Maurice, surgical patient
She was told to go back to her northern village, Beauval, 300 km away, and return a week later. A discharge note, signed by a nurse, didn't contain information about the procedure, only a form letter and a warning to keep her wounds dry.
Ten days later, the missing appendix remains a mystery but Maurice's experience has become a clear case of how patient-physician trust can unravel over communication issues.
Margaret Maurice says she didn't receive verbal or written disclosure from her surgeon about the medical procedure. (Chanss Lagaden/CBC) After the surgery, Maurice went to a hotel where she was bedridden with a headache and nausea.
She was also confused and upset.
"I wanted to know what [the surgeon] did to me, what he did inside," Maurice said. "They just left me like that to go home."
Search for answers
Her daughter, Gail, who lives in Toronto, was livid over what she calls "unnecessary surgery."
"My mom was under general anesthetic. She's in her 60s. It's not to be taken lightly. It's surgery," she said. "She has scars on her stomach and she did not know what was performed."
Gail Maurice called the surgeon, Dr. Yagan Pillay, to complain about her mother's care and decided to record the telephone conversation.
A filmmaker, she has worked for the University of Toronto as a standardized patient to test medical students on patient care.
Communication challenges
In the recorded conversation provided to CBC News, a man identified as Dr. Yagan Pillay defends the procedure. He points to misinformation from Margaret Maurice about her own medical history.
Victoria Hospital in Prince Albert, Sask. (Chanss Lagaden/CBC News) Pillay, who was certified in South Africa, has practised general surgery in Canada for a decade.
Pillay didn't respond to numerous phones calls, messages, and attempts to verify the recording by CBC News. However, CBC News listened to the recording to hear the surgeon's explanation as to why, he said, an appendectomy made sense to him at the time.
Last fall, Maurice was suffering from chronic diarrhea and pains in her right side. A screening test for colon cancer showed blood in her stool.
She didn't tell me she had her appendix out - Dr. Yagan Pillay, surgeon
She was referred to a Prince Albert specialist, Pillay, who performed a colonoscopy on Dec. 1.
The procedure ruled out colon cancer, but he says diagnostic images from inside the colon showed a hardened chunk of feces at the entrance of where her appendix should be.
"She didn't tell me she had her appendix out," he explained in the recorded conversation. He also dismissed other diagnostic tests. "I had no reason to think she doesn't have an appendix."
Maurice acknowledges she didn't know differently, either.
"I only had two surgeries in my life," Maurice said. "I had gallstones, and the other was a tubal ligation. In one of those times, maybe the doctor took out the appendix."
No appendix
Pillay booked her for a laparoscopic appendectomy, a method considered less invasive than open surgery but not without risks. It requires three cuts in the abdomen to insert an instrument with a video camera and surgical tools.The appendix is removed through one of the incisions.
He said, during the surgery, he couldn't find an appendix. He probed around searching for it for about half an hour, then stitched up the incisions.
When challenged by Maurice's daughter the day after the surgery, he offered to meet with Maurice immediately.
However, she says the offer came too late for her.
Margaret Maurice recovers in a hotel room after her surgery. (Chanss Lagaden/CBC) Maurice confirms she received repeated phone calls to her hotel room from Pillay's office a day after her surgery, but that she refused to answer.
The Metis woman already harbours a distrust of medical professionals, tracing back to a tubal ligation she says a doctor in Meadow Lake, Sask., pressured her into when she was just 22.
Surgical specialists consulted by CBC News were reluctant to assess the clinical aspect of the case, citing the many variables in diagnosis of appendicitis. However, they all agreed the communication was poor.
Patient right to know
When something doesn't go according to plan, it's part of disclosure. - Chris Power, Canadian Patient Safety Institute
Chris Power, CEO of the Canadian Patient Safety Institute, says communication is a critical component of patient care.
"When something doesn't go according to plan, it's part of disclosure," Power said. "Harm doesn't need to happen always to disclose, but if things don't go quite as planned … the patient has the right to know that."
Medical experts interviewed by CBC News also said a nurse may provide patient debriefs in typical cases, but that this case wasn't typical.
The Canadian Medical Association Journal has published studies over the past two decades showing that effective physician-patient communication not only improves health outcomes, but also reduces the number of complaints about doctors to licensing bodies.
Lost trust
Maurice has already contacted the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Saskatchewan to start the process of a formal complaint against the doctor.
She says she also filled out a complaint form on the Prince Albert Parkland Health Region's website.
Back home in her village, Maurice is refusing to return to Prince Albert for a follow-up appointment with the surgeon.
She has asked for a referral to a different doctor.The above video accurately demonstrates two things. Firstly it demonstrates the need for a nice tripod which will stay grounded and give the camera a solid and unmoving platform for it to rest on. The second thing this video demonstrates is the importance of leaving your camera be as it is taking the photos. This is evident in some of my earlier timelapse videos where I accidentally knock the tripod detracting from the final result.
The actual act of timelapsing is quite simple and straight forward and can (if you want to know how long the final result will be and how long the camera will be taking photos for) involve some maths. Lets start with the process and I will talk about the maths afterwards.
Before setting out to shoot a timelapse make sure your battery/s are fully charged and all your gear is packed. Set up the tripod and the camera in the desired location. Frame up the shot and make sure the tripod is stable and won't shake as the timelapse is being shot. Take a few test photos to see if the shot is what you want it to be and to check if the exposure is correct. Set the camera to fully manual mode and make sure auto white balance is not on and iso is not set to auto. This avoids any lighting changes as the light of the environment changes. (The first timelapse I ever did I didn't do this and as the sun set the camera kept on compensating yielding a horrible result.) Also make sure the camera is in manual focus mode so it doesn't try to refocus every photo. Set up the method of capturing the timelapse whether it be a computer, magic lantern or an intervalometer and set it to take the desired amount of photos with the desired time between photos. When everything is setup, get the timelapse going and sit back as the camera works its wonders. Once the timelapse is shot, pack up and go home or alternativley, take another!
Now for the maths. If you want to work out how long the final timelapse will be you will first need to work out how long you want your timelapse to last. For instance if you are shooting a sunset or sunrise you may only want to be shooting for 30 minutes to an hour whereas if you are doing some astrophotography you may want to shoot for 2+ hours. Once I work out how long I want to shoot for I set my exposure and how long I want between shots (make sure the time in between shots is always more than the exposure time). I then change the number of shots to suit the length I want to shoot for. Once I know how many shots I will take I can work out the time of the final result at 24fps (frames per second)
For Example:
I want to shoot a sunset and I want the timelapse to span 45 minutes. I set the time between shots to be 15 seconds. First I convert 45 minutes into seconds as it is easier to work out the number of shots:
45 minutes x 60 = 2700 seconds
Then to work out the number of shots I divide 2700 by 15
2700/15 = 180 shots
Therefore i need 180 shots to get 45 minutes of timelapse with 15 seconds between shots.Canadian engineering technology company Genoil has signed a letter of intent worth $50 billion with Russia’s Grozneft. The deal will support what are described as integrated oil projects in Russia.
Genoil will develop oil fields and build clean technology upgraders, refineries and pipelines in Russia, according to the company.
At first, Genoil plans to invest $15 billion into projects in Russia’s southern republic of Chechnya. The company will explore ways to link the new project to existing pipeline networks in the region.
Read more
“We have good ties to Chinese investors, we are ready to invest into infrastructure development, and we believe that it’s possible to increase oil production in Russia by this,” a company representative said as quoted by Vedomosti daily.
“First of all, money will be invested into developing reservoirs in the republic to create a refinery with a capacity of 3-6 million tons of oil,” said Grozneft chairman Andrey Gusak, stressing that the investors may consider buying mining assets in other regions of the country.
Russia’s Economic Development Ministry hasn’t reportedly received any documents concerning the deal.
The project has raised doubts among the experts, interviewed by the daily.
“Genoil is an unknown company, while the sum is huge. Moreover, it may be equitable to the annual capital cost of the whole Russia’s fuel and energy sector,” said Valery Nesterov, analyst to Sberbank CIB.
READ MORE: Russian oil production sets new post-Soviet record
Using Chinese capital, the company plans to invest into something that does not have economic sense, according to the head of Urus Advisory in Moscow.
“The Chinese do not need Canadians to enter the Russian market: they have ties, resources and business skills,” the analyst said.The State Of Men’s Marathoning In The U.S. Ryan Wood / August 13, 2014
The 2016 U.S. Olympic Trials Marathon will be an intriguing affair. Photo: PhotoRun.net
Which three runners will drape themselves in the American flag at the finish line of the 2016 Trials? At this point, it’s impossible to guess.
So, are you an optimist or a pessimist?
Do you look at the state of elite-level men’s marathoning in the U.S. and get excited? Or is the view depressing?
Today we’re exactly 18 months away from the 2016 U.S. Olympic Trials Marathon races in Los Angeles. Three Olympic team slots are up for grabs and you could argue there isn’t a single runner in the driver’s seat at this point to grab one.
Is that thrilling or terrifying? Because there are two ways to look at it, depending on how full (or empty) your glass is:
— The field is wide open, and that’s great. While the well-known veterans—Meb Keflezighi, Ryan Hall, Dathan Ritzenhein, Abdi Abdirahman—are still forces to be reckoned with, there are so many marathoners in the 2:10-2:12 range today that the trials are going to have unmatched intrigue. Plus, the recent retirement announcements from Jason Hartman and Andrew Carlson could open up a chance for other up-and-coming runners. There are no less than a dozen runners with a legitimate chance at contending for one of those three slots.
— On the flip side, one could make the argument that American competitiveness will end there. Everyone in the field has flaws: Keflezighi, 39, and Abdirahman, 37, aren’t getting any younger, Ritzenhein, 31, continues to struggle with injuries and Hall isn’t the runner he was even two years ago. Not to mention the fact that no other current American runner, so far, has broken 2:10. The warts are real, and there may be enough of them to prevent anyone in the U.S. from being consistently competitive on the world’s stage in the next few years.
RELATED: Who will make the 2016 U.S. Olympic Marathon teams?
The mystery of the 2016 trials should be fun to watch play out, but some say the bigger picture isn’t a rosy one.
“We’re just not that good in the marathon,” says Greg McMillan, a running coach who trained pros through adidas-sponsored McMillan Elite team for several years. “When you look at the list, we only have nine U.S. citizens that have broken 2:10 on non-aided courses [four who are currently running], and only six more on aided courses like Boston. That’s pretty bad. In other countries, they’ll have that many (break 2:10) in a weekend.”
Why can’t the U.S. be more competitive? We live in a sports-crazed country of 300 million people. It has the technology and the resources for cutting-edge training like the Nike Oregon Project. It has the geography for altitude training. And the latest running boom over the last 10 years has drawn more interest to the sport than ever before, both at the entry level and at the competitive level.
Yet when Ryan Hall leaned across the finish line at the 2008 London Marathon in 2:06:17, it represented a high-water mark of sorts (Keflezighi’s major victories aside). No American has come within 90 seconds of Hall’s performance that day on an unaided course—not even Hall himself. And really, nobody seems poised to anytime soon.
To take it one step further, as of Aug. 13, there are 60 runners from around the world who have run faster this year than Meb Keflezighi’s Boston Marathon-winning time of 2:08:37. Not only are there no Americans among the top 60, but Hall, Ritzenhein and Khalid Khannouchi are the only U.S. runners to have ever run that fast.
So while the trials will be a must-see event and will serve as a quadrennial benchmark of American distance running, the drama could very well end there. And everybody has a theory as to why U.S. runners struggle to stack up alongside other countries in the marathon.
RELATED: Chasing The American Dream From Oslo
Starting Young
Lifting the flag of Uganda over his head with a huge grin stretching across his face, Stephen Kiprotich crossed the finish line of the 2012 Olympic marathon in a winning time of 2:08:01.
Kiprotich was 23 years old that day. It was his fourth marathon.
Such experience at such a young age is nearly unheard of in the U.S. Heck, many 23-year-olds in the U.S. are still running college track. Even Hall, who started running the distance earlier than most Americans, made his marathon debut at the age of 24.
While Keflezighi has shown that a marathoner can be successful well into his 30s, many think the younger years are where the foundation is most effectively set.
“The Ethiopians and the Kenyans, these are guys who are running marathons young. They’re running marathons at 21, 22, 23,” says Pete Rea, who coaches a team of elite athletes at Reebok-sponsored ZAP Fitness. “They’re honing it, they’re mastering it, they’re learning the subtleties associated with the marathon.”
Many elite American runners, though, take a slower path. They finish college at 22 or 23, head straight to track, and, depending on their rate of success, move to road races and marathons sometime after that.
“A lot of the African athletes are jumping into the marathon at 19, 20 years old,” says Sam Grotewold, manager of professional athletes for the New York Road Runners. “But in the U.S., people tend to wait longer. That’s the way it’s always gone.”
The Cost of Progression
Ryan Vail is encouraged by his marathon career so far. Save his 2:13 finish at the 2013 New York City Marathon, he’s been able to progress at each of his races—a 2:12 at the Olympic Trials in 2012, a 2:11 at the Fukuoka Marathon later that year, and a 2:10 at the London Marathon this past April.
“I still feel like I have a few minutes to go,” says Vail, 28, who lives in Portland, Ore. “It’s one step at a time. I’m now a 2:10 guy, so I’m going to start looking at 2:09. When you hit 2:09, you can start talking about 2:08.”
Vail readily admits he doesn’t have the natural talent of a fast track guy like Ritzenhein, who’s marathon PR is 2:07:47, so a slow and steady progression like this is his ticket.
“Is 2:07 out of reach?” Vail says. “I hope not. But it’s going to take time to get there.”
It’s time that some runners can’t afford to take—literally.
Jeffrey Eggleston, who lowered his PR to 2:10:52 at the Gold Coast Marathon in Australia this summer, compares professional marathon running to any other career where you have to work your way up—and struggle financially at first.
“You have to pay your dues, and you need to invest in yourself,” says Eggleston, 29, who trains in Boulder, Colo.. “You have to build up your running resume and go to different races and make an investment in yourself to keep running at a high level.”
But dropping from, say, a 2:15 personal best to a 2:10 or even lower (which means more money) can be a long process, and the results certainly aren’t guaranteed. Meanwhile, many of these runners have degrees from well-known universities. Starting a career in the real world can be an enticing option for them, and their potential in the marathon could go unrealized as a result.
“The economics for us are very tough,” McMillan says. “Most distance runners have good college degrees and can get good jobs. In other countries, running is the way out. [Running] is the good job.”
He adds: “We lose them all the time. Everyone who ran in college knows of athletes who could’ve developed into really good runners. But they got jobs.”
The Battle With Track
Galen Rupp has become the darling of American distance running, winning silver in the 10,000 meters at the London Olympics and breaking his own American record in the event earlier this year at the Prefontaine Classic. His talent has marathon fans drooling. A 1:00:30 half marathon in 2011 was another clue at Rupp’s potential brilliance at longer distances.
But if we want to see what Rupp, 28, is capable of doing in the marathon, we’re going to have to wait. His coach, Alberto Salazar, has said it will be after the 2016 Olympics before Rupp even considers making the jump. Rupp will be 30 years old in two years when the Games hit Rio.
Oftentimes, the top few 5,000- and 10,000-meter runners make a good living on the track during their prime speed years, while the next tier find better potential earnings in the marathon and shorter road races. Depth among American distance runners matters. The marathon suffers more than other events when there’s not enough of it.
“If you’re an American who’s a 13:35 5Ker, you can make a living and still stick with the shorter races,” Rea says. “In Kenya, (with that time) you run road races and you run marathons.”
Rupp has run a 12:58 in the 5,000 meters, and his Olymic medal cemented his rockstar status—likely a well-compensated one with his sponsorship backing from Nike. While marathon fans certainly want to see Rupp take on the distance (his training partner, Mo Farah of Great Britain, ran a 2:08 in his marathon debut at London this past April), many close to the sport understand why Rupp is staying on the track for now.
“He has a silver medal and the American record. I’m sure he’s well-compensated. He can do whatever he wants,” McMillan says. “The major marathons would pay him six figures, maybe even seven figures with a multi-year deal. It’s not financial with him. It’s strategy.”
Grotewold figures the marathon will eventually lure in most of America’s top track stars. He looks at runners like Rupp, Chris Derrick and Ben True and sees America’s future in the event—even though they haven’t attempted it yet. Derrick, a two-time U.S. cross country champion, is 23, while True, sixth at the world cross country championships in 2013, is 28.
“For all of them, it’s coming,” Grotewold says. “Maybe not by 2016, but it’s coming. Someone among that group will be a 2:06, 2:07 guy.”
Training Philosophies
The simplified stereotype of U.S. marathon training is its prioritization of volume over intensity. Vail thinks there’s some truth to it.
“There are so many runners doing different things, so it’s hard to speak for everybody,” Vail says. “But I feel like there’s an overemphasis on saying ‘I run this many miles in a week.’ Yeah, but how many are you doing hard?’ I think there’s got to be a balance between those.
“U.S. distance runners are still trying to find that balance.”
Coaches like Rea and McMillan think the Americans are close to nailing it down, with several coaches beginning to do the high-intensity workouts like 30K runs at marathon pace that international runners are already doing.
The difference, McMillan says, is the gains made with those intense workouts are not created equal.
“The problem is the preparation for becoming a runner at the age of 20,” McMillan says. “In some countries, the athletes have 15 years of basic foundational training under their belts just as part of their lifestyle.
“You have a greater aerobic base behind it. If you add intensity on top of it, obviously that athlete is going to have huge improvements. So Americans are behind the 8-ball, but not because the training philosophy doesn’t match what the best runners in the world are doing. It’s because the best runners have a different background.”
Is the Bar Too Low?
Tsegaye Mekonnen, an 18-year-old Ethiopian, won the Dubai Marathon in 2:04:32 earlier this year, pulling away from fellow countrymen Markos Geneti at the 22-mile mark.
It was a remarkable debut, but not just because of that 2:04 time or even the fact that he’s still a teenager. Rather, Mekonnen stayed with the lead pack to run the first half of Dubai in 1:01:27. Before that race, his PR in the half marathon was 1:02:53.
That is a courageous, go-for-it attitude that Eggleston said Americans don’t show enough of—perhaps to their detriment.
“They don’t think about it. They go for it. They’re willing to lay it on the line,” Eggleston says of East Africans like Mekonnen. “Americans are way more conservative. I don’t want to criticize us for that because maybe we’re being smart and running within ourselves. But we never really take a huge risk and stick our neck out.”
Are low expectations holding Americans back? It seems trivial compared to the other, more tangible reasons. But multiple people interviewed for this story cited it as a possible factor.
“2:10 is a very, very good marathon. Exceptional. But at international races, it’s not competitive anymore,” Rea says. “We need to start thinking more along the lines of 2:07, 2:08 as something feasible.”
Eggleston agrees.
“If we want to run 2:08, we should shoot for 2:08,” he says. “I think athletes are trying to get their feet wet in the marathon and are shooting for more modest starting points. If you want to be world class, you’ve got to go for it.”
The Future
The pessimists have plenty of evidence, but optimism will always have its place. While the men’s marathon in the U.S. has a lot of question marks heading into 2016 and beyond, there are runners capable of quieting the skeptics.
Keflezighi, Hall and Ritzenhein are all dangerous, experienced runners despite their question marks. Kelfezighi, despite his age and relatively modest personal best of 2:08:37 set in winning this year’s Boston Marathon, has shown that he can still mix it up in a championship-style race. Eggleston, Vail and Brett Gotcher are 2:10 guys who are still in their 20s, and still improving. There are several more 2:11 guys in the mix—Nick Arciniaga, Fernando Cabada and Andrew Carlson, to name a few.
In addition, several track stars are starting to trickle up to the marathon as well. Rupp is a possibility after 2016 and has the talent to make an immediate impact. Matt Tegenkamp, one of a few American track athletes to break 13 minutes in the 5,000, debuted with a 2:12 at last fall’s Chicago Marathon and told FloTrack afterwards, “I think I can make big strides in this event.” But Tegenkamp is already 32.
The pessimists have a point (many points, actually), but the optimists have a few, too. The next 18 months will see runners strategically choosing races with a build-up to the Olympic Trials in mind. Then, on Feb. 13, 2016 they will battle it out on the streets of Los Angeles.
Which three runners will drape themselves in the American flag at the finish line? At this point, it’s impossible to guess. Whether that’s good or bad, it’s certainly intriguing.
“Could Ryan Hall make another team? Sure. Could Dathan make another team? He could. Meb? Absolutely,” Rea says. “But there are a cadre of young guns waiting in the wings and training hard and one of them could break through—people like Jeff Eggleston and Christo Landry and Tyler Pennel and Craig Leon. I think you’re going to see a couple of guys do some amazing things in 2016 and 2020 and hopefully we start thinking differently about what’s good on an international level.”Professor Margaret Graver is the keynote speaker at this year’s Stoicon conference in Toronto. We are all eagerly looking forward to her plenary address, titled “The Dispassionate Life”. Below is an interview about her longstanding interests in, and scholarship on, Stoicism.
How would you introduce yourself and your work to our readers?
I’m a professor at Dartmouth College, which gives me the privilege of teaching young adults how to read ancient texts accurately and attentively. Born in Louisiana, I now live year round in New Hampshire, where I love the mountains and the lakes in summer. Swimming with the loons, picking blueberries from your kayak. In winter I can at least say that I don’t mind shoveling snow.
As a scholar, I work in Hellenistic and Roman philosophy, with a particular interest in Stoic views on the nature and management of the emotions. I have three books out. Cicero on the Emotions: Tusculan Disputations 3 and 4 gives an annotated translation of a text by Cicero that is actually one of the best introductions to Stoicism that I know, particularly for anyone who has struggled with grief.
Stoicism and Emotion is a more comprehensive study that concentrates on the early period of Stoicism. In addition to the main emotion theory, it treats such related topics as freedom of the will and character development. Most recently, I have worked with A.A. Long on a complete translation of Seneca’s Letters on Ethics. The letters are a fascinating glimpse into Roman life as well as a wonderful topic-based exploration of Stoicism. I’ve loved working on an accurate translation that would have a contemporary feel. Now, as I write this, I’m at work on two other projects. One is a broad-based study of Seneca’s philosophy of values, the emotions, and literature, and the other is on Cicero’s relationship to Stoic ethics.
When and how did you first become interested in Stoicism?
It was really Seneca that drew me in. I had been studying classical literature at Brown, and one day picked up a volume of the Letters, wanting to get back into Latin prose after doing an awful lot of Greek poetry. What caught my attention was the structure of that book, how Seneca makes it feel natural and right to read one letter a day, so that the book becomes a life companion as well as an educator. The fuller understanding of the Stoic system came later for me. Of course I have been much enriched by conversations with other scholars. While I was still in graduate school it was especially Martha Nussbaum and Victor Caston, then over the years Brad Inwood, Chris Gill, Tad Brennan, and Tony Long have all taught me a great deal, and these are only a few of many. Students, too, both my own students and those from other schools, and adult learners – they are always showing me new perspectives, so that I feel like I am rediscovering the subject every day.
What are the most important aspects of Stoicism to you?
The rule of reason. Yes, there are other things in human nature besides our ability to reason, and those are important too. But this is fundamental. We don’t like being deceived; we don’t wish to be mistaken. Epictetus: “Try to believe that it is night.” When the sun is shining in the window, you just can’t do it—you can’t make yourself accept views that contradict each other, just because you are fundamentally a rational creature. All of Stoicism comes down to this. Getting things right, discerning what is true from what only seems true, getting to a point where your actions and even your feelings are based on reality—this is just a better way for a human being to live.
The immediate extension of that is the Stoic way of thinking about values. The idea that things like playing fair, speaking the truth, facing up to challenges, being kind and gentle, really matter and matter in a completely different way from what you own, what people think of you, even how long you live—that is the very core of their ethics. And that much seems to me very straightforward and correct. What that actually looks like in any given situation is a lot harder, though.
In what ways do you think Stoicism still matters today?
The toughest problems facing us today have to do with the fragmentation of the media, the ever more staggering inequalities of wealth and privilege, and hatred and mistreatment based on ethnicity. To some extent, any system of ethics should be able to suggest some ways forward. But there are some key elements of Stoicism that speak directly to these issues.
First and foremost, intellectual independence. Stoicism is all about thinking for yourself, using your own mind and not just passively accepting the views other people want you to hold. In ancient Stoicism there was no party line, no |
look after your welfare," he said.
Not wanting to give up my exercise, I decided to move out to live with my brother Loong.
It was probably not the response my father had anticipated, but he realised then that I was a 47-year-old adult who was going to make up my own mind on things.
The next year, when I told my father I was going to hike a volcanic crater in Hawaii immediately after I was discharged from hospital, he gave a very different response.
"Be careful."
He said nothing more.
Published Aug 5, 2012
At Oxley Road, we value the frugal life
I grew up in a middle-class family. Though they were well-off, my parents trained my brothers and me to be frugal from young.
We had to turn off water taps completely. If my parents found a dripping tap, we would get a ticking off. And when we left a room, we had to switch off lights and air-conditioners.
My father’s frugality extends beyond lights and air-conditioners. When he travelled abroad, he would wash his own underwear, or my mother did so when she was alive. He would complain that the cost of laundry at five-star hotels was so high he could buy new underwear for the price of the laundry service.
One day in 2003, the elastic band on my father’s old running shorts gave way. My mother had mended that pair of shorts many times before, so my father asked her to change the band.
But my mother had just had a stroke and her vision was impaired. So she told my father: “If you want me to prove my love for you, I will try.”
I quickly intervened to say: “My secretary’s mother can sew very well. I will ask her to do it.”
My parents and I prefer things we are used to. For instance, the house we have lived in all my life is more than 100 years old.
When we first employed a contractor-cum-housekeeper, Mr Teow Seong Hwa, more than 10 years ago, he asked me: “Your father has worked so hard for so many years. Why doesn’t he enjoy some luxuries?”
I explained we were perfectly comfortable with our old house and our old furniture. Luxury is not a priority.
Mr Teow has since become a family friend, so he now understands we are happy with our simple lifestyle.
For instance, my room has a window model air-conditioner. Most houses now have more sophisticated air-conditioning systems. So Mr Teow shopped for a window unit in Malaysia, so I would have a spare unit if my current one broke down.
All the bathrooms in our house have mosaic tiles. It is more practical than marble which can be slippery if wet. But it is now difficult to buy mosaic in Singapore. So again, Mr Teow bought mosaic tiles from Malaysia to keep in reserve in case some of our current tiles broke or were chipped.
I have three Casio watches, but use only one. Recently, when I woke up in the middle of the night and could not find the Casio I usually wore, I looked around for the other two. I found them in a drawer, together with two Tag Heuer watches that my brother Hsien Yang had given me recently, as well as a Seiko that my father had given me decades ago but which is still working fine.
My instinct had first led me to look frantically around for the original Casio. After 30 minutes, I knew that I was not going to find it that night. So I strapped on another of my Casios, comforting myself that I would not have got round to wearing my other watches if I had not misplaced my usual one.
I am frugal about my clothing too. I had only two batik wrap-around skirts that I bought in Indonesia more than 20 years ago. My girlfriends and my sister-in-law Ho Ching noticed that I wore the same two skirts almost all the time, and probably thought I looked scruffy. So they bought me more than 20 new skirts.
I have begun using three of the 20, and plan to wear them out before using the rest. And I have not discarded my two original wrap-arounds.
I have stuffed one into my backpack so I can whip it out as and when the occasion demands and I have to appear somewhat more respectable than in my usual shorts and T-shirt.
Frugality is a virtue that my parents inculcated in me. In addition to their influence, I try to lead a simple life partly because I have adopted some Buddhist practices and partly because I want to be able to live simply if for some reason I lose all that I have one day.
It is easy to become accustomed to a luxurious lifestyle. Some people believe that they will not miss their luxuries if for some reason they were to lose them, I think they are mistaken. I think they will miss them and be unable to reconcile themselves to a simpler lifestyle.
So I have trained myself to be satisfied with necessities and forgo luxuries.
Published Oct 23, 2011
Living a life with no regrets
When all is said and done, my father has led a rich, meaningful and purposeful life
About 20 years ago, when I was still of marriageable age, my father Lee Kuan Yew had a serious conversation with me one day. He told me that he and my mother would benefit if I remained single and took care of them in their old age. But I would be lonely if I remained unmarried.
I replied: “Better lonely than be trapped in a loveless marriage.”
I have never regretted my decision.
Twenty years later, I am still single. I still live with my father in my family home. But my priorities in life have changed somewhat.
Instead of frequent trips overseas by myself, to attend medical conferences or to go on hikes, I only travel with my father nowadays.
Like my mother did when she was alive, I accompany him so that I can keep an eye on him and also keep him company. After my mother became too ill to travel, he missed having a family member with whom he could speak frankly after a long tiring day of meetings.
At the age of 88, and recently widowed, he is less vigorous now than he was before May 2008 when my mother suffered a stroke. Since then I have watched him getting more frail as he watched my mother suffer. After my mother passed away, his health deteriorated further before recovering about three months ago.
He is aware that he can no longer function at the pace he could just four years ago. But he still insists on travelling to all corners of the Earth if he thinks his trips might benefit Singapore.
We are at present on a 16-day trip around the world. The first stop was Istanbul for the JPMorgan International Advisory Council meeting. We then spent two days in the countryside near Paris to relax. Then it was on to Washington DC, where, in addition to meetings at the White House, he received the Ford’s Theatre Lincoln Medal.
As I am writing this on Thursday, we are in New York City where he has a dinner and a dialogue session with the Capital Group tonight, and Government of Singapore Investment Corporation meetings tomorrow. After that, we will spend the weekend at former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger’s country home in Connecticut. Influential Americans will be driving or flying in to meet my father over dinner on Saturday and lunch on Sunday.
Even for a healthy and fit man of 88, the above would be a formidable programme. For a recently widowed man who is still adjusting to the loss of his wife, and whose level of energy has been lowered, it is even more challenging.
But my father believes that we must carry on with life despite whatever personal setbacks we might suffer. If he can do something that might benefit Singapore, he will do so no matter what his age or the state of his health. For my part, I keep him company when he is not preoccupied with work, and I make sure he has enough rest.
Though I encourage him to exercise, I also dissuade him from over exerting himself. I remind him how he felt in May last year when, after returning from Tokyo, he delivered the eulogy at Dr Goh Keng Swee’s funeral the next day.
He had exercised too much in the two days preceding the funeral, against my advice. So naturally, he felt tired, and certainly looked tired on stage, as he delivered his tribute to an old and treasured comrade-in-arms. A few of my friends were worried by how he looked and messaged me to ask if my father was OK. Now when I advise him not to push himself too hard, he listens.
The irony is I did not take my own advice at one time and it was he who stopped me from over-exercising. Once, in 2001, while I was recovering from a fracture of my femur, he limited my swimming. He went as far as to ask a security officer to time how long I swam. If I exceeded the time my physician had prescribed, even if it was just by a minute, he would give me a ticking off that evening.
Now the situation is reversed. But rather than finding it humorous, I feel sad about it.
Whether or not I am in the pink of health is of no consequence. I have no dependants, and Singapore will not suffer if I am gone. Perhaps my patients may miss me, but my fellow doctors at the National Neuroscience Institute can take over their care. But no one can fill my father’s role for Singapore.
We have an extremely competent Cabinet headed by an exceptionally intelligent and able prime minister who also happens to be my brother. But the life experience that my father has accumulated enables him to analyse and offer solutions to Singapore’s problems that no one else can.
But I am getting maudlin. Both my father and I have had our fair share of luck, and fate has not been unfair to us. My father found a lifelong partner who was his best friend and his wife. Together with a small group of like-minded comrades, he created a Singapore that by any standards would be considered a miracle. He has led a rich, meaningful and purposeful life.
Growing old and dying occurs to all mortals, even those who once seemed like titanium. When all is said and done, my father – and I too, despite my bouts of ill health – have lived lives that we can look back on with no regrets. As he faces whatever remains of his life, my father’s attitude can be summed up by these lines in Robert Frost’s poem Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening:
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Published Oct 2, 2011
Love does indeed spring eternal
Emotional ties don’t come to an end with the passing away of a loved one
My friend Balaji Sadasivan passed away on Sept 27 last year. In the obituaries section of The Straits Times last Tuesday, exactly one year after his death, there was a sonnet by Balaji himself: “But even in gloom, one truth is fundamental, from time immemorial, love springs eternal.”
A week after Balaji died, on Oct 2, my mother passed away peacefully at home. “Love springs eternal” – but what comfort is that to the one who has departed and can no longer reciprocate our love?
This thought slipped randomly in and out of my mind as I was exercising last week. Then my Blackberry buzzed. I read the incoming e-mail. It was from my father – brief, concise, a mere statement of fact, yet what was unsaid but obvious was his love and concern for us, his children.
I suddenly realised that love does spring eternal. Papa, my brothers Hsien Loong and Hsien Yang, and my sisters-in-law Ho Ching and Suet Fern, and I are still bound by our love for Mama and will continue to be for many more years.
For the first few weeks after her devastating stroke on May 12, 2008, my family and the doctors met often to discuss how best to minimise her suffering and perhaps enable her to recover to some extent.
The physiotherapists, occupational therapists and speech therapists all did their best, but Mama did not improve. The May 12 stroke was more extensive, and involved more brain regions controlling movement than her first stroke on Oct 25, 2003.
But Papa remembered how well she had recovered from that first stroke, which had occurred while my parents were visiting London. By the end of that year, we were celebrating Mama’s 83rd birthday on Dec 21 in a private room at Goodwood Hotel in Singapore.
Now, in October 2008, Papa knew that if Mama survived she would never be able to walk independently. But he felt that so long as she knew she was an important part of his life, she would still find life worth living.
He told her: “We have been together for most of our lives. You cannot leave me alone now. I will make your life worth living in spite of your physical handicap.”
She replied: “That is a big promise.”
Papa said: “Have I ever let you down?”
Mama tried her best to cooperate with the therapists. But it seemed a useless struggle. Even swallowing a teaspoon of semi-solid food was a huge effort. Then more bleeds occurred and her condition deteriorated. We, her family, decided that no further active treatment should be sought. We arranged to bring her home and nurse her there.
Before we brought her home for the final time, Papa arranged for her to stop at the Istana, to see her favourite spots in the grounds. We wheeled her to where she had planted sweet-smelling flowers such as the Sukudangan and the Chempaka. Then we wheeled her to the swimming pool, where she had swum daily.
We showed her the colourful little “windmills” she had arranged around the pool. She also saw the colourful wetsuits that Papa had arranged to be made for her to keep her warm in the water.
He and I had been convinced that she had to exercise to remain fit. So come rain or shine, she would don a wetsuit and swim. Even when travelling, she would swim in the hotel pool.
On one trip, Mama said to Papa: “Today is a public holiday in Singapore. Can I take a break from swimming.”
Papa replied: “No, have a swim. You will feel better after that.”
As a neurologist, I knew that after the first bleed in 2003, a second was likely. But I did not want to burden Papa or Mama with this knowledge.
Still, unknown to me, Papa had sensed that she could easily rebleed. He told us later that they had both discussed death. They had concluded that the one who died first would be the lucky one. The one remaining would suffer loneliness and grief.
Mama deteriorated further after she returned home. Finally, she reached a stage when she could not even speak and seemed unaware of her surroundings. But she was always aware of Papa’s presence.
When Papa travelled, she would stay awake at night waiting for his phone call. When I began travelling with him, he usually would tell her on the phone: “Bye dear, I am passing the phone to Ling.” Those were the times when I could hear her actively trying to vocalise.
When Mama passed away, I was at her bedside, watching her fade as her respiration became more shallow and feeble until it finally stopped. I did not try cardiopulmonary resuscitation. It would have been futile to have done so and cruel.
I called to ask my family physician to sign the death certificate, then returned to my room in a daze. Papa waited until the people from the Singapore Casket Company arrived. He showed them the jacket he wished Mama to wear and asked them to do their best to make her look attractive.
The wake lasted for three days. Hsien Loong and Hsien Yang, together with their wives, took turns to stand by the coffin and greet well-wishers.
I was tired and rested at home, only attending the wake on the first evening to greet my friends and colleagues. I hoped that by resting I would recover by the day of the funeral.
Most of the time, my mind was blank. I thought I had my emotions under control. It was only at the funeral, when it was my turn to deliver the eulogy, that the finality of Mama’s passing hit me. I managed to control my tears but my voice was strained with emotion.
Three days after the cremation, the urn containing my mother’s ashes was delivered to our home. We all stood and bowed as the urn was brought into the dining room.
A few days later, I noticed that Papa had moved from his usual place at the dining table so as to face a wall, on which were placed photographs of Mama and himself in their old age. He tried various arrangements of the photos for a week before he was satisfied.
He also moved back to the bedroom he had shared with Mama for decades before her final illness. At the foot of his bed were another three photographs of Mama and himself.
The health of men often deteriorates after they lose their wives. The security officers and I watched Papa getting more frail every day. His facial features were grim, perhaps to mask his sadness and grief. I took one day at a time and persuaded him not to undertake any arduous trips to America or Europe. China and Japan were near enough and manageable. I was pleased to get him out of the house.
By July this year, Papa’s health had stabilised and even begun to improve gradually. I reminded myself of the analogy I used for him – titanium. Titanium is light but strong. It can bend a little, but it will not snap unless it is under overwhelming force.
Physically, we all eventually succumb. Papa is also mortal. But he is psychologically stronger than most people. Life has to carry on, and he will keep going so long as he can contribute to Singapore.
As I was halfway through writing this article, I went out of my room for a drink of water and saw a note from Papa addressed to all three of his children. It read:
“For reasons of sentiment, I would like part of my ashes to be mixed up with Mama’s, and both her ashes and mine put side by side in the columbarium. We were joined in life and I would like our ashes to be joined after this life.”
Published Aug 14, 2011
Remembering the childhood years
Our parents were firm but they never put pressure on their three children to perform well
My father became prime minister of Singapore in 1959. At that time, we had two “black-and-white” Chinese maids.
When the election results became known, one said to me: “Now that your father is prime minister, we ought to call you ‘Big Little Mistress’”.
I replied: “It is my father who is prime minister, not me. Please call me by my own name.”
My parents always emphasised to my siblings and me that we should not behave like the PM’s children. As a result, we treated everyone – friends, labourers and Cabinet ministers – with equal respect. My father’s security officers became our friends. We called them by their personal names, and they did the same with us. One security officer who retired in 1970 still calls me Ling.
When strangers asked me who my father was, I used to reply truthfully that he worked for the Government.
I entered kindergarten just before age three. On the first day at school I was anxious and weepy. The teacher tried to pacify me by playing the piano. Eventually, she took me out of the classroom and showed me a very old cempaka tree that still bore flowers with a wonderful fragrance. I integrated into the kindergarten with no further problems, except for being naughty.
At the end of my kindergarten years, when I was nearly seven, there was a graduation ceremony, complete with mortarboard and black graduation gown. My father came to watch the graduation ceremony and had photographs taken with me by the press. My brothers and I knew even then that our father used us for larger purposes. He wanted us to be models for other children, though he never said so to us.
When I was in Primary 1, I was so far ahead of the other children that I did not listen to the teacher and became rather disobedient. At the end of the year, my teachers decided to solve my naughtiness by awarding me a double promotion to Primary 3.
As a result, I went from being top student in Primary 1 to eighth in Primary 3. From then on, I worked extremely hard, and I have at times wondered in later life whether my tenacity was the result of this double promotion.
It wasn’t till Primary 6 that I again topped my cohort. At the graduation ceremony, I was asked to deliver a speech on behalf of the students, and my father turned up in his white-and-white. Even his daughter’s school ceremony was for him part and parcel of nation building.
In both Nanyang Primary and Nanyang Secondary, the dress code required a skirt not more than 2.5cm above the knee, and we were required to wear our hair not more than 2.5cm below the ear. I had no problems complying with either rule. I had always wanted to get my hair cut as short as possible, and running in a short skirt would have been embarrassing.
As for languages, my father wanted me to be trilingual. So instead of geography, I studied Malay in school. I still remember Chegu Amin who came to our house to give my brothers and me tuition twice a week.
My Malay was good enough to earn me a distinction in the Secondary 4 school leaving examination. I also won a Malay essay-writing competition. My father, of course, attended the prize-giving ceremony.
I was streamed into the sciences in Secondary 3. I found my science teachers teaching us in Mandarin but using English textbooks. I thought that this was an inefficient way to teach and so switched to an English school, Raffles Institution, for my pre-university education.
I chose RI, not National Junior College, because NJC, then new, had poached the best teachers from other schools, and had the best facilities. I have always had a sense of reverse snobbery, and so chose RI.
In my first year in Pre-U, the school was still at its old Bras Basah address. At that time, I already had a black belt in karate. In one sparring session, when I blocked a kick, my block was slightly off and so the impact of the kick was felt in my metacarpal bones. It was rather painful.
I completed the training session, went home, told my mother about the accident, whereupon she rushed me to Singapore General Hospital. The orthopaedic surgeon said there was nothing to be done about the fracture other than put on a bandage, and made light of the whole thing. But my mother ordered me to stop my karate from that day. By that time, my curricula and extra-curricular activities – which included cross-country running and swimming – were taking up so much of my time that I did not protest.
In my second year in Pre-U, the school moved to its Grange Road site. The buildings were bigger and brighter, and there was no longer any danger of the roof suddenly collapsing on us. But most of us had on our minds the A-level exams that we had to sit at the end of the year.
I had always been a consistent student, not the type who studied at the last minute. Still, my self-confidence was low, and after every single paper, I imagined that I had done poorly.
After the exam, I travelled with my parents and my brother Hsien Yang to Britain, France and Egypt. The trip was great fun, except that I woke up every morning dreaming that I had failed all my papers.
The results came out in early 1973. To my astonishment, I had topped my science cohort for the whole of Singapore. I was awarded the President’s Scholarship.
My mother advised me: “Take the prestige. Don’t take the money, so you won’t be bonded.”
My father said: “No, take the money. It makes no difference whether you are bonded or not.”
So I took the money, which was then only enough to cover the fees at Singapore University, with a couple of hundred dollars left over for pocket money.
I enjoyed my childhood and adolescence. My parents were firm but never put pressure on us to perform well. I studied hard and trained hard, not because my parents told me to, but because I wished to. In fact, they often tried to persuade me to ease off.
I take after my father in this respect. Indeed, he often chastises me for being even more intense than he is. He once told me: “Your misfortune is that you have my genetic traits, but in so exaggerated a form that they have become a disadvantage for you.”
Well, there is nothing I can do about that.We know there were a lot of changes made to Rogue One, be that in the script phase, the shooting phase, or the edit phase. That means a pile of stuff ended up not making the final cut. The movie is finally out on DVD and Blu-ray this week, but there were no additional scenes there. So we’ve assembled every bit of information that we could find about what’s missing.
Advertisement
The Opening Crawl
The decision to distinguish the standalone Star Wars movies from the episodes by getting rid of the opening crawl was made so early that writer Gary Whitta flat out forgot there was ever a crawl in the script. But in the very first draft, there was a crawl.
The Beaches and Bases of Scarif
We know that a lot of changes to Rogue One happened in the final act and that a surprising amount of that footage made it into the trailers. In the final cut of the movie, Jyn, K-2S0 and Cassian Andor get the Death Star plans from one part of the tower on Scarif and then fight their way to the top of that same building to transmit the plans to the Rebel ships. In the original version, the transmission tower and the storage facility were different buildings. So the team had to sprint across the beach to get from one to the other.
Advertisement
Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF
Since the team no longer snuck into the base and then went running out—and since K-2S0 was now slated to die outside the computer room—we also lost the scene of the base infiltration team running through the halls:
Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF
Advertisement
Behind-the-scenes footage showed Alan Tudyk, in his motion capture outfit, being “shot” and falling over (next to what could be Cassian) in front of the base’s doors, it seems like his original death scene was meant to happen after this run got the three of them to door of the bunker.
Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF
And yet, that’s clearly Cassian on the beach running with Jyn and we even a behind-the-scenes image of Tudyk there, too. So there were a lot of variations on how life ended for these two.
Advertisement
Since so many of the Scarif beach scenes were cut when the film’s ending was condensed, we also lost Krennic surveying the carnage.
Presumably, his confrontation with Jyn on top of the tower became that character’s big ending confrontation instead of this.
Advertisement
So Much Vader
At one point, it looks like Darth Vader met with Krennic on board the Death Star, where he’s never actually on the thing in the final version of the movie.
Advertisement
Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF
The first look at Vader in Rogue One was this shot of the Sith Lord standing in front of the classic Death Star proximity graphic—and it never made it into the movie.
Advertisement
In one trailer scene, Krennic says to Vader, “The power that we are dealing with here is immeasurable.” The style of the set screams that this is either the Death Star or Scarif, neither of which Vader actually visits in the finished movie. Krennic is also never this arrogant with Vader in any other scene. Mendelsohn is on record as saying:
We did have multiple, multiple ways of going at any given scenario, we had multiple readings of it. So should they ever decided to, there would be a wealth of ways of approaching these different things. And I know from having seen sort of the crucial kind of scenes throughout it, I know there’s vastly different readings of at least four of those scenes.
That makes me wonder if there was a version of this movie where, when Krennic visits Vader on Mustafar, he cowers less and demands more. It would certainly fit with the version that has him striding through bodies on the beach of Scarif.
Advertisement
In an earlier version of the script, Darth Vader and Krennic did have one more interaction. Krennic didn’t die in the Death Star blast on Scarif, but was found alive in the rubble. He wouldn’t have stayed alive for long, since his failure would have lead to the inevitable Vader Force-choke. More importantly, Whitta told EW that they’d had to come up with a really complicated reason to explain how someone would survive a Death Star strike. “It’s a bit of a reach, which is why it isn’t in the finished film,” he said.
Jyn Erso Interacting with Others
The initial marketing for this movie contained a lot more dialogue from Jyn’s time on Yavin IV with the Rebel Alliance’s leadership. Jyn being asked to state her name and the recitation of her crimes, all of which appears to be missing from the final film.
Advertisement
Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF
Those bits we never actually saw, but they were voice overs for the scenes of a handcuffed Jyn on Yavin IV.
Advertisement
Another line from the trailer that just never made it into the final movie was the famous, “This is a rebellion, isn’t it? I rebel.”
I have no idea why Jyn said “Good” and Cassian responded “Good” in this U-Wing scene, but it’s also missing.
Advertisement
Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF
“The captain says you are a friend. I will not kill you,” is a cut K-2S0 line. That’s fine, he had plenty of similar ones. Likewise, K-2S0 giving a classic Star Wars calculation of the odds later (97.6 percent of failure) is missing from the final cut.
Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF
Advertisement
Another bit of dialogue that formed the backbone of one of the trailers was Saw Gerrera saying to (presumably) Jyn, “What will you do when they catch you? What if you continue to fight? What will you become?” A bit of development of Saw in this movie would not have gone amiss.
Scenes That Were Filmed But Never Meant to Be in the Movie
Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF
Advertisement
This shot of Jyn partially in disguise became iconic fairly quickly. But it was never actually scripted. Instead, it was filmed while Felicity Jones was walking between sets and someone turned the lights on. It ended up in the trailer because the marketing team saw the footage in dailies and put it in the trailer.
Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF
Similarly, this scene was created out of whole cloth for the sake of the trailers. Director Gareth Edwards told EW, “It was something the marketing team fell in love with. We knew it would not be in the film. It’s one of those things where all the trailers are put together way before the film comes out. It wasn’t a specific part of the story.”
Advertisement
The reflection of Vader, which was the first Rogue One shot of the character revealed at Star Wars Celebration, was shot because it looked cool, not because it was needed for the movie.
Advertisement
And finally, like a shocking number of Krennic’s coolest moments, this shot never made it into the film. The scene had ended, but between that and Edwards calling “Cut,” Mendelsohn struck this pose and the “good vibe,” as Edwards called it, made it into the trailer.
Advertisement
Cut Cameos, Characters, and Planets
Planets
As it is, Rogue One is stuffed with planets. Jedha, Eadu, Yavin IV, Scarif, Mustafar—it’s a lot of locations. And yet, there was a time when the first set of scenes with the Rebels was going to be on Dantooine—the planet Leia gives up in A New Hope to save Alderaan—before the Rebels flee to Yavin IV. There was also a point where Saw Gerrera’s base wasn’t on Jedha, but a new moon with an atmosphere charged with electricity. Too many planets, honestly. This was a time when budgets forcing cuts probably helped.
Advertisement
Also cut? According to the Art of Rogue One, there was a complicated bit where the escape from Eadu included a laser grid that had to be destroyed. A lot of details were cut from the planets, including more of Vader’s Mustafar castle, a more ruined and “mined” looking Jedha (a source of Kyber crystals, remember), a shot of the dish of the Death Star moving from a planet to the ship, and the Jedha “Camel” io9 revealed.
Cameos
If Admiral Raddus—a blue Mon Calamari serving the Rebellion—seemed an awful lot like another famous Mon Calamari admiral who famously pointed out that something was a trap, that could be because Admiral Ackbar was initially meant to appear in Rogue One. Ackbar became Raddus because Ackbar showed up in The Force Awakens and they didn’t want to use the character again so soon. Whitta told EW there were a few other cameos, “but I’m not going to tell you,” Whitta says. “You will write it up and it will become a big deal. It’s not a big deal. They were just little things that we put in there.” So that’ll have to be left up to rumor and speculation.
Advertisement
We do know one other cameo that ended up cut, though. Alan Tudyk played K-2S0, but his Con Man character almost showed up playing a pilot. In a Reddit AMA, Tudyk explained:
Yeah, I guess it’s a cameo- Wray Nerely, so the character that I play in Con Man. Sort of my alter ego in Con Man had a role in Rouge One Star Wars I played a pilot, and the scene got cut I just found out. Like did Wray Nerely survive? I was really looking forward to seeing Wray Nerely in Star Wars, but truthfully Wray Nerely would never get that good of a job. So it was probably pretty good that he didn’t
Wray Nerely showing up may not have worked, but a non CGI version of Tudyk showing up might have been fun.
Advertisement
Characters
The Art of Rogue One reveals that the original version of the team that retrieved the Death Star plans used to have a Jyn Erso who was a Rebel officer. Also, in that version, K-2S0 was an imperial protocol droid instead of a security droid, there was a pilot named Ria Talla, and Krennic was an Imperial spy on the team. There also used to be aliens on the team, named Lunak and Senna. The team was rounded out by two characters called Dray Nevis and Jerris Kestal.
Jyn’s mother, who was revealed to be a kind of Force hippie (believes in it, but is not Force-sensitive) was also at one point an actual Jedi and Bodhi Rook, the defecting Imperial pilot, was originally an engineer named Bokan who worked for Saw. That electrified planet meant Saw needed engineers, so he went out and kidnapped one from the Empire. Ditching that planet—which the team originally crash-landed on—meant changing the character.
Advertisement
We also have to put in a word for C2-B5, who was announced with much fanfare on the Star Wars Show and featured in toys, but whom no one can remember actually popping up in the movie.
Advertisement
The Other Endings
In addition to the ending originally filmed and cut—which had all the beach scenes and the different deaths of the characters— and the ending where Darth Vader killed Krennic, there were at least three more endings that were considered and discarded.
A Few Escapees
In one version of Rogue One’s script, Bodhi, Chirrut, and Baze didn’t exist and Jyn was a stalwart member of the Rebellion. That early script had some casualties, but the major characters of Jyn and Cassian (although he didn’t have that name yet) survived. However, K-2S0 was always slated to die.
Advertisement
Whitta told Entertainment Weekly that this version had a Rebel ship make it to the surface of Scarif and rescue the team. They’d meet up with Leia’s Tantive IV, transfer the Death Star plans to it, and then be attacked by Darth Vader. The ship would explode, and the audience would think they died. But, said Whitta, “They got away in an escape pod just in time. The pod looked like just another piece of debris.”
Flight to Coruscant
John Knoll, Chief Creative Officer and Senior Visual Effects Supervisor for Industrial Light & Magic, was the person who initially pitched the story that would become Rogue One. He told io9 that he considered an ending where Cassian and Jyn escaped and tried to use the traffic around Coruscant as cover. They failed, but they transmit the plans to Leia, whose ship is taking off from there, outing her allegiances to the Rebels. And then the two would have blown up their ship so Vader couldn’t torture them.
Advertisement
The CARBON FREEZE BOMB
The second possible ending Knoll shared with io9 had Cassian as a double agent who ends up on the side of good for real. In order to save everyone’s life, Cassian would have made it look like Vader’s managed to destroy the ship, but he’d really use a “carbon freeze bomb” to freeze the crew. With no life signs, but everyone actually alive and frozen, the team would have survived.
Advertisement
Other Bits and Pieces
While a lot of the changed chunks are thematic, there are a few scenes that appeared for seconds and then vanished.
Advertisement
This image of Krennic hints at a showdown that never happened. He does grab a weapon and go after Jyn and Cassian in the final film, but this particular moment never |
Amplified “Salutes“, a fundraiser for purchasing aid dogs for disabled American Veterans. We have always felt the community has supported us and feel it is necessary for local businesses to be part of the community. Our other community efforts partnered us with Joshua House and many Tampa Bay area Churches and Charity Fundraisers.
Life Amplified " Salutes "
Being an Independent Cinema we are being forced by Hollywood to change from a 35mm film format to Digital Format by the end of the 2013 or we will no longer be able to show movies. We hope to use Kickstarter as a fundraising tool to keep us running and being a part of the community.
NEC 900 Digital Projector
Movies have been produced on film for over 100 years. However, Hollywood and all the major movie studios have determined that they will only make movies in digital format beginning in 2014. This will substantially reduce their production and distribution costs. It will also provide a better movie-going experience in both picture and sound quality. No more sound pops, scratched film, or missing frames. Just a brighter, sharper picture and incredible state of the art surround sound.This sounds wonderful doesn't it?
Unfortunately, it also means that Tampa Pitcher Show will have to "Go Digital or Go Dark." Many independent Cinemas across the country have closed their doors as a result. The new digital projectors and sound equipment required for the conversion to digital movies are very expensive and beyond our budget. We may be able to work out a loan arrangement eventually but the best option is still to have the fans of the Cinema help us with this Kickstarter.I don't know if it's even possible with the TPP Fast Track that they already passed.... but Bernie absolutely needs to redo his historic "filibuster" speech that he did for the extension of Bush's tax cuts but this time be against the TPP.
I can't really call it a filibuster because the one in 2010 wasn't technically one as he couldn't really stop it. I fear it may be the case now as well... but the country needs to know what's going on.
If Bernie wants to stop the TPP. If Bernie wants America to take notice... he needs to redo "The Speech" and talk for as long on the Senate floor as he can to make sure this TPP doesn't pass... And if it does pass... maybe then the people will take notice and they will realize who is on THEIR side... and who is on the BILLIONAIRE'S side.
Here is the link to the full 8 and a half hour speech on CPSAN.
Buy "The Speech" on Amazon (I make no money from you clicking on that Amazon link - but proceeds from the book purchase go from Bernie directly to charity from what I've heard)
On Friday, December 10, 2010, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders walked on to the floor of the United States Senate and began speaking. It turned out to be a very long speech, lasting over eight and a half hours. And it hit a nerve. Millions followed the speech online until the traffic crashed the Senate server. A huge, positive grassroots response tied up the phones in the senator’s offices in Vermont and Washington. President Obama reportedly held an impromptu press conference with former President Clinton to deflect media attention away from Sander' speech. Editorials and news coverage appeared throughout the world. In his speech, Sanders blasted the agreement that President Obama struck with Republicans, which extended the Bush tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, lowered estate tax rates for the very, very rich, and set a terrible precedent by establishing a "payroll tax holiday" diverting revenue away from the Social Security Trust Fund, threatening the fund’s very future. But the speech was more than a critique of a particular piece of legislation. It was a dissection of the collapse of the American middle class and a well-researched attack on corporate greed and on public policy which, over the last several decades, has led to a huge growth in millionaires even as the United States has the highest rate of childhood poverty in the industrialized world. It was a plea for a fundamental change in national priorities, for government policy that reflects the needs of working families, and not just the wealthy and their lobbyists. Finally, Sanders' speech-published here in its entirety with a new introduction by the senator-is a call for action. It is a passionate statement informing us that the only people who will save the middle class of this country is the middle class itself, but only if it is informed, organized, and prepared to take on the enormously powerful special interests dominating Washington.
While Sander's speech wasn't a filibuster... it brought attention to the matter... and he needs to do it again.
Please contact the Bernie Sanders campaign in any way you can. If the TPP is as disastrous as he's telling us it is (and I think it is) he needs to do this.The U.S. Department of Justice has ruled that Indian nations can grow and sell recreational marijuana on tribal land, but will we soon see Indian pot shops in Oklahoma?
The policy was created after several western states legalized pot.
While some Oklahoma tribes are studying their options, the nation's in the Tulsa area, aren't interested.
Marijuana is still against the law and they're not comfortable with the subject.
"I don't think as a nation we would even look into it right now because abuse is abuse - whether its alcohol or drugs and that's not part of our history our culture," said George Tiger, Muscogee Creek Nation Principal Chief
While the Oklahoma tribes are reluctant, many Indian leaders also acknowledge that in the decades ahead the laws and attitudes may be different.
Chief Tiger won't be pushing for marijuana here.
The director, of the state Bureau of narcotics is glad. He says legalizing pot sales, wouldn't be a good for the state.
"We believe that nothing really good comes out of legalization," Director R. Darrel Weaver said. "There are scores of issues coming out of Colorado now, that is probably not as pleasant as what they thought and the revenue is not as high."
The leaders of Pawnee Nation say the marijuana profits aren't worth the problems they'd cause.
They don't see drugs as a legitimate business opportunity, because it conflicts with their historic values.
"Why raise something we are trying to get our people away from?" said Marshall Gover, president of the Pawnee Business Council. "Money isn't everything, sometimes principals are worth more than cash."
Quapaw tribe leaders aren't saying no to marijuana. Their tribe already has green houses to grow organic herbs and vegetables for their casino. So they're looking at using them to grow no-intoxicating, medical marijuana.
"If there really is a medical benefit and there's an economic benefit for tribes there I think it would be a big step," Quapaw Nation Chairman John Berrey said.
The chairman says medical marijuana fits in with the natural remedies of Native Americans. However, the only new smoke he expects in their casino is from a cigar bar that's being planned.
Only three tribes have contacted the federal government about the specifics for recreational marijuana. They're in California, Oregon and Washington.‘Container-type structures’ could be used to house homeless families in Redbridge
General view of Trinity Buoy Wharf, a community made from old shipping containers, in Canning Town, east London. Matt Crossick/Empics Entertainment
Homeless families could be put up in “container-type structures” in an effort to tackle Redbridge’s housing crisis, papers have revealed.
Share Email this article to a friend To send a link to this page you must be logged in.
The authority said options were being explored to bring down costs as it faces a rise in the number of people needing emergency temporary accommodation.
A budget report published this week included proposals for new temporary “container-type” homes to be built.
The initiative follows a successful project in Trinity Buoy Wharf, in Canning Town, east London, pictured above, where shipping containers were converted into homes.
But council leader Cllr Jas Athwal said the authority wanted to provide something “more upmarket”.
He said: “We do not want to be putting people in to what are effectively shipping containers.
“There are other alternatives we are exploring.”
The document, due to go before the council cabinet on Monday, said planners preferred if timber structures were used.
Phil Herbert, managing director of homelessness charity the Healthy Living Project, welcomed the plans.
“Temporary container-type structures will deliver better, more spacious accommodation and provide residents with a suitable stepping stone to finding a permanent home,” he said.
“This however, is not a long term solution and needs to be coupled with a long term plan to develop permanent housing for those needing it most.”
While spending on temporary accommodation is expected to rise to £2.26million in 2017/18, Cllr Athwal said he was confident the council could make a “significant saving” to cover it.
But opposition leader Cllr Paul Canal said: “This hasn’t been thought through. We need more than a paragraph.
“We need a proper plan.”
See full budget report on p5New York City terror suspect, 27-year-old Akayed Ullah, is the fourth Bangladeshi national in the United States to be accused of terrorism in a little more than a decade.
Ullah, as Breitbart News reports, allegedly planned to detonate a homemade bomb in New York City on Monday. Though the terror plot was botched, Ullah is accused of leaving at least three individuals injured. The Bangladeshi national originally entered the U.S. in 2011 with his parents and three-four siblings.
The terror suspect is the fourth Bangladeshi national to enter the U.S. as an immigrant, only then to plot to harm Americans:
JUST IN: 27 y/o Terrorist who is from Bangladesh and was living in Brooklyn, told authorities “They’ve been bombing in my country and I wanted to do damage here, Terrorist was also a cab driver. pic.twitter.com/vhtfzadgoc — NYC Scanner (@NYScanner) December 11, 2017
NEW: PHOTO OF THE TERRORIST BEING TRANSPORTED BY EMS MINUETS ATER THE EXPLOSION IN NYC MANHATTAN. pic.twitter.com/vRg9WePLD1 — NYC Scanner (@NYScanner) December 11, 2017
In 2015, 24-year-old Bangladeshi national Rahatul Ashikim Khan was convicted and sentenced to ten years in federal prison for providing material support to terrorists with the al-Shabaab terrorist organization.
Between 2011 and 2012, Khan worked to coordinate overseas travel for an undercover Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent whom he believed was a violent jihadist. Khan even made arrangements to place the undercover agent into an Al-Shabaab pipeline that was run by Gufran Ahmed Kauser Mohammed and Mohamed Hussen Said.
Additionally, Khan led a group of Islamic terrorist-sympathizers in Austin, Texas, who pledged loyalty to then-Taliban leader Mullah Omar.
In 2013, 21-year-old Bangladeshi national Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis was convicted and sentenced for planning what he thought was a 1,000-pound bomb at the New York Federal Reserve Bank in Lower Manhattan’s financial district. Such an attack would have killed hundreds and possibly thousands of Americans.
Nafis entered the U.S. on an F-1 visa — the program under which thousands of international students are allowed to come to the U.S. every year — with immediate intent to conduct a terrorist attack for the al-Qaeda terrorist organization.
After arriving in the U.S. in 2012, Nafis tried to recruit fellow Islamic extremists in New York to form a terrorist cell in the country that would regularly plot terrorist attacks against Americans. One of the individuals Nafis attempted to recruit was actually working as an undercover FBI source.
Between 2012 and 2013, Nafis planned the attack, seeking out several high-profile locations, including the New York Stock Exchange. The FBI ultimately thwarted the terrorist plan after the undercover agent supplied Nafis with a fake bomb and arrested him at the scene of the planned attack.
In 2006, Bangladeshi-born 49-year-old Mohammed M. Hossain was convicted and sentenced to 15 years in prison after helping an FBI informant with a plot to sell weapons to terrorists.
Hossain was the leader of a mosque in Albany when he was involved in a fictitious plot contrived by the FBI to aid foreign terrorists after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City.
As Breitbart News reported, mass immigration from Bangladesh has been spurred by a process known as “chain migration,” where new immigrants can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the U.S. with them.
Since 2005, the U.S. has admitted and resettled 141,501 Bangladeshi nationals who entered because their foreign relatives were already living in the country. In 2016 alone, more than 18,000 Bangladeshi nationls entered the U.S. because their foreign relatives were living in the country:
The Bangladeshi chain migration population (since 2005) is larger than the population of Dayton, Ohio. https://t.co/rQ6JPsOCHe — John Binder 👽 (@JxhnBinder) December 11, 2017
About 9.3 million foreign nationals have come to the U.S. as chain migrants between 2005 and 2016, Breitbart News reported. In that same period, 13.06 million foreign nationals have entered the U.S. through the legal immigration system, as every seven out of ten new arrivals come to the country for nothing other than family reunification.
This makes chain migration the largest driver of immigration to the U.S. — making up more than 70 percent — with every two new arrivals bringing seven foreign relatives with them.Shot at our headquarters in Montreal and inspired by the videos of Andy Warhol, the SSENSE “Screen Test” series is a way to evaluate the camera-readiness of our products.
For this season, SSENSE has invited photographer Rebecca Storm to create a series of Screen Tests inspired by the ASMR video genre. Short for “Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response,” ASMR videos explore objects as objects, especially the spine-tingling sensations evoked by the sounds of crinkling paper, brushing hair, and hushed whispers. They occupy the grey terrain between the digital and the bodily, broadcasting Internet-induced head massages to hundreds of thousands of YouTube followers.
Featuring styles from Saint Laurent, Loewe, Dsquared2, and Kara, Storm directs our attention to the unmistakable sound of the zipper, a design feature that evokes security, relaxation, and sexuality.The long awaited Tamer file for the Nekomimi series. This comes with edited hair and body, but will not come with the face pictured. The face will be the default #1. Once again, free to DL and edit, but please give credit when sharing. Send me pictures of your characters; I’d love to see them!
One small disclaimer: The game still treats the ears as hair. As such, during movement, the ears will move and warp. Please be aware of this when using!
This was the one I worked on first! I spent a lot of time making sure it was good > u < This one is built differently than the ranger one. The ears are larger and take from the entire back half of the hair. As such, the back is pictured and it is recommended that you wear the ribbon that comes with Tamer costumes to cover the back of the hair. I am planning to roll out the Tamer in the Nekomimi style of the Ranger DL soon. That one will have intact back hair but smaller ears. Thank you for taking the time to look at my creation!
If you have any questions you may contact me on reddit (pasuteruhime) or comment here. Additionally, I may be found on the Black Desert Forums under Caramel.People aren't the only ones who've got rhythm. Two reports published online on April 30th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, reveal that birds - and parrots in particular - can also bob their heads, tap their feet, and sway their bodies along to a musical beat. The findings show that a very basic aspect of the human response to music is shared with other species, according to the researchers.
"We've discovered a cockatoo [named Snowball] that dances to the beat of human music," said Aniruddh Patel of The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, lead author of one of the studies. "Using a controlled experiment, we've shown that if the music speeds up or slows down across a wide range, he adjusts the tempo of his dancing to stay synchronized to the beat." One of Snowball's favorite dancing tunes is none other than the Backstreet Boys' "Everybody."
"For a long time, people have thought that the ability to move to a beat was unique to humans," added Adena Schachner of Harvard University, who led the other study. "After all, there is no convincing evidence that our closest relatives, chimpanzees and other apes, can keep a beat, and there is similarly no evidence that our pet dogs and cats can line up their actions with a musical beat, in spite of extensive experience with humans. In this work, however, we found that entrainment [to music] is not uniquely human; we find strong evidence for it in birds, specifically in parrots."
Before this discovery, "scientists who studied music and the brain thought that moving to a musical beat might be a uniquely human ability because we don't commonly see other animals moving rhythmically to music," Patel agreed. In fact, as far as they know, birds in the wild don't move in time with sounds, leaving many scientists to think that this ability might be an evolutionary specialization of the human brain for music cognition.
But that may not be so, the new studies suggest. They now suspect that the parrots' ability can be traced to another capacity they share with people: vocal learning or mimicry.
Indeed, Schachner's group searched YouTube for videos of dancing animals. Of more than 1,000 videos that turned up, only those of vocal mimics - representing 14 parrot species and one species of elephant - showed evidence that they could really get into the groove. That result is in keeping with the notion, first proposed by Patel, that entrainment to a musical beat relies on the neural circuitry for complex vocal learning, which requires a tight link between auditory and motor circuits in the brain, they said.
"A natural question about these results is whether they generalize to other parrots, or more broadly, to other vocal-learning species," including songbirds, dolphins, elephants, and pinnipeds, a group including walruses and seals, Patel said.
The findings in birds also offer new insight into humans' relationship to music.
"Why humans produce and enjoy music is an evolutionary puzzle," Schachner's team wrote. "Although many theories have been proposed, little empirical evidence speaks to the issue. In particular, debate continues over the idea that the human music capacity was not selected for directly, but arose as the byproduct of other cognitive mechanisms. By supporting the idea that entrainment emerged as a byproduct of vocal mimicry in avian species, the current findings lend plausibility to the idea that the human entrainment capacity evolved as a byproduct of our capacity for vocal mimicry."
###
**To view two movies that correspond with this study, please visit the following embargoed link, which is also embargoed until 12 Noon EST on 30 April: http://www. cell. com/ current-biology/ April30Movie.
Article 1:
The researchers include Aniruddh D. Patel, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA; John R. Iversen, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA; Micah R. Bregman, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA; and Irena Schulz, Bird Lovers Only Rescue Service, Dyer, IN.
Article 2:
The researchers include Adena Schachner, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Timothy F. Brady, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA; Irene M. Pepperberg, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; and Marc D. Hauser, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.Bordeaux come from behind to beat Valenciennes 2-1 in their Ligue 1 encounter.
Bordeaux moved up to fourth place in the Ligue 1 table with a 2-1 victory over Valenciennes this afternoon.
Jussie nodded Theo Pellenard's cross inches wide of the post in the 20th minute and Lamine Sane spurned a good chance from eight yards out as the home side looked the more likely side to break the deadlock in the first half.
However, it was relegation-threatened Valenciennes who took a 56th-minute lead when Tongo Hamed Doumbia rose highest in the box to power Mathieu Dossevi's corner home.
The lead lasted less than two minutes, though, as Landry N'Guemo was brought down in the box and striker Jussie stepped up to bring Bordeaux level.
In the 66th minute, Eloge Enza Yamissi squandered the opportunity to put his side ahead once more from the spot and eight minutes later Bordeaux capitalised.
Nicolas Maurice-Belay advanced with the ball into the box and drilled a shot across the diving Nicolas Penneteau and into the net.One of my parents’ favourite ice-breakers is, “So, have you eaten?” It doesn’t matter what time of day it is or which meal, specifically. Rather than asking each other how we are, we’d end up spending most of the time describing our dinners over the phone.
Like many Asian families, we’d become incredibly proficient at reading cryptic emotional signs. There may not be big hugs and open praise, but once in a while, mum would put an unexpected fried egg in our noodles or dad would try and make conversation by asking us to pronounce, then spell every street name he’s ever had trouble remembering. Those, as we’d try to explain to our friends, are their ‘affectionate’ sides.
The awkward father and daughter bond... from Eat Drink Man Woman.
From time to time, my sister and I would wonder whether it’s time we started challenging the awkward PDE (public display of emotion) policy at home. But the sheer difficulty of trying to make our parents break character after years of polite reticence would end up holding us back.
Plus, there’s always the possibility that too much affection could backfire. Earlier this year, Global Times reported that young people telling their parents ‘I love you’ over the phone have left many parents ‘bewildered’ and in shock.as a young, unpopular and unkissed lad, all the way through junior high and high school and college, i believed there was such a thing as a friend zone or a “ladder theory” that explained why girls didn’t look twice at me
i have since discovered that every guy who believes themselves to be in a friend zone has placed the girl of his desires in the romance zone, and just as the guy doesn’t want to be in his zone, the girl doesn’t want to be in that zone either. it’s 1:1. if a girl doesn’t like you it isn’t because of a zone. it’s because she doesn’t like you and also doesn’t have to like you
only after i learned that lesson did i grow incredible facial hair and become very charming and funny and exotically handsomeAmerican actress
Hayden Lesley Panettiere (; born August 21, 1989)[3] is an American actress, model, singer and activist. She is known for playing cheerleader Claire Bennet on the NBC sci-fi series Heroes (2006–2010) and Juliette Barnes in the ABC/CMT musical-drama series Nashville (2012–2018).
A native of New York, she first appeared in a commercial at the age of 11 months. She started a full-time acting career began by playing Sarah Roberts on One Life to Live (1994–1997) and Lizzie Spaulding on Guiding Light (1996–2000), and then played Sheryl Yoast in the Disney feature film Remember the Titans at 10 years old. Other roles include her portrayal of the title character in the true crime drama Amanda Knox: Murder on Trial in Italy, the original voice actress for Kairi in the Kingdom Hearts series, and Kirby Reed in the slasher film Scream 4. She received two nominations for the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Series, Miniseries or Television Film, for her work on Nashville in 2012 and 2013.[4]
Early life [ edit ]
Panettiere was born in and partly raised in Palisades, New York. She is the daughter of Lesley R. Vogel, a former soap opera actress, and Alan Lee "Skip" Panettiere, a fire captain. She has Italian, with some English and German, ancestry. She has one younger brother, fellow actor Jansen Panettiere.[5][6][7] Her mother's family lives in Indiana.[8][9]
After Panettiere attended South Orangetown Middle School in New York, she was homeschooled[10] and had private tutors from grade nine to the completion of high school to accommodate her acting schedule.
Career [ edit ]
Acting [ edit ]
Television [ edit ]
Panettiere first appeared in commercials at the age of eleven months, beginning with an advertisement for a Playskool toy train.[11] She landed a role as Sarah Roberts on the ABC soap opera One Life to Live from 1994 to 1997, which was followed by Lizzie Spaulding on the CBS soap opera Guiding Light in 1996, and again from 1997 to 2000. While on Guiding Light, Panettiere's character Lizzie battled leukemia. The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society gave her its Special Recognition Award for drawing the attention of daytime viewers to the disease, and for improving national awareness.
For her performance in Lifetime Television's 1999 TV movie If You Believe, she was nominated for the Young Artist Award for Young Actress Age Ten or Under in the category of Best Performance in a TV Movie or Pilot.[12] Panettiere appeared on Fox's Ally McBeal as the title character's daughter, played the daughter of a man transitioning to female in HBO Films' Normal, had a recurring guest role on Malcolm in the Middle and guest starred in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in two different roles. In 2004, Panettiere had her first starring role in the Disney Channel film Tiger Cruise
Panettiere became most prominent as Claire Bennet in the NBC series Heroes, which was created by Tim Kring, as a high school cheerleader with regenerative healing powers. Thanks to her role on Heroes, she became a regular on the science fiction convention circuit, invited to attend conventions around the world in 2007, including Gen Con, New York Comic Con, and Fan Expo Canada. Panettiere has complained that her acting options are sometimes limited because "people look at [her] as either the popular cheerleader type or just the blonde".[13]
In early 2007, Panettiere appeared on the MTV show, Punk'd. The appearance was engineered by her mother and involved a male "fan" discussing her work with her, instigating a jealous reaction from the man's spouse. In April 2012, she hosted an episode of the new series.
In March 2012, it was announced Panettiere had been cast opposite Connie Britton on the ABC musical drama series Nashville, where she portrayed Juliette Barnes.[14][15][16] The show reunited Panettiere with Burgess Jenkins (who appears in the first few episodes) from Remember the Titans. The show moved from ABC to CMT for its fifth and sixth seasons, and concluded its run on July 26, 2018.
Films [ edit ]
Panettiere in London, 2007
Panettiere made her feature film debut with 1998's A Bug's Life,[17] but her first released film was the same year's The Object of My Affection, in which she appears briefly as a mermaid in the school play in the opening scene. In 1999, she portrayed the girl on a sinking sailboat in Message In A Bottle. She played the role of Coach Yoast's daughter, Sheryl, in the 2000 Disney film Remember the Titans. In 2004, she played Kate Hudson's title character's adolescent niece in Raising Helen. In 2005, she was the title character's rival in a skating contest in Ice Princess. In the same year she played the main (human) role in the film Racing Stripes as budding jockey Channing Walsh. She subsequently starred in 2006's Bring It On: All or Nothing as a cheerleader and had a supporting role as Adelaide Bourbon in the 2007 independent film Shanghai Kiss.
In June 2007, she signed with the William Morris Agency, after previously being represented by the United Talent Agency.[18] Forbes estimated that she earned $2 million in 2007.[19]
In 2008, Panettiere appeared in the drama Fireflies in the Garden as a younger version of Emily Watson's character, Jane Lawrence. In September 2008, she appeared in a satirical video, a mock-PSA on funnyordie.com titled "Hayden Panettiere PSA: Your Vote, Your Choice".[20] In October, Panettiere appeared in another satirical PSA video on funnyordie.com titled "Vote for McCain: He's just like George Bush, except older and with a worse temper".[21]
In July 2009, Panettiere starred in the teen comedy I Love You, Beth Cooper. In September 2010, she starred as Amanda Knox in the controversial Amanda Knox: Murder on Trial in Italy.[22] Panettiere also provided the voice of Kate in 2010's Alpha and Omega.[23]
In April 2011, Panettiere appeared in the Scream sequel, Scream 4, playing Kirby Reed. The film received mixed reviews, but she received acclaim for her role and was considered to be a highlight. The same year she replaced Anne Hathaway as the voice of Red for the animated sequel Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil. In 2012, The Forger, in which she played the role of Amber, was released direct to DVD (both this and Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil were made in 2009).
In April 2015, Panettiere joined the cast of Custody,[24] alongside Viola Davis, whom she appeared with in 2006's The Architect.
Video games [ edit ]
Panettiere voiced Kairi in Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts II, although she was replaced by Alyson Stoner in several sequels; she briefly reprised her role in Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep and also voiced Xion in Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance.[25]
She voiced and modeled the character of Sam in Until Dawn, which was released on PlayStation 4 on August 25, 2015.[26]
Singing [ edit ]
Panettiere was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1999 for A Bug's Life.[27] In 2004, she recorded a song entitled "My Hero Is You" with a video for the Disney Channel film she starred in, Tiger Cruise, and "Someone Like You," a duet with Watt White for another film, The Dust Factory (also with an accompanying video). The next year she recorded a song entitled "I Fly" for the Disney film Ice Princess in which she also co-starred. She recorded a song for the Hollywood Records compilation Girl Next (2006) and another song entitled "Go to Girl" for Girl Next 2 (2007). Also in 2007, she recorded a cover for "Cruella De Vil" for DisneyMania 5, "Try" for the Bridge to Terabithia soundtrack and a ballad called "I Still Believe" for Cinderella III: A Twist in Time.
Panettiere's first single not associated with an acting role, "Wake Up Call", was digitally released on August 5, 2008. The clothing brand Candie's announced that it was premiering an ad campaign for the single in late July. Candie's provided additional promotion for the single with a television advertisement and a music video.[28] Sebastian Stan, who portrayed the brother of Panettiere's character in The Architect, played her boyfriend in the video.
She has recorded several songs for Nashville, which were released as singles and included on the show's soundtrack albums. She also made numerous concert appearances associated with the show's touring promotion. In 2013, Panettiere recorded a version of "The Fabric of My Life" for a Cotton Incorporated campaign.[29]
Modeling [ edit ]
In late 2006, Neutrogena made Panettiere the cover girl for their new worldwide ad campaign;[30] following in the footsteps of actresses Kristin Kreuk, Josie Bissett, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Mandy Moore, Mischa Barton, Gabrielle Union and Jennifer Freeman. In September 2007, Panettiere appeared in a Heroes-themed Got Milk? ad for which the photographs were shot by Annie Leibovitz.[31] In February 2008, Kohl's announced that Panettiere would be their next Candie's spokesperson.[32] From 2007 to 2008, Panettiere designed limited edition hand bags for Dooney & Bourke and modeled their bags in magazine ads [33][34][35]
In 2009, Panettiere was one of the celebrities featured in the coffee table book Room 23,[36] produced by Diana Jenkins and photographed by Deborah Anderson.[37]
Personal life [ edit ]
Panettiere dated her Heroes co-star Milo Ventimiglia from December 2007 to February 2009.[38][39]
She met then-world heavyweight boxing champion Wladimir Klitschko in 2009 at the book launch party for mutual acquaintance Diana Jenkins' Room 23 (both appeared in the book), and they soon began dating.[40] Panettiere was ringside for Klitschko's knockout victory over Samuel Peter on September 11, 2010.[41] In May 2011, she announced that they had split. Both cited the long-distance nature of their relationship as the reason, and said they would remain close friends.[42] Panettiere confirmed reports that she and Klitschko had resumed their romantic relationship in an April 2013 interview.[40] In October 2013, she announced her engagement to Klitschko.[43][44] In December 2014, Panettiere gave birth to their daughter.[45] In August 2018, Panettiere's mother confirmed the couple had broken up again, remaining on friendly terms.[46]
Panettiere followed a vegetarian diet while she starred in Heroes but has since added chicken and fish to her diet, stating that she "didn't respond well" to a vegetarian diet, and she had "low energy".[47][48][49]
In 2015, she stated that following the birth of her daughter she experienced post-partum depression. In her September 28 appearance on Live with Kelly and Michael, she said that it's "scary and needs to be talked about".[50][51] In October, Panettiere voluntarily checked into a facility for treatment, causing her to miss filming for a few episodes of Nashville.[52] She returned to treatment in May 2016.[53]
Activism [ edit ]
In 2007, Panettiere became an official supporter of Ronald McDonald House Charities and is a member of their celebrity board, called the Friends of RMHC.[54]
On October 31, 2007, Panettiere joined with The Whaleman Foundation to try to disrupt the annual dolphin hunt in Taiji, Wakayama, Japan. She was involved in a confrontation between Japanese fishermen and five other surfers of the group from Australia and the United States (including former Home and Away star Isabel Lucas). The confrontation lasted more than 10 minutes before the surfers were forced to return to the beach, after which they left the country.[55] Parts of the confrontation can be seen on the award-winning Sundance Film Festival documentary film The Cove. The fishermen consider the condemnation as an attack on their culture.[56]
In November 2007, she was awarded the "Compassion in Action Award" from the animal rights group PETA for her efforts to stop the dolphin hunt in Japan.[57]
On January 28, 2008, Panettiere handed a letter of protest to the Norwegian ambassador in the U.S. arguing that Norway should stop its hunt for whales. She also delivered a letter to the Japanese ambassador calling for the end of Japan's hunting of whales. At a 2007 Greenpeace event in Anchorage, Alaska, Panettiere defended aboriginal whaling, saying that there is a difference between commercial whaling and the whaling practiced by aboriginal tribes in the U.S.[58]
In May 2008, Panettiere was involved in an eBay auction to benefit Save the Whales Again, a campaign of The Whaleman Foundation. The auction included tickets to a fundraising dinner hosted at the Hollywood restaurant Beso, owned by Eva Longoria, and a whale watching tour, with Panettiere, off the coast of Santa Barbara.[59] The same month, during an interview with Teen Vogue, she explained how her fame gives her a platform for her activism: "The show [Heroes] put me in a place to speak for things that I'm passionate about."[60]
In September 2008, Panettiere launched her own line of calfskin leather bags for the company Dooney & Bourke.[61] In October, she delved into the presidential election, releasing a satirical public service announcement through the website Funny or Die. In this video, Panettiere mocked Republican candidate John McCain for his age and temper.[62] She subsequently made clear her intention to vote for Barack Obama and urged other young people to vote.[63]
Panettiere also appeared in a public service announcement with DC Shadow Senator Paul Strauss endorsing voting rights for the District of Columbia.[64] She is also a teen ambassador for the Candie's Foundation, whose mission is to prevent teen pregnancy. On May 6, 2009, she participated in a town hall meeting in New York City alongside Bristol Palin and Major League Baseball pitcher Matt Garza on the issue of teen pregnancy.[65]
On December 6, 2013, Panettiere and her then-fiancé Wladimir Klitschko visited the Euromaidan-protests in Kiev, Ukraine.[66] Wladimir's brother Vitali was one of the leading figures of |
this new interest: analysis as a kind of weird avant-garde experiment that you lend yourself to for a couple of months (as the early patients did) is quite a different proposition from the eight- or ten-year analyses that are nowadays commonplace. (When analysis changed from a symptom-curing therapy to a character-changing therapy, as the shift from id to ego psychology caused it to do, it naturally required more time.) A modus vivendi of some sort must be established between patient and analyst, tolerable to both, if this singular and unprecedented association is to last the course, to say nothing of whether it will benefit the patient. “With due respect for the necessary strictest handling and interpretation of the transference,” Anna Freud wrote in 1954, “I feel still that we should leave room somewhere for the realization that analyst and patient are also two real people, of equal adult status, in a real personal relationship to each other. I wonder whether our—at times complete—neglect of this side of the matter is not responsible for some of the hostile reactions which we get from our patients and which we are apt to ascribe to ‘true transference’ only.” Anna Freud’s plain speaking occurred at an analytic symposium where she discussed a paper called “The Widening Scope of Indications for Psychoanalysis,” by the New York analyst Leo Stone, with whose humanistic view of the analytic relationship she heartily concurred. A few years later, in 1961, Stone was to elaborate this view in his classic study “The Psychoanalytic Situation.” At the symposium, he was content to simply express his fear that analysts’ overzealous playing of their roles as silent, ungratifying, unknowable beings might subvert the very process it was intended to set in motion. Early in the paper, Stone reveals the sort of person (and analyst) he is as he looks with a kind of sorrowing wonder at the flourishing psychoanalytic scene of New York in the nineteen-fifties (today wistfully referred to as “the heyday of psychoanalysis”), when “scarcely any human problem admits of solution other than psychoanalysis.” Stone goes on to ruefully note that “by the same token, there is an almost magical expectation of help from the method, which does it grave injustice. Hopeless or grave reality situations, lack of talent or ability (usually regarded as ‘inhibition’), lack of an adequate philosophy of life, and almost any chronic physical illness may be brought to psychoanalysis for cure.” What Stone finds most disquieting about this overestimation is its implicit “loss of sense of proportion about the human condition, a forgetting or denial of the fact that few human beings are without some troubles, and that many must be met, if at all, by ‘old-fashioned’ methods: courage, or wisdom, or struggle, for instance; also that few people avoid altogether and forever some physical ailments, not to speak of the fact that all die of illness in the end.” Stone goes so far as to offer the startling suggestion that “if a man is otherwise healthy, happy, and efficient, and his rare attacks of headache can be avoided by not eating lobster, for example, it would seem better that he avoid eating lobster than that he be analyzed.” In “The Psychoanalytic Situation,” Stone argues for the necessity of “framing” the stormy primitive drama of transference and countertransference in a placid relationship of two adults: one a doctor of manifest good will and reliability, the other a patient of comparable maturity and responsibility—insofar as he comes to the sessions, pays the bills, and takes the analyst’s unconventional behavior as a “technical instrumentality” rather than as a personal attack. Within the transference, of course, the patient may (and almost invariably does) wallow in his sense of injury and deprivation, rejection and outrage. But a part of him should always “know” that these feelings are not to be altogether trusted. This capacity of the patient for detachment and self-observation Stone characterizes as “a benign split of the ego” (into observing and experiencing parts), which he considers essential for the working of the analytic process. His concern is that the analyst’s unrelentingly analytic behavior may subvert the process by shaking the faith of the patient’s observing ego in the analyst’s benignity and tipping the balance in favor of the experiencing ego’s delusion of malevolence. “Whereas purely technical or intellectual errors can, in most instances, be corrected, a failure in a critical juncture to show the reasonable human response which any person inevitably expects from another on whom he deeply depends can invalidate years of patient and largely skillful work,” he writes. In wry protest against the overliteral and trivializing application of Freud’s “mirror principle,” Stone remarks, “I doubt that the evolution of the transference neurosis is often seriously disturbed by the patient’s knowing whether one takes one’s vacation in Vermont or Maine, or indeed (let me be really bold!) that one knows something more about sailing than about golf,” and he adds, “I think that it is not seldom disturbed by a persistent or repetitive arbitrary refusal to answer such questions, after sufficient speculative fantasy, if there is no more specific or adequate reason than a general principle that the patient must not know anything about one, or that the analyst does not answer questions.” (Kohut puts the matter very succinctly in a footnote in his book “The Analysis of the Self” when he says, “To remain silent when one is asked a question is not neutral but rude.”) Stone mordantly notes, “The enthusiastic and engaging assertion of an older colleague many years ago that his patient would have developed the same vivid transference love toward him ‘if he had been a brass monkey’ is, alas (or perhaps fortunately!), just not true. For all patients, to the degree that they are removed from the psychotic, have an important investment in their real and objective perceptions; and the interplay between these and the transference requires a certain minimal, if variable, resemblance.” To his delicate disentanglement of the strands of transference from those of “the real relationship” Stone adds the complication of a kind of metatransference, which he calls “the primary transference,” or “the primordial transference.” This has to do with the unconscious meaning that the patient attaches to the psychoanalytic situation itself, which derives, Stone hypothesizes, from his craving for the omnipotent parent of early infancy. This craving is universal and can be activated by doctors, politicians, clergymen, and teachers as well as by analysts. Stone draws an interesting (and, for his argument, telling) distinction between the meaning of the primary transference generated by the physician and that generated by the analyst. While the physician’s direct physical and emotional ministrations correspond to those of the “omniscient, omnipotent, and unintelligible” mother of the earliest period of infancy, the analyst’s activities resemble (in unconscious reverberation) the not so agreeable ones of the mother in the months when the infant is learning to talk and to separate from her—“that period of life where all the modalities of bodily intimacy and direct dependence on the mother are being relinquished or attenuated, pari passu with the rapid development of the great vehicle of communication by speech.” It is in this state of “intimate separation,” or “deprivation in intimacy,” that analysis is conducted, deriving its mutative power from the tension between verbal closeness and emotional distance. Stone believes, however, that the earlier, gratifying mother must not be totally eclipsed by the later, frustrating one—that the analyst’s “physicianly vocation” must meld with his analytic one if the analytic process is to develop and flourish. This brusque summary of Stone’s exquisite essay is comparable to a “college outline” of “The Golden Bowl.” Stone’s plea for humaneness and flexibility and common sense is encased in the most subtly reasoned, profoundly erudite, and awesomely “difficult” of meditations on a complex subject. Other analysts, before and after Stone, have remonstrated against analytic rigidity, but none with Stone’s authority and sincerity. In its comfortable commingling of abstruse technical and metapsychological concepts with ordinary human wisdom, “The Psychoanalytic Situation” recalls the writings of Freud—and, indeed, among psychoanalysts Stone inspires the sort of reverence that few but Freud himself have inspired. (That Stone is almost completely unknown outside the profession is curious and unfortunate) Stone’s attractive humanistic view of the analyst’s role is currently shared by all but a small minority of analysts. The leader of the opposition is Charles Brenner. Brenner has none of Stone’s elegance of expression and incandescence of literary persona, but he is a worthy foeman. His austere position has an icy beauty. In an article published in July, 1979, in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, entitled “Working Alliance, Therapeutic Alliance, and Transference,” Brenner challenged the whole notion that transference and “the real relationship” can be separated. “Therapeutic alliance” and “working alliance” are terms coined by the late Elizabeth Zetzel and the late Ralph Greenson, respectively, to denote the positive adult relationship in which the transference is framed. To Brenner, all such separating and “framing” is suspect. He sees the “working alliance” or the “therapeutic alliance” as a kind of shady side deal that the analyst offers the patient to gain his compliance—a deal that looks kindly and humane on the surface but in fact robs the patient of the full use of the analytic instrumentality. “Suppose an analyst were to fall asleep during a session, or to forget an appointment with a patient. Should he apologize, explain, and discuss the reasons for his action with his patient?” Brenner asks in his book “Psychoanalytic Technique and Psychic Conflict.” He gives this rather magnificent answer: Many analysts would say he should... and their arguments for doing so are persuasive. Yet I believe the better course to follow is the usual one of encouraging a patient to express his thoughts and feelings about what has happened. Only in that way can one learn whether a patient has taken his analyst’s mistake as a slight that has offended and angered him, or as a sign of weakness that allows him to feel superior and even triumphant, or as a welcome excuse for anger, etc. A conscientious analyst will naturally regret such a mistake, he will certainly try, through self-analysis, to discover his unconscious reasons for having acted as he did, but he will be well advised to maintain an analytic attitude even to such an event, and not to assume what it must mean to his patient without hearing what his patient has to say. It is presumptuous to act the analyst, unbidden, in a social or family situation. It is a technical lapse to be other than an analyst in one’s relation with an analytic patient. Several years ago, Brenner and Stone jointly led a seminar at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in which just such nice points of technique were debated. “Should the analyst express sympathy to a patient whose father has just died?” was one question that was put to the leaders. Stone said that he, of course, would express sympathy. Brenner said that he, of course, wouldn’t. Recently recalling this incident, a younger woman analyst of somewhat romantic leanings declared, “Charlie is a very kind man. He might not say anything to the patient, but I’m sure he would let him know somehow, probably with his eyes, how sorry he was.” She has missed Brenner’s point. In the “Working Alliance” article, Brenner returns to this eventuality, and gives this unexpected and unarguable reason for analytic neutrality even in the face of death: It is true enough that it often does no harm for an analyst to be thus conventionally “human.” Still, there are times when his being “human” under such circumstances can be harmful, and one cannot always know in advance when those times will be. As an example, for his analyst to express sympathy for a patient who has just lost a close relative may make it more difficult than it would otherwise be for the patient to express pleasure or spite or exhibitionistic satisfaction over the loss. This is taking respect for individual experience and generosity of spirit toward human frailty very far indeed.
“When I received my letter of acceptance from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, it was as if I had been given an injection of adrenaline, amphetamine, and heroin. I have seldom in my life felt so triumphant. I knew that my life was going to be the way I wanted.” Aaron Green said this to me one Wednesday morning in his consultation room, where he and I had taken to meeting weekly at the same hour, as if for therapy. The empty couch looked out on the room with a meaningful air. “I’m not any old shabby foam-rubber sofa,” it seemed to say. “I am the couch.” Aaron sat in a big, sagging olive-green upholstered chair near its head—his habitual seat, a sort of nest padded with accustomed objects: the lamp table on the right strewn with books, scientific journals, letters, pencils, notebooks, a mug of tea; the glass-topped table on the left piled with paper towels (the couch’s antimacassars, changed for each occupant) and also holding a telephone, a small round clock, a drug company’s appointment calendar, and a vase of decaying chrysanthemums. It put me in mind of a chronic invalid’s chair. I sat across from him in a smaller easy chair, and between us, on a hassock, lay my small, attentive-looking Japanese tape recorder. “I had hated medical school,” Aaron continued. “It was dehumanizing and brutalizing, and when I was an interne and resident in B— I learned what horrible places hospitals are—how the patient’s needs are trampled underfoot and everything is done for the staff’s convenience. When I got into the New York Psychoanalytic, I felt I had come in out of the cold. I had applied to other institutes, but this was the one I desperately hoped to get into—the oldest, largest, most renowned analytic institute in America, the institute of Hartmann, Kris, Loewenstein, Jacobson, Greenacre, Isakower, Bak, Arlow, and Brenner. The one thing that marred my happiness was the prospect of going into analysis again. I didn’t see why I had to. I felt I was already perfectly well analyzed.” Freud’s recommendation that the analyst himself be analyzed has become an inflexible and central fact of analytic education. The “candidate,” as the student is called, is assigned a “training analyst,” with whom he has an analysis that—at least in theory—is no different from ordinary therapeutic analysis, though certain subtle differences are inevitable. In a grim voice, Aaron went on to tell me of a traumatic event that had marked his arrival in New York from B—. “When I was told the name of my training analyst, I was somewhat mollified by the fact that I had drawn one of the plums of the New York Psychoanalytic’s roster—a very eminent older woman analyst, now deceased, who was a writer and theoretician of international renown. I was frankly flattered by the assignment—feeling it to be connected to my own superior attributes—and arrived at the first session nervous but cocky. I sat down (it is the custom for candidates to have a few preliminary sessions sitting up with their prospective training analyst) and we began to talk, and about fifteen minutes into the session—after I tell you what happened, you will imagine what those fifteen minutes had been like—this small, stout, benign-looking older woman suddenly banged her hand on her desk in exasperation and said, ‘You are a maddening person! You are like a gadfly!’ She glared at me with anger and dislike. I had been weaving and dodging and interrupting and cutting into her questions with counterquestions. But I hadn’t realized how irritating I was being, so when that raw aggression suddenly came flying across the room I was absolutely stunned by it.” “What did you do?” “Nothing. I was scared. I was afraid I’d get into trouble. That the Institute would see me as a troublemaker. I had had trouble in medical school. I was a very abrasive person. But I didn’t want trouble with this woman, so I became humble and conciliatory. At the end of the hour, I asked meekly when the analysis proper would begin. When would I start lying down on the couch? And it was then that she showed her true quality. She said—this impressed me, I will always admire her for it—‘Forgive me for bursting out at you like that, and go to another analyst. An analysis should not start with a scene. I am not the right analyst for you. Go to someone else.’ Now, that’s being a mensch. No, she shouldn’t have burst out at me like that. But who had the courage to face up to what had happened! Not me. I was too frightened. I would have been willing to work with her to avoid trouble.” “Did you get another woman analyst?” “No. They assigned me a man. At first, I was contemptuous of him. I thought him a dull mediocrity. I found him pedestrian. I regarded his work as hack, textbook stuff. Well, it wasn’t hack, it wasn’t textbook. His work turned out to be of extremely high quality. My second analysis turned out to be much more thorough, much more profound than the first. But I didn’t know that at the time. My initial attitude was ‘Who are you? I’ve never heard of your name, even in the literature. You’re not famous.’ You see, my first analyst had been famous. He was a very brilliant and charming old man—an Austrian Jew of the first generation of analysts after Freud—who had come to this country during the big exodus of European analysts in the thirties. He didn’t keep the analytic incognito very much. He was a good deal more casual about it than my second analyst, and was much more demonstrative, expressive, and supportive. His analyst had been Sandor Ferenczi, and he idealized him. There was a bust of Ferenczi in his consultation room, together with one of Freud, who had analyzed Ferenczi. I could thus trace my analytic lineage back to Freud. You smile, and you should. It’s a preposterous notion. It’s the most primitive kind of family romance—my parents are aristocrats, I’m descended from royalty, all that sort of stuff. I know that now. But I didn’t then, and you’d be surprised by the number of people in and out of establishment psychoanalysis who hold to these childish fancies about their royal descent.” I asked Aaron what he meant by “establishment” psychoanalysis. He explained that in this country the establishment is formed of the institutes that are recognized by the American Psychoanalytic Association, which came into existence in 1911, three years after the International Psychoanalytical Association was organized by Freud in Europe. The regulations and standards of the American are stricter and stiffer than those of the International, which oversees the analytic institutes and societies of the rest of the world. Aaron believes that American psychoanalysis is a great cut above psychoanalysis elsewhere in the world; he is contemptuous of what he calls the laxness and sloppiness of English, European, and South American analysis. There are other people, naturally, who are unimpressed by American analysis and are critical of the American Psychoanalytic Association’s iron hold over the profession. The most controversial of the American’s regulations is the one that, in effect, requires members to be medical doctors. The rule was laid down in 1923 in the belief that alignment with the medical establishment would give the struggling new profession the respectability it needed. It gave it that, but debate continues on whether too much wasn’t sacrificed by this strategy—whether too many good people who are unwilling to go through medical training aren’t being lost to analysis. Some of the greatest names in psychoanalysis were laymen—Anna Freud, Erik Erikson, Ernst Kris, to name the most celebrated The International leaves the question to the discretion of the individual institutes, and most do not require that their members be doctors. Freud himself was opposed to the medical requirement, arguing (in a pamphlet called “The Question of Lay Analysis,” written on the occasion of a lawsuit by the Austrian government against a non-medical colleague, Theodor Reik) that training in the care of bodies has little bearing on the treatment of souls. Philip Rieff, in “The Triumph of the Therapeutic” (1966), points with bitter malice to what he sees as the evil consequences of the medical requirement: More often than not, the contemporary candidate for training in one of the institutes now comes straight out of a medical school with precisely the wrong kind of education, for which a reading of Freud’s case histories and various other courses in the development and structure of psychoanalysis cannot compensate. The early psychoanalysts were educated men when they gathered around Freud; the contemporary psychoanalyst is not an educated man when he leaves the institute.... By default, the institutes have become what most of their students ardently desire them to be: trade schools preparing them for accreditation and the good life in some suburb, without night calls from troublesome patients. Non-doctors who wish to practice psychoanalysis in this country get their training at what Aaron (with unabashed snobbery and an admitted total lack of justification) calls the “fly-by-night” institutes. These include institutes founded by revisionists, such as the Karen Horney Institute and the William Alanson White Institute, as well as those set up specifically to accommodate non-doctors, such as the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis, founded in 1946 by Reik, who had emigrated here. The situation is a messy, incoherent one, difficult for the person who is looking for an analyst to make his way through. And this is to say nothing of the back street of dubious and outright fraudulent therapies beckoning to the person in desperate straits. Within the establishment, in addition to the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, New York has the N.Y.U. Psychoanalytic Institute (formerly the Downstate Institute), peaceably founded in 1949 by Sandor Lorand, of the New York Psychoanalytic, and the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, painfully wrested from the New York Psychoanalytic in 1944 by Sandor Rado, in a savage schism whose scars are apparently still borne by both institutes. Aaron’s attitude toward the N.Y.U. Institute is that of an older sibling toward a younger brother: affectionate, tolerant, a bit condescending toward the boy’s evident immaturity, and admiring and envious of his dash and style and charm. For Columbia, the no-good son, he has nothing but bitterness and scorn. “But the schism was years ago,” I said. “What’s the matter with them now?” Aaron frowned, and said in a low, dark voice, “They’re sharp dressers.” I laughed. “Is that all?” “Isn’t that enough?” Aaron said. He laughed, too. We returned to his early training at the New York Psychoanalytic. “When I started, I was eager to do the course work,” he said. “I had taught myself a little theory in an undisciplined way, and now, I thought, I would learn the whole corpus of psychoanalytic theory from the great teachers of the greatest analytic institute in the world. I didn’t attach much importance to the supervised casework I would be doing. I felt that I was already a good psychotherapist—I had been at the top, or close to the top, in my residency—and I thought I just needed more practice. And I looked on the training analysis as a loathsome, unnecessary encumbrance. So I came to analytic training with values that were the exact opposite of those of the training institution in which I was enrolled. The New York Psychoanalytic (like most institutes) sets the greatest store by its training analysis. Second to that, it values the supervised casework—a one-to-one relationship about another one-to-one relationship. And pretty far down below those two is the book learning. Now, after several years of training, my values, by some strange coincidence, have reversed and become those of the Institute. The courses turned out to be disappointing. There were a few exceptions, taught by good teachers, but mostly they were boring discussion classes, in which I had to sit and listen to my fellow-students—who knew even less than I did. The classes were at night, from eight-thirty to ten, three times a week. Analytic institutes are night schools; the faculty and the students—most of whom are already working psychiatrists—see patients during the day. I would arrive after a day’s hard work at the hospital and sit there tired and bored and irritated. My training analysis opened my eyes and gradually changed me. I realized that my first analyst had not been rigorous or ruthless enough. His technique hadn’t been good. The troubles I’d had in medical school—I’d started analysis at the end of my second year—would probably have been compounded if I hadn’t been in analysis; he helped me get through all kinds of confusions and despairs. But it was the second analysis that changed me. I’m not so belligerent and abrasive anymore, so touchy and angry.” I said, “How do you know it was the analysis that changed you, and not simply the fact of getting older?” “That’s a very common and firmly held idea,” he said. “The idea that what happens in analysis would have happened anyway—that people ‘naturally’ change as life goes on, and analysts take credit for changes they aren’t responsible for. I’ve had thoughts like that myself about my analysis, and have had to stop myself. I’ve had to remind myself of how rigidly determined our lives are—how predictable and repetitive, how encrusted and hardened, how resistant to change. If we changed as easily as it’s claimed, there wouldn’t be people going into analysis at forty and fifty; they would all have changed ‘naturally’ by then into wise, mature, moderately contented people. A person who goes into analysis in his twenties, as many people are doing today, can’t see this as well as a person who goes into analysis later on, after his life has become hopelessly, repetitively unsatisfying, after he has seen himself make the same mistake over and over again, after he has come to feel how trapped he is and to understand how little freedom he has. The young person whose life hasn’t taken a course yet can deceive himself into thinking that his life has unlimited potential, though in fact it is already limited and determined. I made that mistake earlier, but I’m old enough now to have a sense of how my life would have gone if I hadn’t had analysis.” “What would have been different about your life?” “It would have been extremely constricted, full of bitterness and depression. To some extent, I know that because it still is,” Aaron said with a rueful smile. “You see, I haven’t changed all that radically. I don’t think basic character structure ever changes. We’re not that malleable. But one of the ways I became impressed by the changes occurring in me was through the appearance of substitute symptoms. As I gave up certain character traits, I developed acute symptoms. I had read about that happening—Freud writes about it—but I never thought it would happen to me. Well, it was happening. As I grew less nasty and pugnacious and argumentative—as I began more and more to say to myself, ‘Hell, you don’t have to do that anymore’—I grew more and more anxious about things I had never been anxious about before. Like being in crowds and sitting in the balcony at the theatre. I also developed a speaking anxiety, which I still have, and which really troubles me. It gets in the way of my teaching and prevents me from speaking at congresses. I was invited to speak at a meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association—I was to be one of the discussants of a paper on a subject of special interest to me: Freud’s dual-instinct theory—and I had to refuse. I just couldn’t do it. The mere thought of being on that stage at the Waldorf terrified me. I feel flawed and humiliated by this symptom. It’s one of the things I may have to go back into analysis about.” “But is it such a serious flaw? Is it even a symptom?” I asked. “Don’t we all have something we don’t do well or can’t do at all?” “My immediate reaction to that is to say, ‘Look, if I’m going to have a flaw, let it be in an area that doesn’t interfere with my professional ambition’—which, of course, is nonsensical.” “Since ambition is the problem?” “Right. There’s no question about it. Ambition is the problem. But I think you’d be surprised by what the ambition is about. It isn’t just getting out there and killing my father. That’s just part of it. There are other things, too. Well, I’ll be frank. It’s the desire to be a beautiful woman. You find all kinds of surprises in analysis.” “Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me about you,” I was interested to hear myself say. “Well, it surprised me! It bothered me, I can tell you.”How Brit Marling Forged Her Acting Career
Women in Hollywood face many casting challenges. For many young female actors looking to break into the industry, the roles offered are often typecast with girlfriend and victim roles. Brit Marling had already left a career for acting, and wanted her presence on screen to carry weight. This meant she had to create these characters herself.
From Georgetown to Los Angeles
Brit Marling’s road towards her acting career began a far cry from Hollywood. While studying at (and eventually graduating from) Georgetown with a Major in Economics, Marling met two future directors, Mike Cahill and Zal Batmanglij, whom she would work closely alongside to create the films that would shape her blossoming career.
After interning for a summer at Goldman Sachs as an analyst, Marling turned down their job offer, and opted for the road less traveled. She left the United States, and moved to Cuba with Mike Cahill, where the pair co-directed and co-wrote Boxers and Ballerinas, a film exploring the US-Cuba conflict by profiling boxers and ballerinas in Havana, Santiago de Cuba and Miami.
After being lauded for her involvement in the project, Brit Marling set her sights on Hollywood. The pair’s move to Los Angeles was a rocky one, with the actor admitting the couple survived on a diet of lentils.
Marling eventually joined Batmanglij in a life of freeganism, which involved freezing their bank accounts for 10 weeks, sleeping outside, hopping trains to travel and eating from trash bins, to find meaning in their lives.
Having a hand in creating her own roles
After rejecting scripts of female characters portrayed as largely helpless victims, Marling co-wrote The Sound Of My Voice and Another Earth with Batmanglij and Cahill, respectively, to co-write, co-produce and star in both films. Both pictures opened at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, a first for a female writer and actress.
Finding success through creative filmmaking
After winning four cinematic awards for her work in Another Earth and Boxers and Ballerinas, and thanks to the buzz at Sundance, Marling was approached by Robert Redford to star alongside himself, Susan Sarandon, Terrence Howard and Stanley Tucci in the political thriller The Company You Keep.
After wrapping Company, Marling returned to her longtime collaborator Zal Batmanglij, to co-write and star in The East, which was inspired by their time living off the grid as freegans. The East was the first of her personal projects to feature additional star power, with her sharing screen time with Alexander Skarsgård and Ellen Page.
After The East, Marling teamed up again with Mike Cahill to star in I Origins, a drama about a molecular biologist making a startling discovery involving human eyes, which debuted at Sundance in 2014.
Pilot bidding wars
After accepting roles written by others, Marling and Batmanglij joined forces again, to create The OA, which sparked a bidding war that Netflix eventually won. After working together to create such intimate films as The Sound Of My Voice and The East, anticipation for their new drama is high. Netflix’s VP of Original Content champions their creative voices as “uniquely captivating”, though has kept all pilot details under wraps.
The OA joins heavy hitters House of Cards, Orange Is The New Black, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Sense8 and Peaky Blinders in the Netflix Originals lineup in 2016.
Inspiration for unique actors
Brit Marling followed her creative instincts, despite them taking her far from a path of safety. She abandoned her educational trajectory in economics, as she was truly sure that this was not the right course of action for herself, and her career.
“As a kid, I was going to the cinema and not seeing the type of women I saw every day in my own life. I think about what a struggle it is to be a young girl in this world, and it makes me determined to play interesting women.”
Despite extreme challenges early in her career, Marling persevered and held out for roles that mattered to her, as an actor. Rejecting roles that don’t match with your personal career vision is a risky move, though she shows that in certain situations, unique actors can truly forge a career for themselves that they can be proud of.
For women and other minorities in the film industry, this belief in yourself is crucial. While Hollywood may be lacking in diversity now, if you and other actors work with progressive and creative directors, your work could be the incentive for Big Hollywood to take the diversification movement seriously, and finance projects that continue to challenge the current status quo.
Finding the roles you’re being offered aren’t matching your values or stoking your creativity? Exploring the other side of production to create your own roles may be an option for you. Creating a short film, web series, documentary or even YouTube videos could be the content that drives your personal marketing, and propels you into the hands of your next casting director.
Know thyself, invest in your creativity and watch your career develop.
Share this: Facebook
Twitter
Google
Reddit
Tumblr
Pinterest
LinkedIn
More
Print
Like this: Like Loading...
0
0 SharesThe Wall Street Journal provides yet another indicator of strained consumer budgets. More and more are having trouble paying their utility bills, precisely when the service providers are getting tougher about collections:
Utilities are becoming more aggressive about collecting money from delinquent customers, leading to a surge in service shutdowns just as economic woes are pushing up the number of households falling behind on bills.
The utilities say they are under pressure to clean out accounts that are weighing down their books at a time when their stocks are being hammered and earnings growth has slowed.
Meanwhile, the increasing number of homes left without power — which could rise as economic pain deepens — is beginning to worry some consumer advocates and regulators.
In Pennsylvania, PPL Corp. increased shutoffs by 78% in the first three quarters of the year compared with the same period a year earlier. Shutoffs at electric utilities throughout the state increased by 20% in that period. George Lewis, a spokesman for PPL, based in Allentown, Pa., said the utility had been somewhat lax in the past but decided this year to “reverse the trend and prevent people from getting further in debt” by cutting them off sooner. About 3% of the company’s residential accounts have been disconnected for delinquency.
In Memphis, Tenn., the city-owned utility that supplies electricity, natural gas and water to residents cut off 38% more people in the first eight months of the year,…
One bright spot is that many utilities will have more money to distribute next year to poor customers through the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program. Congress boosted the program’s funds for the current fiscal year by 78% to $5.1 billion. Many utilities are trying to get the word out that people should apply because eligibility rules have been expanded, allowing people with higher incomes to qualify.
State regulators say they have noticed that power shutoffs have moved up the economic chain. “We’re seeing an uptick in middle-class people who have never been in this situation before,” said Eric Hartsfield, director of the customer-service division of the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities.
New Jersey’s biggest utility company, Public Service Enterprise Group Inc., said it saw a 10% increase compared with the year earlier in uncollectible natural-gas accounts, and slightly less on the electric side…
Rising delinquencies are occurring across the country. In New York, the amount of money utilities are owed on accounts at least 60 days past due jumped 22%..Michigan has experienced a nearly 39% increase in electricity disconnections this year compared with last.TotalBiscuit Profile Blog Joined March 2010 United Kingdom 5415 Posts Last Edited: 2012-01-15 00:42:11 #1
"Colin Smith is saving ESPORTS!"
The $5000 SHOUTcraft 2-day Invitational
"Colin Smith is saving ESPORTS!" Powered by the community, for the community
The SHOUTcraft Invitational series is the biggest, self-funded, unsponsored tournament series in Starcraft 2. Thus far we've done everything with no corporate sponsorship and intend to keep doing that. This tournament is a community-fueled, high-stakes, electrifying live event with some of the best players SC2 has to offer, battling it out in the SHOUTcraft Single-elimination format.
STOP THE PRESSES, SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT OF GREAT GRAVITY AND IMPORTANCE
The SHOUTcraft Single-elimination format is no more. It has been ground to a fine paste and rebuilt in a new player and spectator friendly form.
"In our tournament, every group is a Group of Death!"
Format - Introducing the SHOUTcraft Single-elimination group-stage invitational format. After careful discussion with various players and casters we have come up with a revamped format which we will test in this tournament. The RO8 will consist of 2 groups of 4 players. Each player will play a BO3 against every other player in the group. The top 2 players will proceed forward and the bottom 2 players will be eliminated. The remaining 4 players will be seeded into the RO4 depending on their performance. Seed 1 from group A will then play Seed 2 from group B. Seed 1 from group B will play Seed 2 from group A. These matches will be BO5. The tournament proceeds as normal from that point with the winners advancing to the Grand Final for a BO |
as he meets the world similar to the way Mr. Feeny did to Topanga and Cory? We'll just have to keep tabs and find out.The Canadiens’ 20-day training camp begins Thursday in Brossard with medicals and the ever-popular fitness tests.
It hits the ice Friday for the first day of practice, will continue with a fan-friendly scrimmage two days later at the Bell Centre, roll through seven preseason games in Montreal, Toronto, Quebec City and Ottawa, and conclude Oct. 6 probably with a Brossard skate before the team charters out for the Oct. 7 season-opener as visitors for the Maple Leafs.
Over these 20 days, there will be sore muscles, hard management decisions, reassignment of players to their junior teams and to the American Hockey League’s St. John’s IceCaps and more questions than answers in some cases.
And, of course, there will be the annual wave of optimism greeting the end of summer that, in the modern National Hockey League, is not an off-season as much as a rude interruption of games.
I will dearly miss a talk this week with late Canadiens icon Jean Béliveau, a pre-camp custom that spanned maybe 15 years. Le Gros Bill always had a fresh, delightful training-camp story to relate, no matter how many he had previously shared with me.
Béliveau once recalled his first Canadiens camp in 1950, an 18-year-old centreman invited in from the junior Quebec Citadels.
“I was very nervous,” he said of that three-week stay. “It was quite an experience. Imagine what it was like to play alongside your heroes, men who were practically legends.”
Among coach Dick Irvin’s players that season were future Hall of Famers Maurice Richard, Elmer Lach, Ken Reardon, Doug Harvey, Tom Johnson, Émile Bouchard and Bernard Geoffrion. Irvin, too, would go to the Hall of Fame, inducted in 1958 as a player.
After perhaps Quebec’s most famous courtship, Béliveau finally signed with the Canadiens on Oct. 3, 1953, beginning a career that would take him into the Hockey Hall of Fame.
He recalled in one talk that, during his 18 NHL seasons, he often reported to camp 10 to 12 pounds above his 205-pound playing weight — something unthinkable today.
“There were other boys who would report heavier than that, but we were professionals and we were conscious of our responsibilities,” Béliveau said. “We had to determine what weight was best.
“And then,” he added with a laugh, “(coach) Toe Blake always had his charts to help us find that weight.”
Early sessions weren’t leisurely skates, even if camp was stretched out over a month and a few days. Irvin was known to stir a few dry-land surprises into his unscheduled morning and afternoon intra-squad games.
Something you won’t read during this month’s camp, as reported in the Oct. 5, 1949 Montreal Gazette:
Irvin announced that Doug Harvey was top man in the examination he held last week at camp. It was a written test on hockey rules and some of the questions were not only tough, but tricky. Harvey received 80 marks of a possible 100. Hal Laycoe was second with 79 and Elmer Lach was third with 77. Harvey won a $10 prize for his effort. Irvin said many of the French-speaking boys on the squad did well and had higher marks than some of the English-speaking fellows although the whole examination was conducted in English.
I’ll also miss this week’s pre-camp talk with Lach, another Habs icon we sadly lost last season. Elegant Elmer was a bottomless pit of rich tales if you took the time to dig for them.
A native of Nokomis, Sask., Lach arrived in Montreal for training camp in October 1940 via two seasons of provincial-class hockey in Moose Jaw, having won a scoring title and advanced to a provincial final. It was with the Millers that Lach caught the eye of Paul Haynes, an injured Canadien who had been sent west on a scouting mission.
Millers owner Cliff Henderson urged Lach to go east, figuring his star would return in better shape with Moose Jaw lacking artificial ice and unable to skate until the local creek had frozen over.
But Lach, 22, would not be back, agreeing to a 1940 contract of $4,000, plus a $1,000 signing bonus, for his first season with the rebuilding Canadiens.
On that train with Lach would be Reardon, Jack Adams and Joe Benoit, who would be among nine rookies to make Montreal’s roster that fall.
Or nine more than will crack the lineup when camp breaks early next month.
Today’s 20-day training camp doesn’t run an arbitrarily chosen period, it’s clearly spelled out in the NHL’s current Collective Bargaining Agreement.
As is Thursday’s first day of activities, detailed in CBA Article 15.2 (c):
The first day of Training Camp will be dedicated (and exclusively limited) to office activities, such as medicals/physicals, fitness testing, photographs and other public relations-related matters. During the first four (4) days of on-ice activity at Training Camp (days 2 through 5), ice-time activities will be limited to 1.75 hours and off-ice activities will be limited to 1.25 hours per day, except on Exhibition Game days where these limits shall not apply to Players playing in the Exhibition Game.
Five Octobers ago, I sat with centreman Lars Eller, who was skating in his first Canadiens camp after having been acquired from St. Louis four months earlier for goaltender Jaroslav Halak.
Then 21, Eller was taking part in just his second NHL camp, setting his sights on being in the Canadiens lineup for the team’s Oct. 7 opener in Toronto.
(That he did, skating his eighth NHL match and first of the 356 regular-season games he’s now played in a Canadiens jersey.)
“Everything I’d heard about Montreal is true,” Eller said. “The activity around the team, the passion of the fans and the crowds for practices, scrimmages and exhibition games — it’s unbelievable.”
A wet-behind-the-ears teammate of Eller’s was also hoping to make a good impression that fall, arriving with two games of regular-season experience and a strong 14-game 2010 playoffs, called up from the farm as an injury replacement.
“If there is a spot (open), there’s 20 million offensive defencemen in this organization who are capable of playing, and ready to play,” this young defenceman said that camp, exaggerating perhaps a little.
“I haven’t even made the team yet, or played an exhibition or regular-season game. My focus is on coming to camp, getting better, getting to know my teammates better and contributing as much as I can. Then we’ll see.”
It seems that things have worked out for P.K. Subban.
dstubbs@montrealgazette.com
twitter.com/Dave_StubbsIn 2010’s Citizens United v the FEC, the US Supreme Court decided that corporations have the same right to free speech as any living, breathing human being. Not only did the decision enable big businesses to flood our elections with vast amounts of capital unavailable to peasants ( or any individual, really ), but it reinforced the legal identity of corporations as “people” which — not who — are endowed with rights. The notion of corporate rights is interesting considering that the US was founded on the ideals of liberalism, a political philosophy which emerged from the so-called Age of Enlightenment, rooted in a principle called natural law. The thinkers who developed these ideas — John Locke, Thomas Paine, John Milton, & others — would be confused (at least) or (more likely) horrified at the idea that an abstract institution, such as a corporation, has rights.
And here’s why…
The Origins of Natural Law & Natural Rights
The first thing to understand is that the whole idea of “rights” is pretty new in the western world. Before the European monarchic systems were overthrown in favor of liberal ones ruled by laws, nobody really had rights per se aside from the rich & powerful — so, mostly kings, popes, & other jerks. Sure, most folks could speak freely or enjoy privacy in their own home — until the king got miffed at what you said or decided he needed your stuff. Rulers got away with this because, with the help of corrupt religious institutions & a bit of violence, enough people accepted (or were too scared to challenge) the idea that autocrats had the “divine right to rule.” The king was the king because the Almighty Lord said so.
Then, something wonderful happened — books. When printing was invented, the people could spread & exchange new ideas much faster and popular thinkers began to question the absolute authority of the state & of religion. Exchange with African & Arab cultures revived European interest in things like Greek literature, which the Muslims had preserved in ‘Arabic after the Church torched the scrolls of heathens like Plato & Aristotle. The Greek concept of natural law went viral among the political thinkers & radical intellectuals who used it to challenge the supposed right-to-rule of monarchs & to explore alternative theories of government.
Natural Rights Broke the Ideology of Monarchism
Theorists like John Locke & Thomas Paine adapted the popular idea of natural law to argue that people had natural rights which could not be taken away — even by God’s appointed ruler. The world was governed by a set of natural laws which could be discovered by using reason, since reason was a part of human nature & human nature was a part of the natural order. Using observations about the natural order as evidence, they reasoned that violating certain rights went against natural law. According to John Locke, people had the right to live, to be free, & to the products of their labor. That may seem basic but, at the time, it was revolutionary and not just in the figurative “blow-your-mind” sense but also in a literal “the-French-actually-cut-the-king’s-head-off-at-the-end” sense of the word.
Rights Come from Natural Order, Not Social Order
Which natural rights we had was often controversial but the founding thinkers of liberalism agreed that — whatever they were & however many — they definitely existed. To John Locke & many of his peers, natural law had greater authority than any king or pope because they saw natural law as a direct creation of God’s, which conferred moral authority to it. Whatever we believe, the important point here is that the order of the natural world was sacred to folks like John Locke and, religious or not, many of us today still harbor a mysterious suspicion that there is something pretty damned important about it.
And besides — even if the existence of natural rights were someday proved to be mere superstition, it would nonetheless be a superstition that empowered people to storm the Bastille and that has got to be worth something.
“ Corporate Rights “
Is a Non-Sense Idea
The idea that a corporation — an abstract organizational tool — is endowed with rights is incoherent. Corporations having rights makes as much sense as vacuum cleaners deserving justice — the concept simply does not apply. Advocates for corporate rights argue that corporations are just groups of people and, since people have rights, corporations have rights by extension. The reality, however, is the opposite because corporations are specifically designed to limit the degree of human control & involvement.
Understanding What a Corporation Is
A corporation is essentially an organization formed with a specific intention, often to profit, and the most basic is called a joint-stock company. As a tool to encourage investment, the idea to sell stock in a company ( called “shares” ) was ingenious. Stock was invented when a lot of trade was done by navigating ships with maps that had spooky dragons inked in the margins, which was risky business. Entrepreneurs had concerns about investing in trading vessels which often got sunk, lost, pirated, & possibly even eaten by monsters. The Dutch fixed this by selling fractions of a ship to decrease the risks for investors, resulting in more funds for business & higher profits. Investing in 1/10th of 10 separate ships was far less risky than investing in 1 ship which might easily be smooshed by a watery beast.
To protect investors from being cheated, new laws were written that required corporate businesses to act in their shareholders’ interests by holding managers accountable for decisions that were dishonest, incompetent, or intentionally reduced profits. Corporate history is long & complex but the result is that today’s corporations are run by folks who are legally required to serve the profit of shareholders. The important point is that corporations are driven by profit — not by human reason. Corporate managers are not free to act according to what they think is right or just or best for our society — in fact, the logic of profit sometimes forbids it.
Corporate Motives Exist Independently of Human Desires
The children of humanity share the same set of basic interests & concerns — clean air to breathe, water to drink, food to eat, a shelter over our heads, & social interactions to keep us from going crazy. This fundamentally shared aspect of the human experience informs our behavior, allowing us to act ( most of the time, anyway ) in ways that seem reasonable to our peers — this is a big part of what the liberal thinkers called our “human nature.” And corporations just do not share this human nature. While incorporation is a handy tool for organizing business & finance, corporate entities necessarily end up possessing a “thirst” for money & a “hunger” for resources that may or may not be consistent with the goals of society or of individuals.
Giving “Rights” to Corporations
Threatens the Existence of Rights Altogether
The people of the United States need to remember why we instituted rights in the first place or we risk regression to a higher-tech version of the Dark Ages, destroying what progress we made so far toward establishing truly just & civil societies. We developed the idea of rights precisely to overthrow the “right” of powerful institutions — at the time, monarchy & the Church — to act in their self-interest when it opposed human reason or well-being. The purpose of rights is to ensure that people, who by nature share common interests & the ability to reason, remain in control of society’s institutions — and not the other way around.
Corporate entities are made by people — they are not people. To paraphrase the incisive query of the Hebrew teacher, Isaiah — “shall the clay criticize the potter who formed it?” There was a time when institutions were held more sacred & cared for more diligently than the people whom the institutions were made to serve, all for the greed & thirst for power of a few. Our ancestors fell victim to the lie before and, now upon hearing the lie again, we must renew our understanding to remind our society that corporations are not people.
In solidarity,
John Laurits
P.S. Just to be clear, I am not endorsing the philosophies, politics, or ideologies of John Locke, Thomas Paine, et al, or of liberalism in general — nor am I dismissing them altogether. My purpose was to explain natural law, rights, & the history of those ideas. As a socialist, I have fundamental issues with a lot of liberal ideology’s underlying assumptions but — speaking strictly in relation to the European autocracies of ages past — the classical liberal idea of natural rights seems to have mostly been an improvement.I was going through some old projects and photos recently and stumbled across one of my favorite ideas that I actually followed through with, my daughters 1st birthday photo shoot. My wife and I decided to throw our daughter, Aly, an Alice in Wonderland themed party. We had it all planned out; we would call it: Aly in “One”derland!
I knew I wanted this to be something special to commemorate my daughters big day and we came up with the idea of a photo shoot with Aly in her cute, handmade, Alice dress. We took some initial photos at home, but something was missing. I mean she was cute and all, of course, but I knew I had to step it up to make this memory top notch. The first year of parenting is such a mix of joy and struggle, the occasion truly deserved a solid effort. This was for us as much as it was for her, and she was just getting to that age where we could really have fun with her. So what else was I to do but lean on the experience I gained from my time designing sets for the stage. I declared to my wife that we were going to build a set for this all important photo shoot. She encouraged my madness, as she always does (almost) and I started designing right then and there. As I thought about how I would pull it off, I realized that the easiest way to communicate the magical “Alice” feel, was to play off of the “eat me” “drink me” moments. I went to work furiously cutting, gluing, painting, cursing and putting everything I had into this epic backdrop. Once the set was complete, I set the lighting just so, to have as much natural effect in the pictures before finishing off the images in Photoshop. I honestly wasn’t that great with digital editing at the time, so I very much relied on the magic made in “reality”.
The finished product turned out awesomely!
I used a foam tri-fold presentation board for the walls with felt paper glued on as decorative wallpaper. I then added the dollhouse door and some other small wooden accessories for perspective. The finishing touch was simply a checkered table cloth we just happen to have laying around… Perfect!
The back light coming through the door cast a very natural highlight into the room really adding to magic.
Another trick I learned, from Redbeard actually, was to add wooden edging to really make things pop, giving models and sets an air of elegance.
All we had to do when it was done, was just let Aly… do her thing.
After showing the “big” side of Aly’s personality, I decided I wanted to do a second shoot showing her tiny little self in the big crazy world of “Wonderland”.
This turned out fantastic as well!
The digital editing consisted of playing with a lot of different hue’s, saturation’s and overlays. We then pieced together some cards and sent them out, not only as invites, but for keepsakes as well.
Then we had another kid and for his birthday, we put plastic trucks on cupcakes and blew up yellow and black balloons. Because… I guess that’s just what happens with the second kid.
By:Bill Ball has handled multiple whiskey-making tasks in his 47 years at Jim Beam, but on Saturday he took on an unexpected role — joining colleagues on a picket line outside a Beam distillery in Kentucky.
More than 200 union workers walked off their jobs at Beam distilleries at Clermont and Boston in Kentucky after voting Friday to reject the latest contract offer from the world's leading bourbon producer. As the old contract expired, Beam said its contingency plans would keep operations running to maintain the flow of whiskey to distributors and consumers.
As passing motorists honked in support Saturday, striking workers outside the Clermont distillery vented their frustrations.
They said staffing shortages often extend work weeks to 60 to 80 hours to keep up with growing demand for Beam whiskey. The company has turned increasingly to temporary workers, they said, and disregards seniority when assigning veteran employees to new roles or shifts.
"We hope this is settled shortly," Ball said. "If it's not, we're here for the long haul."
The walkout soured what has been an era of smooth relations between management and labor in Kentucky's whiskey industry, which has ridden a wave of renewed popularity in recent years.
Fred Minnick, a bourbon author and historian, said the walkout doesn't necessarily signal a new period of labor unrest in the sector.
"Historically, these strikes do not have a ripple effect," he said Saturday. "They tend to be more isolated events."
Kentucky is home to about 95 percent of the world's bourbon production. Both the bourbon and whiskey industries are enjoying growing sales worldwide, in part driven by higher demand for premium spirits and cocktails.
Last year, the state's bourbon production swelled to a nearly 50-year high. Bluegrass state distilleries filled nearly 1.9 million bourbon barrels, the highest number since 1967, and 44 percent above the pace in 2014, according to the Kentucky Distillers' Association.
Beam did not offer specifics about its contingency plans to keep the two distilleries operating.
"Given our inventories and contingency plans, we currently do not anticipate shortages of Jim Beam or any other products made at these facilities," David Hunter, chief supply chain officer for Beam Suntory, said in a statement Friday night.
The company said it hoped union workers would reconsider the contract offer, which included pay increases. It said the revised offer dealt with workers' concerns on such issues as overtime and temporary workers. It did not immediately comment Saturday as the strike began.
The vote Friday marked the second time in days that union workers overwhelmingly rejected the company's offer.
The classic American whiskey brand is owned by Suntory Holdings Ltd., a Japanese beverage company.
Ball sounded skeptical of those contingency plans, predicting efficiency will suffer without union workers manning operations. "If Jim Beam wants to put the product out with the quality that we've done in my 47 years, it has to have our help to do it, so it's done right," he said.
Bourbon ages for years before reaching maturity. Where the walkout could have an impact on short-term supply is in such jobs as removing mature whiskey from barrels stored in warehouses, known in the trade as rickhouses, and bottling the spirits.
"You can't just get Johnny off the street to come in to do this," Minnick said in a phone interview. "If you don't know how to roll a barrel in a rickhouse, you're going to lose a thumb."
Striking workers talked about a family atmosphere on the job that has grown strained in recent times.
Jerry Smith, a 21-year Beam employee who does maintenance work on the bottling line, said he typically works about 70 hours per week. His workload means he's missed out on plenty of events with his two teenage children, he said.
"Pretty much, my kids in the last five years have grown up without their father around for the most part," he said.
Associated PressBEIJING (Reuters) - In the race to develop self-driving cars, the United States and Europe lead in technology, but China is coming up fast in the outside lane with a regulatory structure that could put it ahead in the popular adoption of autonomous cars on its highways and city streets.
Li Zengwen, a development engineer at Changan Automobile, lifts his hands off the steering wheel as the car is on self-driving mode during a test drive on a highway in Beijing, China, April 16, 2016. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon
A draft roadmap for having highway-ready, self-driving cars within 3-5 years and autonomous vehicles for urban driving by 2025 could be unveiled as early as this year, said Li Keqiang, an automotive engineering professor at Tsinghua University who chairs the committee drafting the plan. The panel is backed by the powerful Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
The draft will set out technical standards, including a common language for cars to communicate with each other and infrastructure, and regulatory guidelines - a unified framework that contrasts with a patchwork of state laws and standards in the United States.
Without coordination, that patchwork could hold back the development of self driving cars in the U.S., David Strickland, a former safety chief for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said at an event in Beijing this month.
China’s top-down approach could see it overtake the U.S. and Europe, where automakers have generally been left to agree among themselves on industry standards. A push for self-driving and electric cars also fits with Beijing’s shift to an economy driven by high-tech and consumer industries rather than heavy industry and low-end manufacturing.
“If we can convince the government that every company, every car on the road must use this (single standard)... then there is a chance China can beat the rest of the world” to the widespread use of self-driving cars, said Li Yusheng, head of Chongqing Changan Automobile’s autonomous drive program.
China is ripe for the advent of self-driving cars. It’s the world’s biggest autos market and is blighted by choking air pollution, traffic congestion and often erratic driving. More than 200,000 people die each year in road accidents, according to World Health Organisation estimates.
As relative newcomers to mass car ownership Chinese also tend not to share the West’s love affair with driving. In a 2015 World Economic Forum survey, 75 percent of Chinese said they would likely ride in a self-driving car, versus half of Americans. Within 20 years, China will be the largest market for autonomous features, accounting for at least a quarter of global demand, says Boston Consulting Group.
BIG AMBITIONS
The China draft would be opened up for industry comment and input from a range of ministries, ultimately going to the State Council, or cabinet, for approval.
At a most basic level, the committee will define a ‘self-driving’ car and set a minimum level of functionality, said Bai Jie, a professor at Tongji University who also sits on the expert committee.
In other respects, China plans to be more ambitious. It may adopt cellular data technology - already used in many cars to access the Internet - for cars to communicate, rather than the dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) standard used in the U.S. and Europe, said Li, the panel chairman.
“The U.S., Europe and Japan spent so much time developing DSRC, so they strongly recommend it for China,” Li said. “Here, we’re just beginning so why not choose advanced technology like LTE (Long Term Evolution wireless broadband technology) or 5G?”
China’s provisional timeline would put it at least in line with, if not ahead, of others developing self-driving cars.
By 2020, Toyota Motor aims to market a car that can drive by itself on highways, and Mercedes, after two decades of research, plans to launch a self-driving car, though drivers would be required to take control in certain situations.
Chinese automakers including SAIC Motor and Ford Motor’s local partner Changan have internal targets that match the likely draft roadmap, and are represented on the experts committee, Li said, while foreign car makers are not.
SELF-DRIVE TRIP
To be sure, China has some way to go to become a global pacesetter in autonomous driving.
Li, the committee chief, said the panel was only now looking into legal issues around self-driving cars, such as who is liable in any collision.
Li Shufu, chairman of automaker Geely [GEELY.UL], has said China must revise its laws so the manufacturer, not the driver, is held responsible for accidents when a car is in self-drive mode. “If (our) legislation lags behind, self-driving cars will be difficult to sell in China,” he said.
“It’s certainly possible for the Chinese auto industry to make significant headway with government backing, but there’s still a lot going into developing that technology, making sure it’s safe, and that means a certain number of miles driven,” said Jeremy Carlson, an analyst at consultancy IHS Automotive.
Ahead of next week’s Beijing autoshow, Changan took a couple of its prototype self-driving sedans for a 2,000 km (1,243 mile) trip from its Chongqing headquarters to the Chinese capital.
Slideshow (7 Images)
With a test engineer behind the wheel, but with his hands in his lap, the automated system guided the car along the highway at 80 km per hour, adjusting speed for traffic and speed-limit signs, while keeping centered in its lane - roughly on par with the self-drive capabilities of Tesla models already on the market.
Changan’s Li said a self-driving model should be on the market in 2-3 years, with the automaker spending 5 billion yuan ($773 million) to further the technology by 2020. It is also in talks with Internet giant Baidu on developing automated driving technology.
“The intersection between technology companies and automakers is the space to watch,” said Wang Yanmin, a professor at Beijing Normal University.Web performance is something I care deeply about both as a developer whose work affects millions of people around the world, and as a user who often accesses the web on slow & unreliable connections. I have regularly and loudly complained that the BBC News website is unnecessarily slow, so when I was given the opportunity to help rebuild one of the most visited pages of BBC News—the front page—I jumped at the chance.
That was April 2016. Now, a whole year later, we’re ready to begin a phased rollout of the new front page. Starting with a small percentage of users in the UK, we will gradually move everybody to the new front page over the course of several weeks. (Update: as of June 2017, the new front page is rolled out to all users).
Quick facts about the new front page
It is lighter and faster than the old one: First meaningful paint happens up to 50% sooner on mobile devices [1]. Page enhancements like lazy-loaded images load 150% faster on mobile, and 70% faster on desktop. The total bytes downloaded is 50% less on mobile and 75% less on desktop. CPU busy time has been reduced by 30% on mobile and by 50% on desktop. Performance monitoring has been automated with SpeedCurve from the beginning of the project.
It is available over HTTPS, and we have plans to redirect insecure traffic to HTTPS in the not-so-distant future.
The page is built from React components that are styled with the BBC’s CSS framework, Grandstand.
Each component is a horizontal “slice” of the page that fetches its own data. This makes it easy for us to reuse slices on any page.
The React components are individually rendered by the BBC’s React-component-as-an-API-endpoint service and assembled into a page by our page-assembly-as-a-service system.
React is only used on the server. We do not load it in the browser [2].
. The development team consists of 5 developers and 1 tester, but we have collaborated with over 60 other developers and testers from all around the BBC to build this page.
What’s next?
The version of the front page we’re rolling out is an MVP, a phase one. We will be changing it considerably over the next several months. Here’s an idea of what you can expect to see:
Performance improvements
While we have managed to improve the performance of the front page considerably, there is still a lot of work to do:
The first meaningful paint time is still too high. We can improve it by loading the core CSS sooner.
We still send too many bytes to the client. A good portion of this is from inline styles that are only used on IE8. (Update: We already have a pull request open to drop the IE8-only styles, which should reduce the amount of inline styles by about a third).
Style recalculations and layouts take too long on low-powered devices. This still needs some investigation.
We are essentially hamstrung by the “white BBC bar” at the top of the page. This bar contains components from other parts of the BBC like Search, Notifications, and BBC ID. All of these components load their own blocking CSS & JavaScript before any of the BBC News assets. While this is unlikely to change in the short term, we’re hoping to work with the teams that own these components to reduce their impact.
Design enhancements
In order to ship the new front page sooner, we made a lot of compromises with both the UX and editorial teams around the design of the page. Once we’re finished with the rollout, we will be improving the visual treatment of story cards (promos) to highlight correspondent stories and feature pieces. The current designs look something like this:
The plain promo design for the MVP launch
And below is one of the proposals for how we might display other types of promo:
An example of potential visual treatments for special types of promo
React in the browser
We decided early on in the project that using React in the browser was overkill for a page that is predominantly static text and images. The performance impact of bundling so much JavaScript and executing it in the browser is also unacceptably high: Even making use of server-side rendering, emulated mobile devices spend nearly 4 times as long executing scripts and performing layouts & paints when React was run on the page.
A timeline of the server side rendered page without React in the browser
A timeline showing the impact of running React in the browser
Our current approach to running JavaScript in the browser is to build a good ol’ fashioned bundle, completely separate from the React components. However, we realise that this isn’t going to scale for very long, and that eventually we will have to find a way to run our React components in the browser without impacting the user experience. Solutions that we’re looking into include:
Using Preact in place of React.
Converting our components to stateless functional components where possible to reduce their size.
Smarter code splitting so that we can load non-essential code on-demand.
Acknowledgements
Firstly, to everybody involved: thank you. Rarely have I had the chance to work with so many talented, patient, dedicated, and caring people. From documentation tweaks to requirements gathering, from bug fixes to building entire components; regardless of the size of your contribution, we wouldn’t have reached this point without you. So again: thank you, and congratulations on reaching this milestone.
To the design team and editorial staff: thank you for helping us find a balance between perfection and a fast launch.
To the project managers, business analysts, and product owners: I don’t think you get enough credit. Thank you for working extraordinarily hard to smooth out all of the bumps in this project, and for providing the development team with a clear path.
And finally, to my team: You are amazing. I’m so proud of what we’ve built together. On a more personal level, you’ve made coming into work feel like coming home to a second family, and I’m eternally grateful for that. The donuts are on me 💜.Pune, Aug 22: Members of a Ganesh Mandal (puja organisers) in Pune publicly humiliated and forced 11 Muslim men to do sit-ups as punishment after they refused to pay donation for Ganeshotsav. The Muslim men, all in their 20s and 30s, were from Uttar Pradesh working in a bakery in Pune. Members of the Shri Ram Ganesh Mandal publicly humiliated the Muslim migrant workers and forced them to do sit-ups as punishment for not paying the donation demanded by them for Ganeshotsav. After facing humiliation, the workers quit their job, while some of them left for their home state.
The incident took place on August 15 when members of the Shri Ram Ganesh Mandal demanded Rs 100 for ‘Ganpati vargani’ (donation for Ganesh festival) to the staff of Crown Bakers, on the Bhosari-Alandi Road in Pimpri-Chinchwad. The workers were agreed to pay Rs 50 for donation, but the Mandal members were adamant on their Rs 100 demand. The mandal members then threatened the workers and made them to do sit-ups as punishment on a busy road. (ALSO READ: Muslim woman fired from work for wearing hijab in US)
According to a report of the Indian Express, the Mandal members shot the video of the public humiliation of Muslim workers and shared it with their friends to make it viral. After the video went viral, some of the workers involved left for Uttar Pradesh. The other youths are not reporting for work out of fear. “We have booked three members of the Ganesh mandal, but have not arrested them. The offence is bailable. A notice has been issued to the three to be present in court on Monday to secure bail,” Assistant Police Inspector Mahesh Swamy was quoted as saying.
“It seemed the bakery workers and mandal members had some dispute over Ganpati donations, after which the bakery workers were asked to do sit-ups. The mandal workers erred in making a video and sharing it,” said Shivaji Shinde, who has let out his premises on rent to Crown Bakers. However the Crown Bakery owner said that the matter has ended and he did not want to prolong the issue.Get the latest from TODAY Sign up for our newsletter
Dec. 27, 2013, 6:35 PM GMT By Herb Weisbaum
The theft of 40 million credit and debit card records from Target wasn't the biggest or most damaging data breach ever, but coming right before Christmas, it sure did get our attention – and maybe that’s good.
Perhaps we needed a slap in the face to get us to focus on the growing problem of financial data theft. Keep in mind: Target was just one of about 600 publicly disclosed data breaches in 2013.
“Any retailer can be hit,” said Al Pascual, a senior analyst for security risk and fraud at Javelin Strategy and Research. “People need to protect themselves because sooner or later they’re going to be affected, regardless of where they shop.”
It’s important to understand how debit cards and credit cards differ when it comes to fraud protection, and what to do if your card information is stolen. Quite frankly, some of the advice given to Target victims was questionable or wrong. Here’s what you need to know:
1. Credit cards offer better fraud protection.
The most important difference between credit and debit cards is that credit cards provide better fraud protection.
“If a fraudster steals your credit card number and uses it, they’re stealing the bank’s money, not your money,” said John Ulzheimer with CreditSesame.com. “If a fraudster steals your debit card number and uses it, they’re stealing your money and you’ll have to argue with the bank to get your money back.”
Federal law limits responsibility for unauthorized credit card charges to $50. Visa, MasterCard, Discover and American Express all have “zero liability” policies, so you’ll never lose a penny to credit card fraud.
With debit cards, your maximum liability is $50, if you notify the bank within two days. After that it jumps to $500. You could lose all the money that was stolen from your checking account if you fail to report the fraud within 60 days of getting your bank statement.
Visa and MasterCard promise “zero liability” on the debit card transactions they handle if the customer chooses to sign for the transaction rather than use a PIN. Even so, the missing money doesn’t go back into your account instantaneously.
“Your money could be legally missing from your account for as much as two weeks while the bank investigates and decides whether to reimburse you,” noted Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director at the advocacy group U.S. PIRG. “During that time you may not be able to pay your rent or mortgage or buy anything with your debit card.”
So why have a debit card? Some people don’t |
He proposed pilloring tax havens outside the U.S. to help create millions of new jobs by rebuilding the nation’s crumbling infrastructure.
In a veiled slight to Clinton, he gave a nod to “women governors and women senators” who have helped progress feminist causes in the U.S.—but did not mention the possibility of a woman becoming president for the first time.
“It’s not a question of just challenging her,” he said later. “There are enormous issues facing the country that every serious candidate has to focus on…What does Hillary, what does Ted Cruz, what does Bernie Sanders, what does any candidate propose to address those issues?”
Sanders has served in the Senate with both Cruz, of Texas, and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, the only two major declared candidates for president. A self-described “Democratic socialist,” Sanders has been compared as a person who could bring the same vigor to the Democratic debate as Cruz and Paul are expected to bring to the GOP primary.
It’s a comparison for which he doesn’t much care. He plays up the underdog role even in that context, noting that his 8.5-hour filibuster in 2010 on the Obama administration’s tax-cut deal isn’t remembered nearly as much as Paul’s 13-hour one on drones or Cruz’s 21-hour talk-a-thon on the Affordable Care Act.
“When I did my filibuster, which was shorter but first, there…was a huge amount of social traffic on it,” Sanders said.
“The media wasn’t particularly interested in covering it. But when you have my political point of view, you’re not going to get on network television very often. And that’s part of the reality. When you’re taking on the billionaire class, you’re taking on the media, too. And the media would be more sympathetic to a Rand Paul or a Ted Cruz than a Bernie Sanders, in my eyes.”
Therein, again, lies the challenge for Sanders. He knows he needs the press, which is why he’s running back and forth from his hotel room to the lobby—back to the room—to various Manhattan spots for national hits on Wednesday. And he knows he’ll need a comfortable-enough amount to present a serious challenge.
Maybe a surprise endorsement, too? At the National Action Network convention, Sharpton joked that the next-day media story would focus on the fact that Sanders and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, a progressive darling, were seen whispering to each other on stage during a panel.
“So watch out, Hillary,” Sharpton joked.BREMERTON, Wash. (AP) - A Washington State Ferries executive whose ticket-seller son was fired by the agency has been placed on administrative leave for undisclosed reasons.
Operations director Steve Rodgers was administratively reassigned to his home July 3, The Kitsap Sun reported. Rodgers must remain there and be available by phone from 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Monday through Friday while an investigation is underway, according to a letter signed by Cam Gilmour, the chief operating officer of the state Department of Transportation.
The newspaper said it obtained the letter under a public records request. Rodgers did not immediately respond to an email from The Associated Press seeking comment Saturday.
Rodgers' son Josh, a ticket seller at the Fauntleroy terminal, was fired last December after a spot check revealed that $529 was missing from his working fund.
Josh Rodgers insisted that he just borrowed the money for gas and was going to pay it back the next day. He's appealing his termination through the Inlandboatmen's Union, and it's not clear whether his father's administrative leave is related.
The Sun reported that questions had been raised about whether Josh Rodgers received preferential treatment over the years. A human resources consultant for the ferries wrote a letter four days before the firing that said that while Josh Rodgers had received six verbal or written warnings since July 2010, terminal supervisors never asked management for disciplinary action.
By contrast, supervisors requested disciplinary action five times for a co-worker at Fauntleroy who received eight warnings since 2007.
"Unfortunately, this entire process has had bits and pieces of nepotism, and this is not the image that employees should have of WSF management," the consultant, Jim Schofield, wrote to the agency's operations and construction director, George Capacci.
"I understand terminating an employee is not an easy decision and regardless of favoritism it is difficult when you work closely with the employee's father," Schofield wrote.
He noted that there had been at least 23 incidents of theft in the ferry system since 2000, and that Josh Rodgers' case was being handled differently. He warned that if Josh Rodgers wasn't fired or allowed to resign in lieu of termination, it would be difficult in the future to dismiss employees for theft.
Transportation Department spokesman Lars Erickson said he was concerned that reporting on individual cases of wrongdoing could present a misleading image of the ferry system.
"Those incidents are very serious, and we use a deliberate process with data and factual information to determine corrective action when appropriate," he said. "There are 1,800 employees at Washington State Ferries that are committed public servants to keep our vessels moving. I don't want the public to think there is a systemic problem here."
News of Steve Rodgers' administrative leave comes amid a tough summer for the agency.
Transportation officials are investigating after a Seattle-bound Washington state ferry was mistakenly loaded with too many passengers and forced to return to the Bremerton terminal Friday.
On Aug. 3, a ferry from San Juan Island to Anacortes suffered a mechanical problem, and passengers were told to huddle on the main passenger level and don life jackets. In late July, a ferry lost power on the system's busiest route, stranding hundreds of passengers in Puget Sound until the vessel could be towed to the dock.GREEN BAY, Wis. -- James Jones hasn’t forgotten when he incurred Aaron Rodgers' wrath. Yes, even one of the Green Bay Packers quarterback’s good friends found himself on the receiving end of the two-time NFL MVP’s ire a few times during their eight years together.
And while Jones believes that Rodgers means it when he says he only gets on receivers he cares about and won’t chastise a player “unless I believe in a guy,” what’s more important to Jones is what Rodgers’ approach proves about Rodgers himself.
Former Packers receiver James Jones said that he didn't mind if QB Aaron Rodgers read him the riot act on occasion. "It lets me know that you care," Jones said. AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast
“For me, I loved it because it lets me know that you’re trying to win. It lets me know that you care,” Jones said this past Friday morning during an interview on “Green & Gold Today” on ESPN Milwaukee. “What’s crazy is he’s just like that in practice like he is in a game. He wants to be perfect, and if it’s not perfect -- whether it’s him, whether it’s you -- he’s going to own up to it and he’s going to make sure you hold up your end of the bargain.
“But I love it because I want a competitor. I want a guy out there that, if he’s not doing the right thing then, yeah, you get on him, whether I’m on the bad end of it or not. We’re all out here trying to win. We’ve got one goal -- trying to win the Super Bowl. We’re not one of these teams trying to make it to the playoffs, win five games, [or] be 8-8. We are trying to get to the Super Bowl, so we need everybody. And that’s how he approaches the game. He tries to be perfect.
“When [New England Patriots quarterback] Tom Brady does it, it’s all good. But when Aaron does it, [critics say] he’s not a leader and all this stuff. The guy just wants to win, and he wants to get the best out of everybody. Period.”
That’s why Jones, who spent his first seven NFL seasons with the Packers before returning last year to help fill the void left by an injured Jordy Nelson, believes the team’s young receivers -- Davante Adams, Jeff Janis, Jared Abbrederis, Ty Montgomery and rookie fifth-round pick Trevor Davis -- would be wise to do everything they can to connect with Rodgers and commit to doing what it takes to be on the same page with him.
Yet again, following the team’s final open practice during organized team activities last week, Rodgers reiterated how vital it is to not only understand the offense as it’s designed in the playbook (or, these days, on an iPad), but also how it’s run with Rodgers under center.
“I’ve said this a number of times: There’s an offense on paper and then there’s an offense kind of when we take it and go with it,” Rodgers said. “The great thing is, there’s freedom for creativity within that.”
But there’s also room for miscommunication and confusion, and that’s where Rodgers and his young receivers must work together, Jones said. Adams, Janis and Abbrederis are entering their third NFL seasons and should be furthest along in that process; Montgomery had his rookie year cut short by an ankle injury last year, and Davis is one of several rookies trying to get up to speed.
Building chemistry with Aaron Rodgers during the offseason will be key for promising receiver Davante Adams. "Davante can be special in this league," ex-teammate James Jones said. AP Photo/Morry Gash
“They need to really take advantage of these OTAs and training camp and minicamp to really build Aaron’s trust. That’s first and foremost,” said Jones, who led the Packers in receiving yards (890) last season, in part because he and Rodgers quickly got back on the same wavelength in the offense. “If you go out there and have 12’s trust, he’s going to give you opportunities to make plays.
“All four of them need to sit down with Aaron. You pick Aaron’s brain, you talk to him on the field, you talk to him off the field, you consistently get in his ear on what he wants you to do. Just like when I first got there last year [after signing in Week 1]. Aaron was like, ‘Look, J.J., these are the routes I like you on, these are the routes I’m going to signal to you in the game because you run them very well.
“It’s definitely going to take them earning Aaron’s trust, communicating with him. Then he’s going to put you in the best situation possible.”
And while the Packers’ decision to go young at receiver wound up costing Jones a chance at returning to Green Bay, Jones believes those players will flourish this season behind Nelson and Randall Cobb -- with Rodgers’ help.
“All those guys bring great things to the table,” Jones said. “Davante can be special in this league; he had the injury bug last year [with ankle and knee injuries], which kind of messed him up mentally and physically. I expect him to bounce back. Jeff and ‘Abby’ are just extremely smart and extremely athletic guys. I’m excited to see what they’re going to do with a lot of opportunities.
“And my sleeper is Ty Montgomery. He’s one of those kids that is going to do everything perfect every time. He’s a perfectionist and he’s going to be where he’s supposed to be when he’s supposed to be [there]. He’s extremely smart [and] they can move him around to numerous positions.
“I’m excited to see how those young guys do. Me being there last year, I built a relationship with every last one of them, so I just want to see them all succeed. But the biggest thing is earning Aaron’s trust. Like me and Randall and Jordy always talk [about], ‘We’re still trying to earn his trust.’”Editor’s note: graphic content
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — A workshop at Harvard University on Tuesday night delved into the ins and outs of anal sex, with a presenter denouncing the “stupidity of abstinence” and the joys of “putting things in your butt,” according to a College Fix reporter who attended the event.
The workshop was held as part of the Ivy League university’s Sex Week, which launched Monday and runs through Nov. 12. Titled “What What in the Butt: Anal 101,” the event drew nearly 50 students.
At one point the presenter leading the workshop passed out gloves and butt plugs to students as she offered instructions on anal relaxation techniques.
“Remember it’s all about practice, practice, practice,” said the presenter, Natasha, a representative of the Cambridge-based adult shop Good Vibrations.
Showing students a special medical-grade butt plug, she said “a local guy named Greg makes these—salt of the Earth!”
Identifying the event with the sexual positivity movement, Natasha said the goal was to “encourage people to go after their desires and not feel shame.”
“Come up front guys, were gonna have some dirty fun,” she said as the presentation began.
Noting “not all men have penises, not all women have vaginas,” she added “the butthole is the great sexual equalizer. All humans have a butthole.”
A slide shown during the event listed other perks: “because it feels good,” “tantalizing taboo” and “increases truth/intimacy.”
The crowd appeared enthusiastic, asking detailed questions about anal intercourse. One guy even showed up in a hotdog costume.
“There are two types of people in this world, people who watch anal porn and dirty fucking liars,” Natasha told students.
She said she blames politics and religion for preventing young people from enjoying anal sex.
“You couldn’t be fucked in the ass in Texas until about 10 minutes ago,” she said.
Natasha also denounced abstinence, saying “it doesn’t make any fucking sense” and that “the population of priests and nuns are declining.”
During the event, Natasha went over relaxation and tickling techniques. She also delved into how different actions stimulate the anatomy and how to avoid messy situations. At one point she held up anal beads and explained how to use them. She also discussed how porn gives inaccurate perceptions of sex.
The event closed with a raffle for expensive sex toys, including butt plugs and vibrators. The butt plugs used during the demonstration were handed back to organizers.
Students were also allowed to take whatever they wanted from a bountiful amount of male and female condoms, sex toy cleaners, and literature from Planned Parenthood.
Anal 101 is one of a number of events as part of Harvard’s student organized sex week observance. Other events later in the week include “Beyond the Hub: Broadening Your Porn Horizons” and “Unleashed: Kink 101.”
Tuesday’s event was not the first time Harvard has hosted an anal sex workshop. It also did in 2014, The College Fix reported at the time.
Current members of Harvard’s student sexual education group, Sexual Health Education and Advocacy Throughout Harvard, or SHEATH, which organizes Sex Week, lobbied to bring it back.
MORE: UChicago Sex Week includes love enchantments, ‘sexual pain’ workshop, BDSM tutorials
MORE: UNM sex week: Abortion is healthy, Bible supports homosexual sex, orgies are fun
Read More
Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on TwitterNEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. Federal Reserve on Monday awarded $50 billion in term reverse repurchase agreements in the second of four weekly test operations in an effort to see how the tool might be used when it decides to tighten monetary policy.
The central bank will pay Wall Street dealers, money market funds, mortgage finance agencies and other qualified participants a “stopout” interest rate of 0.07 percent for the 21-day reverse repos (RRP) due on Jan. 5, 2015, the Fed said via the New York Federal Reserve website.
Bids submitted at the stopout rate were awarded about 94 percent of the amount submitted, it said.
Sixty-eight participants submitted $75.1 billion worth of bids, with 45 of them receiving awards, the Fed said.
Last week, the Fed awarded $50 billion in 28-day term RRP at a stop-out rate of 0.08 percent. Forty of 71 participants submitted $101.93 billion worth of bids, equivalent to 92 percent of the submitted bids.
For more details, see ((here))Hearthstone Preview: Mage Spells and Abilities
by Zenstyle - 6 years ago
Hot off the heels of our preview of the Priest class, we at BlizzPro are taking a look at another explosive caster class, the Mage. Jaina Proudmoore has been a perpetual victim in the Warcraft universe, but it looks like she’ll get the chance to drop the hurt on her would be opponents in Hearthstone. The Mage deck, despite dealing with the numerous mysteries of the arcane, is actually a bit more straightforward than the Priest deck. It features a fair amount of freeze spells and in general a bunch of high damage nukes. Is it worth playing though? We’ll address that question by first looking at the multitude of spells and abilities available to the Mage deck.
Fireblast
In the last couple of weeks, we’ve discussed two different hero abilities that feature direct damage. We’ll continue that this week. Fireblast costs two energy and deals a single point of damage to anything on the board. While the Hunter and Priest abilities can do more for the same cost, it’s worth noting that both have restrictions. Priest requires an evolution card of sorts to unlock the ability to deal two (and then three) damage, and the Hunter deck can only deal two damage to the enemy hero, limiting it severely. Both are solid, and so is Fireblast. If you take the time to watch the Live Fireside Duel between the Shaman and Mage deck, (a match made in fan fiction heaven) you’ll see that Jaina uses the ability frequently to whittle down opposing minions.
Arcane Spells
All three sets of spells feature the ability to do direct damage, but the Arcane spells, predictably, also offer Jaina some utility options. While Arcane Explosion and Arcane Missiles are both solid spells, we’ll focus more on explaining the utility cards.
Arcane Intellect
Magic the Gathering veterans will probably be looking for a lot of card draw, counterspells and annoying utility in a ‘blue’ deck. It’s definitely there, but it’s nowhere near as prevalent. Arcane Intellect is a straightforward example of what’s there. Three energy, draw two cards. It might seem strange, but I’m kind of on the fence about this card. Yes, card draw is important. It just always is. At the same time, a lot of the other decks feature better options, in the form of minions that allow you to draw cards based on meeting certain criteria. This is just a three mana spell. There is no creature or damage paired with it. It’s possible I’m over thinking it, but like Priest, Mage is going to be drowning in spell cards. It’ll be important to make the most intelligent choices in order to maximize this somewhat fragile deck.
Polymorph
This card turns a minion into a 1/1 sheep. It’s worth noting that it can still attack, should your opponent choose to buff it up. That won’t happen though if you make sure to finish it off with Fireblast. Energy cost is four, but still. Absolutely core, run Polymorph.
Mirror Entity
Similar to the Hunter deck, Mage features a good number of secret cards, and this one’s solid. Mirror Entity‘s three energy cost means that you’ll probably end up copying something smaller, but there’s always a chance you’re going against someone who’s not running a bunch of minions and that this secret will sit until later on in the game. At that point, it might be able to copy something bigger when it attacks.
Counterspell
Counterspell, the hallmark of the control deck. The moment your opponent plays a spell (95% of the time the turn after you play this) go ahead and counter it with this secret card. It’s essentially a no exception card and, depending on what you counter, it could be huge. Besides, if you’re going to play a Mage deck, you NEED some kind of spell countering card, right?
Spellbender
While this card looks really good, I’d be careful. If you’re not running a lot of minions, the effect of this card is decidedly minimized. If you are running more minions though, I like this Spellbender. Given that the minion summoned has three toughness, it might survive and then you have another minion. If it’s a huge spell, even better That’s a huge spell one of your far better minions is not taking to the face. The only other thing that needs pointing out is that area of effect spells do not trigger this. Not the end of the world, but definitely food for thought.
Frost Spells
Staying true to the source material, the frost spells tend to trade damage for utility, in the form of the freeze mechanic. The short version on what this does is: frozen minions cannot attack on the next turn. It might be tempting to run a lot of frost spells, but I’m more of the mind that damage is the more valuable currency. Why freeze a minion when you can just take it out? It’s also worth noting that some cards just seem like more expensive versions of other cards with the freeze ability. Cone of Cold is just Arcane Explosion for one more energy with a sizable limitation on what it can hit. Call me crazy, but I’d just take Arcane Explosion. It’s the damage you’re there for. In short, look at the frost spell. Do you want damage, area of effect, or do you really want the freeze? To be thorough, we’ll take a look at some of the better frost spells.
Frostbolt
Alright, this is solid. Three damage and freeze for three energy to a single target. It’s a cheap enough answer to problematic creatures that comes with a giant stop sign for next turn. Frostbolt is worth taking a flyer on when you’re building your deck. It’s also worth noting that, at a common rating, it wouldn’t be hard to grind up as dust goes. That might be enough to run it initially, while grinding out/buying better cards.
Blizzard
Five energy is not cheap, but this probably the version of Cone of Cold you want to run. Two damage to all enemy minions. Considering the +spell damage available, it can also be jacked up to a horrifying three damage with relative ease. Blizzard should effectively be the widow maker when it comes to facing Hunter pets and Shaman totems.
Other Frost Spells
Again, I’m just not sold. Ice Lance could be worth running if you deck features a lot of freeze, but then it seems like you’re gimping your damage. Ice Barrier is just not a good turn three card, and it gets progressively less valuable as the match continues. When it comes to Frost Nova, the card seems like a desperate measure to stave off a killing blow while you hope to top deck an answer card. I’d just honestly run more answer cards. It’s ultimately your deck though. You have to do what’s right, and fun, by you!
Fire Spells
“Burn baby, burn”, said every single Mage I’ve tried to play in World of Warcraft. I’m naturally biased, but for my money, I want to have fire cards all day, forever. They deal the most damage, and at present, that’s how you get things done in Hearthstone. More cards will become available and as they do, the situation might change, but for now? Damage please. Fireball is a no brainer and should be run. I’m not going to get into that one much. Pyroblast, the epic fire spell card, is much the same. Both spells feature a beneficial energy to damage ratio, sitting at five for six and eight for nine, respectively. I’d recommend both as, despite their heavy costs, they bypass taunts, being frozen and all that nonsense and can win you the game later on.
Flamestrike
I love this card, but I respect that it costs seven energy. If it pans out, it should absolutely hand you control of the board. If it doesn’t, well, it’s seven energy for four damage, and only to minions. It seems strange to so heavily endorse Blizzard and be so unenthusiastic about Flamestrike, but that energy cost is just punishing, and by turn seven, there’s always the chance the situation might be too far gone to be remedied. Honest advice, look at where your deck is in terms of high energy cards and see if it’s practical to run one Flamestrike along with two copies of Blizzard.
Vaporize
I love Vaporize for the Mage. It’s a straight up ‘hey get out of here’ kill card and the Mage deck has very few options like that. What I would recommend though is, hold on to this card. Don’t play it on turn three when you have the energy to do so. Try dropping it after say, turn five, to get rid of something that cannot be conveniently taken out by by Fireblast or your other, smaller spells. Turns five through ten are the best window for this spell.
Whew, that’s a lot of spells. We’ll figure out how to tie them all together on Thursday, so be sure to check back.
Miss some of BlizzPro’s earlier previews? Take a look at those and other Hearthstone articles here. Have a question about Hearthstone or just want to talk deck ideas? Drop me a line at @RobertAWing on Twitter, or at ZenStyle@BlizzPro.com.Soft and tender almond meal apple cider donuts stuffed with pieces of chopped apple and topped with a molasses dulce de leche glaze. Looking for more donuts? Check these out!
Have I ever told you about my honeycrisp problem? Like, Steve told me we were going to have to budget for them. If I had it my way, I would eat them for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and every snack in between. Oh, and of course, in donuts. 😉
I don’t know what I’m more excited about–the donuts or the glaze. I loooove the texture of almond meal desserts, especially in donuts, but this glaze is truly unique and over-the-top delicious. They are a match made in heaven.
The donuts are ridiculously simple–one bowl, only a handful of ingredients, and just take a matter of minutes. The glaze takes a little bit more time, but you can make it while your donuts cook and and cool, and it times out perfectly. I love it when things work out perfectly like that. 😉
You guys are going to love these donuts. I took them to work so I wouldn’t eat all of them, and even still I kept sneaking in to grab one totally stealing them from all my friends. Whadda jerk, right? 😉Iraq’s Parliament Speaker, Salim Al-Jubouri yesterday called on the government to remove army leaders who failed to perform their duties and suffered serious defeats in Ramadi at the hands of militants affiliated to the Islamic State (ISIS), the Anadolu Agency reported.
In a statement, Al-Jubouri called on Prime Minister Haidar Al-Abadi “not to wait and to replace the failed security leaders”.
He stressed on the need to respect the parliament’s decisions and to allow thousands of displaced families who fled Anbar after the ISIS takeover entry into the capital, Baghdad, in accordance with the necessary measures to maintain the security situation.
After Al-Abadi became prime minister last year, he sacked dozens of army and other security chiefs as ISIS gained control of large areas in the north and west of the country.
On Friday, ISIS seized control of Ramadi including its security headquarters and government departments.
Losing Ramadi came as heavy blow to the US trained Iraqi army who since last summer have been battling ISIS with help from a US-led coalition.
Meanwhile, the Baghdad Operations Command allowed displaced families from Anbar province to enter the capital, after four days of denying them entry, on the condition that they have a sponsor who lives in the capital.
The sponsor is someone who pledges that the family will not pose a security threat to the capital.He has been one of the few constants under Hughes’ two years of progress, the steel to accompany the silk.
“It’s amazing to think how far the club has come in such a short space of time. I can remember the early days at the training ground – before we got Portacabins to change in I had to get changed at the stadium, drive my Peugeot here and park on the grass, get muddy and then drive back to the stadium.
“This wasn’t a time when we had nice cars either. It’s a fairytale for the chairman - 20 years ago he was getting protests against him.
“Bojan was the turning point. When he came in I think the whole of Europe stood up, just because of his reputation and who he’s played for [Barcelona].
“Since then we’ve spent £18million and £12million on international players and it shows how far we’re going to go. This is going to continue, too. The chairman has said he’s going to carry on backing the manager. We’ve also got a manager who should be managing a team in the Champions League. We are very fortunate to have him.
“The Man City thing was difficult but he didn’t do too bad did he? QPR tainted his image a bit but everywhere else he’s shown what a very good manager he is and I’m just surprised he’s not had that chance at a top, top team. Our main job is to keep hold of him as long as we can, just like with our star players.”Former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton says President Obama’s sanctions on Russia are not a sufficient response to Russia’s “attack on our constitutional system.”
“I don't think they will have much impact at all,” Bolton told “Fox & Friends” on Friday of Obama’s sanctions, calling for actions that will “make the Russians feel pain.”
“The Russians have walked all over the Obama administration for eight years. It's really been a pathetic performance.”
Bolton noted that President-elect Donald Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE’s administration could reverse Obama’s actions easily.
ADVERTISEMENT
He added that if the allegations are true, the Kremlin's activity is "utterly unacceptable."
“It is not enough to say — and people should be careful about this — to say, ‘Well, it didn’t actually have an impact on the election,’ ” Bolton said.
“The fact that Russia’s efforts were incompetent or insufficient shouldn’t make us feel better. No — it’s the effort that they made, if this is accurate, that should trouble us, not the fact that it failed.”
The Obama administration on Thursday announced an array of retaliatory measures against Russia for meddling in the presidential election results.
The measures included expulsion of 35 Russian intelligence operatives in the U.S., the shuttering of two diplomatic compounds in New York and Maryland used for intelligence gathering, a slate of economic sanctions, diplomatic censure, public “naming and shaming” and the possibility of covert cyber actions.
The U.S. intelligence community publicly accused Russia of election interference in October. And a secret CIA assessment reportedly concluded that Moscow acted specifically to get Trump elected.
Russia has denied any interference in the election, and Trump has questioned U.S. intelligence findings about Russia's involvement.Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0553579703, Mass Market Paperback)
Only a handful of authors write with such startling originality that the uniqueness of their vision has become synonymous with their name. In Spares and One of Us, Michael Marshall Smith has earned that distinction. In this unsettling, suspenseful, and wildly imaginative novel he's written a tale that from page one hurtles us....Call him Stark. If you have to. If you're lucky, you won't call him at all. Because if you do, it means you've got trouble. Big trouble. And the problem is that before Stark is done fixing something, a whole lot of other things usually get broken. Like laws and lives—and anyone who gets in the way. It's that attitude that's earned him his latest assignment: finding a missing VIP named Fell Alkland. The authorities believe Alkland has been kidnapped. Stark doesn't. He hasn't stayed alive this long without learning the basics of survival in a world hurtling straight to hell: Things are always more complicated than they seem. And when a job seems too easy, that's when something really ugly is about to happen. For Fell Alkland is about to become Stark's worst nightmare, a nightmare where anything can happen at any time—where friends can become enemies in a heartbeat and your most secret fear a soul-screaming reality. And the worst of it is that for this nightmare you don't even have to be asleep.Millionaire gay fathers to sue the Church of England for not allowing them to get married in the church
Barrie Drewitt-Barlow said that he wants to marry partner Tony in a church
Said that the only way forward is to challenge the church in court
It is a test for Cameron's promise to the CofE and Roman Catholic bishops
Said that no church would be forced to conduct same-sex weddings
Barrie and Tony now have five children through surrogate mothers
The first legal challenge to the Church of England's ban on same-sex marriage was launched today - months before the first gay wedding can take place.
Gay father Barrie Drewitt-Barlow declared: 'I want to go into my church and marry my husband.' He added: 'The only way forward for us now is to make a challenge in the courts against the Church.'
The legal move means an early test for David Cameron's promise to the CofE and Roman Catholic bishops that no church would be forced to conduct same-sex weddings against the will of its leaders and its faithful.
Barrie (right) Drewitt-Barlow wants to be able to marry his civil-partner Tony (left) in a church
Ministers set down a 'quadruple lock' in the new same sex marriage law - which received Royal Assent last month - which is supposed to protect those churches which oppose gay marriage.
However the guarantees will have to be tested in the courts and gay rights groups have been expecting to bring an early challenge.
Mr Drewitt-Barlow and his civil partner Tony have been a celebrated couple since 1999, when they became the first gay couple to be named on the birth certificate of a child. They now have five children through surrogate mothers.
He said : 'We need to convince the church that it is the right thing for our community for them to recognise us as practising Christians.
Tony and Barrie Drewitt-Barlow with their long-distance twins Dallas and Jasper. They now have five children through surrogate mothers
'I am a Christian - a practising Christian. My children have all been brought up as Christians and are part of the local parish church.' Mr Drewitt-Barlow, 42, who owns a surrogacy company based near the family home in Essex and is opening another in Los Angeles, added: 'If I was a Sikh I could get married at the Gurdwara. Liberal Jews can marry in the Synagogue - just not the Christians.
'It upsets me because I want it so much - a big lavish ceremony, the whole works.
He said it was a shame that he and his partner were being forced to take Christians to court to get them to recognise them, but he said the new law did not give them what they have been campaigning for.
Mr Drewitt-Barlow, who took out a civil partnership in 2006, added: 'It is like someone giving me a sweetie with the wrapper on and telling me to suck it.' Under the Government's same-sex marriage law, which is expected to lead the first gay wedding next summer, churches must legally opt in before they can conduct same-sex ceremonies.
Those that hold objections to gay marriage have been told the quadruple lock will prevent the courts from forcing them to stage gay weddings against the conscience of priests and most congregations.
The lock says that no religious organisation could be compelled to marry same-sex couples or to permit this to happen on their premises.
Barrie holds his newborn daughter, Saffron, at a hospital in Modesto, California in 1999
It would be unlawful for ministers to marry same-sex couples unless their organisation's governing body has opted into provisions for doing so. The Equality Act 2010 would be amended to ensure no discrimination claim could be brought against religious organisations for refusing to marry a same-sex couple.
The new law also states that it no religious organisation could be compelled to marry same-sex couples or to permit this to happen on their premises. It would be unlawful for ministers to marry same-sex couples unless their organisation's governing body has opted into provisions for doing so. The Equality Act 2010 would be amended to ensure no discrimination claim could be brought against religious organisations for refusing to marry a same-sex couple.
The law also states that it is illegal for the Church of England and the Church in Wales to marry same-sex couples.
The CofE is also protected by its own internal canon laws, which are part of the law of land, which say marriages must be between a man and a woman.
However a succession of past court cases have resulted in defeats for Christians who were in disputes over equality laws, and in particular courts have always found in favour of gays who have challenged Christians.
Under the Government's same-sex marriage law, which is expected to lead the first gay wedding next summer, churches must legally opt in before they can conduct same-sex ceremonies
In recent years notable cases have ended in the sacking of a town hall registrar who refused to conduct civil partnership ceremonies, the sack for a Relate counsellor who said he would not give sex advice to gay couples, and defeat for a couple who declined to let a room in their hotel to a gay couple on the grounds that they were unmarried.
Colin Hart, of the Coalition for Marriage said: 'The ink's not even dry on the Bill and churches are already facing litigation. We warned Mr Cameron this would happen, we told him he was making promises that he couldn't possibly keep.
'He didn't listen. He didn't care. He's the one who has created this mess. Mr Cameron's chickens are coming home to roost and it will be ordinary people with a religious belief who yet again fall victim to the totalitarian forces of political correctness.'Posted by Horus Gilgamesh on Aug 6, 2014 in Bizarre |
I used to be a Christian. In fact, I was a devout ministry leader for many years – focused mostly on youth evangelism, Biblical literacy, and critical needs relief efforts overseas. A number of life experiences began to tug at the fabric of my faith, not the least of which is what I refer to as the “slippery slope” – the fine line between being devout and becoming delusional. Over the course of a decade, I watched as |
of yourself in the process.
Meanwhile, Sherman, who is running for the state house in the northwest suburbs on the Green Party ticket, has written a letter to Rep. Jack Franks (D- Woodstock), requesting that Davis be formally censured for attempting to order Sherman out of the witness chair as Sherman testified before the House State Government Administration Committee, which Franks heads.
Her grounds: "It’s dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists!"
UPDATE --- At his Web site, Sherman is reporting (and I have not confirmed since Davis has not returned several phone calls from me) that he has accepted an apology that Davis offered to him over the phone:
Davis said that she had been upset, earlier in the day, to learn that a twenty-second and twenty-third Chicago Public School student this school year had been shot to death that morning. She said that it was wrong for her to take out her anger, frustrations and emotions on me, and that she apologized to me. I told her that her explanation was reasonable and that I forgave her.....she thanked me for forgiving her.....
Audio of Davis v. Sherman courtesy of the Illinois Information Service.
Was Lincoln a believer in God? Was he a Christian?
Scott Reeder of the Small Newspaper group: "Illinois politicians have a long history of being tolerant of crooks, adulterers and liars -- as long as they believe in God."
Rich Miller on Capitol Fax: "One of the reasons this has gone mostly unreported locally is that strange statements are often the norm at the Statehouse."
Daily Kos
Boing Boing
Huffington Post
Crooks and Liars
Friendly AtheistThe heavily ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Borough Park is New York’s “baby capital,” a recent survey of births across the city published by the New York Post revealed on Monday.
Data from 2013, which is the most recent available, shows that the Brooklyn area has a birth rate of 27.9 per 1,000 residents. In 2013, some 5,458 babies were born in Borough Park.
“Our community is making up for the rest of the city,” said Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who has six grandchildren. “In our community, having children is fundamental. They are our most precious resource.”
New York City’s birth rate is currently at its lowest since 1936, and has seen a steady decline over the past decade. Bayside, Queens, had the lowest birth rate in New York with just 652 babies in 2013, or 5.5 born per 1,000 residents, the Post reported.
The data also revealed that half the city’s newborns were delivered by mothers who are foreigners. Asians hold the highest birth rate with 17.1 per 1,000 residents. The number of unplanned pregnancies has also declined, and the teen birth rate has fallen 10 percent since 2012 and 37.6 percent since 2004.Tobias Harris came into the season hoping to prove he was worth a big contract and part of the team’s future. He’ll get the contract, but still is undefined.
Tobias Harris is the enigma.
He has spent his entire NBA career kind of hard to figure out. At the Draft the question was about what position he would play and whether the 19-year-old could score in the NBA after just one year at Tennessee. When he left Milwaukee the question was whether he could play defense at any respectable level to earn playing time or find himself within an offense.
After his first year in Orlando, the question was where does this talent fit and could he take things to the next level? His second year left many of those same questions.
And so here the Magic are, preparing to deal with a restricted free agent who is going to command at least $13 million per year still trying to figure out exactly how Tobias Harris fits in the mix.
His 2015 season did not illuminate anything further. It made the question of what will happen with him this summer that much more confusing and baffling.
So how do you account for Tobias Harris’ season?
He continued to put in decent scoring numbers. He improved his 3-point shooting and his defense saw marginal improvements too. Harris did become a better player.
He earned the sizeable contract he is likely to get this summer. Just how sizeable still feels like a mystery. And how high the Magic should go to match him seems an even bigger mystery.
That was a mystery his 2015 season failed to solve.A few months ago, I argued there is a significant gender-wage gap in professional basketball. While the NBA gives 50% of its revenue to its players, it appears the WNBA pays out only about 20% of its revenue.
Not surprisingly, several WNBA players responded to that story with calls for higher pay. Nneka Ogwumike noted specifically that the players should set a goal of receiving 50% of league revenue, telling ESPN: "Knowing how far we need to go, that's a good marker. If you just think of it from a principle standpoint, it makes sense. Hopefully we can work toward that."
Obviously the players want more money. But I think they are not the only people who should want the WNBA players to be paid better.
I think the WNBA should want to see its players paid better.
This may seem counterintuitive. Consider the following quote:
The financial results of the past season prove that salaries must come down. We believe that players insisting on exorbitant prices are injuring their own interests by forcing out of existence clubs which cannot be run and pay large salaries except at a personal loss.
This sounds like something someone with the WNBA (or even the NBA) might have said recently. But actually it comes from baseball's National League — in 1879. Yes, the argument that high salaries are going to destroy a sports league go back nearly 140 years. And such arguments have been repeated frequently since.
A few weeks ago, James Dolan announced that he intended to sell the New York Liberty of the WNBA. In reporting the story, The New York Times noted:
In 2015, Dolan told “Real Sports” on HBO that the Liberty were a consistent money loser and said he had nearly handed the team back to the league: “It hasn’t made money. Its prospects of making money, at that time and even today, are still slim.”
Again, it is not surprising to hear Dolan claim he lost money on the Liberty. But before The Times — or anyone else — accepts this as true, we should remember:
The NBA has made similar claims about its teams very recently, and there is good reason to doubt that story.
Owners of professional sports teams have made similar arguments for more than a century.
Because teams tend not to show us their books, there is no way to determine if anything they say is true.
As for the WNBA, I tend to agree with Jacob Bogage of The Washington Post. I doubt business is as bad as James Dolan's quote suggest. In a league in which players receive only about 20% of league revenue, it seems hard to believe there are serious financial losses. That being said, there is an incentive to claim losses exist. Certainly, if the WNBA was definitely turning a profit, it would make it harder for the league to refute a call for higher player salaries when the CBA is renegotiated.
Then again, maybe there is also an incentive for the WNBA to stop resisting the players' call for higher wages.
As Commissioner Lisa Border recently emphasized, the WNBA is a very young league. The past history of professional sports leagues indicates that leagues do much better after many decades (certainly more than two) have elapsed. Part of this improvement surely comes from having more and more people exposed to the league. But expanding the talent pool a league draws from can also help. For example, it is not unreasonable to argue that baseball got much better after 1947: Racial integration gave baseball teams access to more talent, and more talent definitely improves the product a sports league offers.
The WNBA certainly has a number of very talented players today. But the low pay in the WNBA has had a detrimental impact on its talent pool. The most obvious example is Diana Taurasi, who sat out the 2015 season after her team in Russia agreed to pay her not to play in the WNBA.
Taurasi was motivated to accept this offer because the relatively low salaries in the WNBA lead many players to play professional basketball throughout the year. When the WNBA season is over, a majority of players — as the WNBA itself notes — join teams in other countries. In many cases, the international teams pay many times what the WNBA is willing to pay. Although the pay can be substantial, it is difficult for a professional athlete to continue playing with no significant breaks.
It recently occurred to me, though, that the lack of pay isn't just an issue for current players. Consider for a moment the teams in the Final Four of the 2017 women’s NCAA volleyball tournament. As you watch these teams (and yes, this is on tonight!), you should notice something about the rosters: Of the players on the four teams in the final (Nebraska, Penn State, Florida and Stanford), four women are 6 feet 6 inches or taller.
This is an exceedingly uncommon height for women. How uncommon? It is argued that 6-6 women are less common than 7-foot men. But when you look at the rosters of the final six teams in the 2017 men's NCAA volleyball final, you don't see any 7-0 players. Why? As a Forbes contributor noted in 2013, those men have a huge incentive to play basketball even if they are not that good.
So why are very tall women playing volleyball? Well, I am sure they love the sport. But imagine pay in the WNBA was much higher. It is likely higher pay would encourage more girls (especially very tall girls) to acquire the skills necessary to compete in basketball. In other words, higher pay might make some girls decide they love basketball a bit more than volleyball. And that would deepen the future talent pool for the WNBA.
Ultimately, ownership of a team in a relatively young league is an investment that promises to generate very high returns in the distant future. If the WNBA wants the future to be as bright as possible, it shouldn’t pay its players more today just because that would make the game better today; it should also pay its players more today to encourage more girls to play basketball. And that will ultimately make the future of the WNBA much better.Embed from Getty Images
After being selected as a host venue for the 2018 World Cup in Russia, the suits at the Ekaterinburg Arena realised that they had their work cut out if they were going to boost the stadium’s capacity to meet the tournament minimum in time for kick-off.
The arena in Yekaterinburg boasted an initial capacity of just 27,000 seats, some 8,000 seats shy of the FIFA tournament minimum which stands at 35,000.
So a plan was hatched by the Russian Football Union to expand the Ekaterinburg Arena into a 45,000-capacity bowl by basically erecting two massive ‘bleacher’ style stand extensions outside the ground…
Yep. It looks exactly as insane as it does precarious. Like somebody’s taken a slice from a massive steel gateau.
If you’re already feeling the dizziness starting to set in, just wait until you see the view from the top of the outlying temporary structure…
Nice view from the new stadium in Ekaterinburg that will host the WC next summer. 🤦🏻♂️ pic.twitter.com/kdBZ0mHD45 — Stefano Conforti (@confortistefano) September 27, 2017
Thanks, but it’s a hard pass from Pies.The Steam Hardware Survey for the month of September is out, and it shows a slight anomaly when it comes to the usage share of operating systems. According to the survey, the market share of the Windows 7 among Steam users increased by 6% last month, while Windows 10 64-bit dipped 4.66%.
That being said, Windows 10 is still the most dominant OS that is run by 45.37% Steam users, followed by Windows 7 sitting at 41.01%. But the question is: why the gap between the two OSes has narrowed when it is actually expected to widen? Are Windows 10 users abandoning Microsoft’s latest operating system?
RELATED: Updated Win10 Game Mode Coming, Allows Use of “Full Processing Power” Like an Xbox
Before you jump to conclusions, there are a couple of things to take into consideration. First, the Steam Hardware Survey doesn’t represent the overall market trend as the results are solely based on the its userbase. Next, there is a margin of error, depending upon who opts in.
Moving to the drop in Win10 market share on Steam, it’s unlikely that users abandoned the OS in droves when there’s been no major opt-out solution that could have spurred this change.
What’s more plausible is that Steam just saw an exponential increase in the number of users during the past month. The majority of those users are possibly using lower-specced systems with older OSes installed.
Yes, you guessed it right. The reason behind this all is the explosion in popularity of PUBG in China. The proportion of Chinese language users on Steam increased by around 8% in September alone. Based on these estimates, the Chinese speakers are now a third of the Steam user base.
The shift for Steam shows the dramatic impact PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is currently having on the PC gaming platform. The game came out in March as an unfinished product, yet more than 12 million people have purchased it for $30. Just last month, PUBG hit 1.35 million concurrent players on Steam, surpassing Dota 2 for the top figure all time.
The number of PUBG players is the largest in China, which is around 3.6 million, according to data from SteamSpy. The milestone is achieved, even though the game has never been released in the country.
There is no server optimized for China mainland, and players have to spend extra money on network optimization services to run the game smoothly. Yet against all these odds, the game still got a big Chinese audience.In addition to hosting the ZDNet Government and ZDNet DIY-IT blogs, CBS Interactive's Distinguished Lecturer David Gewirtz is an author, U.S. policy advisor and computer scientist. He is featured in The History Channel special The President's Book of Secrets, is one of America's foremost cyber-security experts, and is a top expert on saving and creating jobs. He is also director of the U.S. Strategic Perspective Institute as well as the founder of ZATZ Publishing. David is a member of FBI InfraGard, the Cyberwarfare Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism & Security Professionals, a columnist for The Journal of Counterterrorism and Homeland Security, and has been a regular CNN contributor, and a guest commentator for the Nieman Watchdog of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. He is the author of Where Have All the Emails Gone?, the definitive study of email in the White House, as well as How To Save Jobs and The Flexible Enterprise, the classic book that served as a foundation for today's agile business movement.Marilyn Lancelot, 86, of Sun City, Ariz., for example, said that after being a compulsive gambler for seven years, she was arrested at age 61 for embezzling $350,000 from her job and served nearly a year in prison. “I really thought I’d win the big one deep down in my heart,” she said in an interview. “Every gambler says that.” Ms. Lancelot has described her experiences in the book “Gripped by Gambling.”
Many experts say that men are often “action” gamblers, who favor blackjack and poker, while women tend to be “escape” gamblers, drawn to games based on luck, like slot machines and lottery tickets. Women often begin gambling later in life than men, sometimes after a major life event, like the death of a spouse or when they become empty nesters.
Women are less likely to develop gambling problems than men, Mr. Whyte said, but “telescoping, the rapid development of problems, is especially pronounced in senior women.” It may seem surprising to some people that women have severe gambling problems, he said. “Grandma is not seen as someone who embezzles money and is taken off to jail,” he said, yet it happens.
Many women lose significant amounts of money and jeopardize their futures. “Once they tap into retirement savings, it’s incredibly hard — if they are ever able — to rebuild those savings,” Mr. Whyte said.
Stephanie Iacopino, 63, of Toms River, N.J., who works part time in retail sales, said that during years of compulsive gambling, she stole money from family members, friends and clients in a travel business, and ultimately went to prison in 2010 for embezzling about $18,000 from her church. She said she served nearly four months at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women near Clinton, N.J., followed by 22 months in New Jersey’s Intensive Supervision Program, which, the state says, is “more onerous” than traditional probation. “We don’t have a nest egg,” said Ms. Iacopino, who is married. “We live paycheck to paycheck.” But she said that while she is struggling financially, she is happy to be recovering from her addiction.One of the attorneys involved in the Citizens United case that changed the way elections are funded could be pushing the edge of the envelope again.
James Bopp Jr. (AP Photo/Eugene Tanner)
James Bopp Jr., an opponent of campaign finance restrictions who served as a legal adviser for Citizens United in its successful the 2010 Supreme Court case, recently established Republican Super PAC, a type of campaign committee that can raise and spend unlimited sums from corporations and individuals so long as it does not coordinate with political parties and candidates.
The new venture could, in effect, allow candidates and party committees to raise unlimited sums during the 2012 election. Unlike other super PACs that have sprung up since the landmark 2010 Supreme Court case, the Republican Super PAC promises donors it will spend money on the candidate of their choice…Judge Learned Hand called “the ghost of the innocent man convicted” an “unreal dream.” But in “Convicting the Innocent,” Brandon L. Garrett shows that it can be a “nightmarish reality.” Since the late 1980s, DNA testing has exonerated more than 250 wrongly convicted people, who spent an average of 13 years in prison for crimes they didn’t commit. (There is every reason to think that more people have been wrongly convicted since then, but only these 250 have been definitively exonerated by postconviction DNA tests.) Seventeen of the 250 were sentenced to die, and 80 to spend the rest of their lives in prison. By poring over trial transcripts and interviewing lawyers, prosecutors and court reporters, Garrett, a law professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, seeks to explore who these 250 innocent people are, and why they were wrongly convicted. His alarming conclusion: the wrongful convictions were not idiosyncratic but resulted from a series of flawed practices that the courts rely on every day, namely, false and coerced confessions, questionable eyewitness procedures, invalid forensic testimony and corrupt statements by jailhouse informers. Garrett’s book is a gripping contribution to the literature of injustice, along with a galvanizing call for reform.
Almost 90 percent of the 250 innocent people later exonerated were falsely convicted of rape, or rape and murder, and 40 of them actually confessed to crimes they didn’t commit, most adding specific details that only the real culprit could have known. How did this happen?
Garrett describes how the police, intentionally or not, fed details of the crime to the suspects — and then recorded only portions of the interrogations so that it was difficult for defense lawyers and jurors to reconstruct the truth. Even the selectively recorded interrogations make for painful reading, as the suspects offer facts that are inconsistent with what happened, and the police browbeat them into false confessions. (Detective: “You hung her!” Vasquez: “O.K., so I hung her.”) Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has refused to focus on whether confessions are reliable, asking instead whether they were coerced, or offered without Miranda warnings. Garrett says the best protection against false confessions would be to require that police record interrogations from beginning to end; at the moment, 11 states and the District of Columbia are required or encouraged to record at least some interrogations.
In addition to false confessions, eyewitnesses wrongly identified the accused in 76 percent of the 250 cases. The unreliability of witness identifications is now widely known, but Garrett was surprised to discover how flagrantly unreliable the procedures were in the cases he examined. In 78 percent of the trials, he found evidence that the police contaminated the eyewitness identifications with suggestive methods, like indicating which suspect in a lineup should be selected, or conducting lineups where one suspect obviously stood out from the others. (Many of the convicted looked nothing like the initial description given by the victims.) Garrett learned that while the witnesses were confident by the time of the trial that they had identified the right suspect, in more than half the cases they had not been confident at the time of the initial identification.
Photo
Of those exonerated by DNA, 70 percent were from minorities, and in nearly half of the rape cases involving blacks or Hispanics, the victims were white. (Garrett points out that “most sexual offenses, almost 90 percent, are committed by offenders of the same race as the victim.”) Garrett criticizes the Supreme Court for allowing lineups that were unfairly conducted, and says the best way to avoid erroneous identifications is to use a double-blind procedure where police officers can’t influence the witness because they don’t know which person in the lineup is the suspect.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
Garrett found invalid forensic testimony in 61 percent of the trials where an analyst testified for the prosecution, including overly confident claims of matching bite marks, shoe prints and hair samples. (One leading geneticist noted in 1989 that clinical and forensic labs have to meet higher standards to diagnose strep throat than to put a defendant on death row.) And Garrett discovered unreliable testimony by jailhouse informers in 21 percent of the trials — informers who, in exchange for lenient treatment from prosecutors, lied about hearing specific details of the crime from their cell mates. Garrett suggests this testimony could be avoided if prosecutors were prohibited from promising informers secret deals that weren’t disclosed to the defense.If there’s one thing you don’t want to mess with on the golf course, it’s lightning. While the odds of being struck are slim, Mother Nature doesn’t care about your chance to break the course record or the last wedge you just laid the sod over. When she’s rolling through you best take cover. Unfortunately, this one English golfer wasn’t so lucky and felt her wrath.
The Daily Mail has the full report:
A golfer has died in hospital after being struck by lightning while playing a round of golf. Philip Shard, 60, was left with serious injures after being struck at 10.50am on May 27 at the Fynn Valley Golf Club, near Ipswich, Suffolk.
Fellow players and paramedics tried desperately to resuscitate the IT consultant after he collapsed on the course and his heart stopped beating.
Golfer killed by lightning on golf course https://t.co/U7KQuGrXTu pic.twitter.com/6idzk4stKz — Golf Monthly (@GolfMonthly) June 6, 2017
Mr. Shard, of Rushmere St Andrew near Ipswich, was taken by road ambulance to the critical care unit at Ipswich Hospital but he died last Wednesday.
Tony Tyrrell, club owner and secretary, said: “Everyone at the club is horrified. It’s a dreadful thing to have happened and our thoughts are with his family.”
The club is now warning players to be vigilant of thunderstorms and “take action at the first signs of any electrical activity.”
Just because you’re an amateur doesn’t excuse you from having common sense.
[Daily Mail]
— — —
Keep yourself up-to-date with the latest goings-on in the world of golf by following the SwingxSwing Clubhouse on social media. We share stories, stats and breaking news on Twitter, keep the fun going off the course on Instagram and share any and all golf-related topics on Facebook.
SwingxSwing is a golf mobile app, media and entertainment company. The company owns and operates businesses across the following golf categories: GPS & Scorecard, Tee Times, Instruction, E-Sports, Social Media, Entertainment, and Apparel.
The SwingxSwing Clubhouse entertains its millions of golfer and golf enthusiast visitors with compelling content on professional golf, instruction, equipment, comedy and other lifestyle categories on a daily basis.
Never be the odd golfer out when your friends are talking about the latest or funniest happenings in golf. Sign up for the SxS newsletter today!BOSTON -- San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, who often irked the league by resting his stars during national TV broadcasts, says he's amenable to the changes made this offseason, though he's still not clear on who he can and cannot rest in certain situations.
NBA owners passed legislation in September that allows commissioner Adam Silver to fine teams at least $100,000 if they rest healthy players or multiple players outside of unusual circumstances, especially during national TV games. Teams electing to rest players have been encouraged to do so for home games instead of away games, and star players sitting out are expected to be on the bench during games.
"Frankly, it's a little bit cloudy. It's all done in good faith to make your fans feel like they're seeing what they want to see for their money, which I understand," Popovich said prior to Monday's game in Boston before deadpanning, "I'm just glad I was never one of those guys that rested people."
Turning more serious, he added, "So the league, obviously, they've compromised a great deal. This schedule is great. The way they've reduced back-to-backs and four-in-five-nights and that sort of thing, Adam listened and I think that's huge. It speaks a lot for how much he cares about the players and the league. The fans are important, too, and we gotta understand that."
But Popovich noted the rule still left some room for interpretation.
"Some of the stuff is in stone and should not be negotiable," said Popovich. "Obviously, Kawhi [Leonard] is hurt but, if Kawhi is healthy, we played last night, I need to play him tonight even though it's a back-to-back [because] we're on the road and he only plays in Boston once. So, same thing with a LeBron [James] or whoever it might be, that makes sense. So I can deal with that.
"On the TV games, the only thing I wonder about is how far down does the list go? I forget the words -- not your important players or your star players or your marquee players or something like that? There's a word, I just can't remember what the adjective was, but how far down the list does it go? How do you tell us? Are you going to tell us which ones are the marquee players and which ones aren't?
"I guess they will if we don't play them and the fine comes, then I guess we'll know this guy is a marquee player."
The Spurs remained without the services of Leonard on Monday night, and Popovich said he's uncertain when exactly Leonard will make his 2017-18 debut while still recovering from the quad injury suffered last season.
"I don't even ask. Seriously. When [the medical staff tells] me he's ready then I'll know he's ready," said Popovich. "[Leonard] doesn't like to be bugged about it all the time. I don't want to hear about it all the time. [The media is] going to ask the question and I understand. When they tell me he's ready to go, then I'll look at him on the court and I'll decide if I agree. Then he and I can talk about it. But the first step is for them to tell me he is ready to go."‘Capitalism Is Mother Earth’s Cancer’: World People’s Summit
Above Photo: “Caring for Mother Earth is a moral issue,” UN Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon (left) told the World People’s Conference on Saturday. “We must change how we use Mother Earth’s resources, and live in a manner that is sustainable.” Here, he is pictured with Bolivian President Evo Morales. Reuters.
The establishment of an independent climate tribunal to hold wealthy nations accountable emerged as a central goal of conference in Bolivia
Decrying capitalism as a “threat to life,” an estimated 7,000 environmentalists, farmers, and Indigenous activists from 40 countries convened in the Bolivian town of Tiquipaya for this weekend’s World People’s Conference on Climate Change, aiming to elevate the demands of social movements and developing countries in the lead-up to upcoming United Nations-led climate talks.
“Capitalism is Mother Earth’s cancer,” Bolivian President Evo Morales told the crowd, which also heard over the course of the three-day conference from United Nations Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon as well as other Latin American leaders.
The people’s summit, which concluded Monday afternoon, produced a 12-point declaration (Spanish) that will be presented during the COP21 climate negotiations taking place November 30-December 11 in Paris, France, during which 200 countries will attempt to cement an agreement to curb global warming. The COP21 agenda has been criticized for its sidestepping of issues like the role of capitalism in climate change and for the robust involvement of multinational corporations in the talks.
According to a translation, the Declaración de Tiquipaya calls for, among other things:
the creation of an international tribunal with “a binding legal capacity to prevent, prosecute and punish states that pollute and cause climate change by action or omission”;
compensation from wealthy countries to developing nations for “climate, social, and ecological debt accumulated over time”;
reclamation of the global commons; and
wholesale rejection of global capitalist and colonialist systems.
“We demand that the Paris Agreement does address the structural causes of capitalism,” the declaration reads. “It does not have to be an agreement that reinforces the capitalist model, through more market mechanisms, allowing volunteer commitments, encouraging the private sector and strengthening patriarchy and neo-colonialism.”
In advance of the Bolivia summit, the World People’s Conference website elaborated further:
The world is being buffeted by multiple global crisis that manifests itself in a climate, financial, food, energy, institutional, cultural, ethical and spiritual crisis. These are the manifestations of unbridled consumerism and a model of society where the human being claims to be superior to Mother Earth… It is a system characterized by the domination of the economy by gigantic transnational corporations whose targets are the accumulation of power and benefits, and for which the market values are more important than the lives of human beings and Mother Earth.
Though the establishment of an independent climate tribunal emerged as a central goal of the Bolivian summit, Reuters noted on Monday that the idea “is a non-starter with almost every other country going to the Paris talks.”
Even the European Union, which as recently as December argued for a strong, legally binding deal, “is increasingly talking about a’ pledge and review’ system,” Reuters wrote, “under which national commitments would be re-assessed every five years against a goal of halving world emissions by 2050.”
As for Bolivia, teleSUR reports: “The South American nation has taken it upon itself to advocate for climate change issues on behalf of other developing nations,” with environmental activist Moira Zuazo telling the publication that “70 percent of the Bolivian people say that development is less important than Mother Earth and we are listening to them.”Copyright by WWLP - All rights reserved
Mary Saladna, WVCB - BOSTON (CNN) - The Boston area has dealt with a great deal of snow this winter and some communities are struggling with removing it from their roads.
"This is ridiculous. I sat there and I watched them," Annete Scott said. Scott is talking about this, the two giant mounds of snow and ice she says city workers dumped over her fence into her backyard.
This was day two of the illegal dumping, and she caught the driver of this front end loader in the act. "He wouldn't give me his name or his supervisor's name, so I run after him. He gets in the bulldozer and I did a Tiananmen Square. I stood right in front of it. I said you're not going anywhere," Scott continued.
Scott took this photo, and quickly reported the license plate number to the Boston public works department. She says they acknowledged it was a city-employed truck, and apologized, but when she called the mayor's office, she got little satisfaction, "They said that's your problem, we're not gonna do a thing. I said why not? They said it's on private property. I said, you're the ones who put it on my private property."
Scott has lived in this house for over 50 years, grew up here. She takes great pride in her home and now worries about the new fence, driveway, and sod she installed just last July.
Copyright CNN 2015Dear Colleagues:
In an article in Time Magazine, PETA co-founder Ingrid Newkirk discusses “flexitarianism,” or “[p]art-time vegetarianism.”
The goal for many activists is simply to get more people to eat less meat. “Absolute purists should be living in a cave,” says Ingrid Newkirk, president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). “Anybody who witnesses the suffering of animals and has a glimmer of hope of reducing that suffering can’t take the position that it’s all or nothing. We have to be pragmatic. Screw the principle.”
We can make several observations about Newkirk’s statements:
First, Newkirk repeats the mantra of the new welfarist movement: that animal welfare reforms actually reduce suffering. The reforms that are promoted by PETA and the other new welfarist groups for the most part do not provide significant welfare benefits for animals. They just represent a different form of torture. Waterboarding someone on a bare board and waterboarding them on a padded board is still waterboarding.
Moreover, for the most part, industry would eventually adopt these reforms anyway because they generally increase production efficiency. Giving slightly more space to veal calves or using alternatives to the gestation crate result in increased animal productivity, lower veterinary costs, and a better bottom line for producers. PETA explicitly recognizes that gassing chickens is an economically efficient thing to do. The symbiotic relationship between large animal groups and institutional exploiters is clear when we see that groups like PETA and institutional exploiters are involved in a drama whereby animal advocates target an economically vulnerable practice; industry puts up a token fight; the reform, or some modification of the reform, is eventually accepted because it does not harm, and usually helps, industry; the animal groups declare victory; the animal exploiters bask in the praise that industry gets from animal advocates. Only the animals lose.
Second, Newkirk conveniently ignores that the relentless promotion of these welfare reforms by PETA and other new welfarist groups and the claims that these reforms make exploitation more “humane” make the public feel more comfortable about consuming animals and, as a result, consumption increases. It is interesting to note that per capita consumption of animal products is going up and not down. When groups like PETA give an award to slaughterhouse designer Temple Grandin, or praise animal flesh/products peddlers, or call off the boycott of KFC in Canada because KFC agreed to phase in buying gassed chickens from producers, what does that say to the public? It is nothing less than one big stamp of “animal rights” approval.
PETA has made it possible for people who eat at KFC in Canada or at McDonald’s, or who buy “happy” meat or other animal products at Whole Foods, to proclaim themselves as “animal rights” advocates.
It should be increasingly clear that the “happy meat/animal products” movement is a giant step backwards.
Third, Newkirk conveniently misses the most important point in the debate whether to pursue a clear vegan moral baseline or instead to pursue welfare reforms.
It’s a zero-sum game. That is, we live in a world of limited resources. Every cent of money; every second of time; every bit of effort that we devote to welfare reform is less money, time, and labor that we devote to clear, unequivocal vegan advocacy. If the large new welfaist corporations put all of their resources into vegan advocacy, they could reduce suffering and death by reducing demand and helping to shift the paradigm away from the notion that animals are things that we can use if we treat them “humanely” to the notion that animals are beings with inherent moral value whom we should not be using at all.
Consider the following example: you have one hour to spend today on animal advocacy. Should you spend that hour educating people about eating cage-free eggs or about not eating eggs (or animal products) at all? You cannot do both and to the extent that you tell people—as these organizations do—that they can satisfy their moral obligations to animals by eating cage-free eggs or other “happy” animal products, you virtually guarantee that the best that will happen is that people will choose a different form of torture rather than no torture at all.
The choice is not, as Newkirk suggests, between reducing suffering or promoting veganism. It is only by promoting veganism—by working on the demand side of the equation rather than the supply side (the focus on welfare reforms)—that we will reduce suffering—and death.
A related point is that it is not just suffering that matters, as Newkirk suggests; killing matters as well. Newkirk apparently buys into Peter Singer’s view that animals for the most part do not have an interest in continuing to live but only have an interest in not suffering. I reject this view as a factual matter. To deny that any sentient being has an interest in continuing to live is absurd. All sentient beings prefer, or want, or desire to continue to live. The welfarist position, which Newkirk and Singer accept, is that animal life per se has no moral value. Perhaps this accounts for why PETA kills most of the animals it takes in at its Norfolk facility. In any event, I reject that view as speciesist.
As long as the issue is how we treat animals, as long as we |
preserve them longer but also waterproofs them. The added bonus is that they are also organized and very compact – 2 Bug Out Packing essential qualities.
The Expiration Date Marks a Camping Trip
Write the expiration date on the outside of the package with a Sharpie Marker (you choose the time frame but I’d be just fine with 1 year). Don’t throw away the meals when they expire. That expiration date marks a much needed camping trip and your meals are now already packed!
Does anyone do something similar to this?
Is this a Bug Out Meal concept that you will consider?
What types of items will your include in your Vacuum Sealed Bug Out Meal?
Remember, it’s not IF but WHEN,
CreekBack to the Future: The Ultimate Visual History Collector's Edition features an exclusive bas relief that brings to life Drew Struzan's iconic poster art for the Back to the Future Part II. Featuring lifelike renderings of Marty McFly, Doc Brown, and the DeLorean time machine, and vibrant paintwork, this piece will enthrall Back to the Future fans everywhere.
Back to the Future: The Ultimate Visual History is a stunning journey into the creation of this beloved time-traveling saga and comes with hundreds of never-before-seen images from all three movies, along with rare concept art, storyboards, and other visual treasures. The book also features exclusive interviews with key cast and crew members—including Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson, Robert Zemeckis, Bob Gale, Steven Spielberg, Frank Marshall, Kathleen Kennedy, and more—and tells the complete story of the production of the movies, from the initial concept to the staging of iconic scenes such as the “Enchantment Under the Sea” dance and the hoverboard sequence.
This unique collector’s edition comes with an exclusive case design and jacket and specially designed slipcase. Also new to the collector’s edition are several exclusive inserts not found in the trade book, including a Biff Tannen museum ticket, deleted scenes and poster art foldouts, Back to the Future premiere tickets, blueprints for the flux capacitor and brain-wave analyzer, and much, much more. In addition, the collector’s edition comes with three 32-page booklets that feature unseen visuals from the three films: one focusing on on-set photography, one on the futuristic art from the second film, and one on the storyboard art created for the trilogy.
Comprehensive, compelling, and definitive, Back to the Future: The Ultimate Visual History, Collector’s Edition is the book that fans have been waiting for.Denuvo Anti-Tamper, or Denuvo, is an anti-tamper technology and digital rights management (DRM) scheme developed by the Austrian company Denuvo Software Solutions GmbH, a company formed through the management buyout (MBO) of Sony DADC DigitalWorks.
History [ edit ]
The first Denuvo-protected game was released in September 2014. Early reports suggested that Denuvo Anti-Tamper "continuously encrypts and decrypts itself so that it is impossible to crack."[1] Denuvo Software Solutions has stated that the technology "does not continuously encrypt and decrypt any data on storage media. To do so would be of no benefit in terms of security or performance." The company has not revealed how Denuvo Anti-Tamper works.[2] Games protected by Denuvo require an online re-activation for every hardware change every 24 hours and Denuvo limits activations to four hardware upgrades per 24 hours.[3][4] Denuvo's marketing director Thomas Goebl stated that some console-only releases get PC releases due to this technology.[5]
In December 2014, the Chinese warez group 3DM claimed to have defeated Denuvo and later that month released a software crack for the video game Dragon Age: Inquisition, which uses the Denuvo anti-tamper technology to protect Electronic Arts' Origin Online Access DRM.[6] The group claimed that the technology involves a "64-bit encryption machine" that requires cryptographic keys unique to the specific hardware of each installed system.[7] However, the 3DM crack arrived almost a month after the game's release in November 2014, an unusually long time for PC games[6] which were normally cracked on the same day as release. Asked about the development, Denuvo acknowledged that "every protected game eventually gets cracked"[6] and Ars Technica noted that most sales for major games happened within 30 days of release, and so publishers may consider Denuvo a success if it meant a game took significantly longer to be cracked.[8] 3DM continued to release cracks for Denuvo-protected games throughout 2015.
3DM reportedly nearly gave up attempting to crack Just Cause 3, which is protected with Denuvo, in January 2016 due to difficulties with an upgraded version of the anti-tamper mechanism.[9] They also warned that due to the current trends in encryption technology, the cracking of video games may become impossible within two years.[9][5] 3DM announced they would stop all research on Denuvo Anti-Tamper, stop cracking all single-player games from February 2016 for one whole year, start relying on other crackers and see if the sales have increased in China in one year's time.[10]
In August 2016, it was reported that the Denuvo protection found in Doom had been bypassed by a cracker named Voksi.[11] Bypasses for many other Denuvo-protected games were released the following days.[12] Although the exploit used for these bypasses was patched 3 days after the first bypass was released, news followed that Rise of the Tomb Raider, Inside and Doom[13] had been fully cracked by the scene group CONSPIR4CY (CPY)[14] by successfully emulating the enhanced "v3" anti-tamper implementation and patching the remaining in-game triggers. Playdead later removed Denuvo from their game Inside in their later patches.[15] id Software removed Denuvo from their 2016 release Doom via a patch in December later that year.[16] Crytek later removed Denuvo from their VR game The Climb.[17] CPY continues to crack Denuvo in other games.
A few months later, Resident Evil 7: Biohazard was cracked only five days after its release, making it the fastest-cracked game with the latest Denuvo implementation at the time.[18] In May 2017, Russian cracker BALDMAN cracked two games protected by the then-latest "v4" version of Denuvo: Nier: Automata and Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3. On 4 June, MKDEV cracked Constructor HD,[19] (although the release was unstable and later properly cracked by CPY.[20]) On 6 June, BALDMAN cracked Tekken 7, just four days after release, despite shipping with the then-latest "v4++" implementation of Denuvo.[21] In June 2017, anonymous scene group STEAMPUNKS released Dishonored 2 with an offline Denuvo license generator. They later released Adr1ft and Planet Coaster with similar generators. The keygens released by STEAMPUNKS are allegedly packed by VMProtect,[22] which is reportedly also used by Denuvo itself in some iterations. STEAMPUNKS released working license generators for most uncracked games with the v3 implementation of Denuvo. For a short period, Denuvo protection on new games was being cracked within hours of release,[23] however this stopped with the release of Assassin's Creed Origins, which was notable for wrapping an updated Denuvo protection within VMProtect. In February 2018, CPY cracked Assassin's Creed Origins, after almost 3 months of the game's release.[24] Final Fantasy XV's Denuvo protection was bypassed by 3DM using the demo.exe file three days before release[25] and several people reported finishing the game using said crack before the game was officially released on PC.[26]
In June 2018 non-Scene cracker named Voksi cracked Football Manager 18 which had implemented Denuvo V4 Protection[27] (The first release did not properly work on some older CPU user and Voksi fixed it with updated variant version for those CPU users). Beginning in July, Voksi cracked Puyo Puyo Tetris in four days.[28] Later on, Voksi cracked two Denuvo games in a row Dragon Ball Fighter Z and Shining Resonance Refrain in two days (but the first release of Shining Resonance Refrain did not work properly and crashed frequently. Voksi fixed it with the help of BALDMAN[29])
Controversy [ edit ]
Some consumers have alleged that Denuvo Anti-Tamper shortens the lifetime of solid-state drives (SSDs) by writing an excessive amount of data to the drive.[1][30][31][32] Denuvo Software Solutions claims that "Denuvo Anti-Tamper does not constantly read or write any data to storage media,"[2] calling it a "wrong rumor," since it doesn't perform read or write operations.[33] Games with Denuvo Anti-Tamper state in EULA that "certain files of the anti-tamper technology may remain even after the product is uninstalled from your computer."[34][35]
An issue with Denuvo arose in 2018 in the game Tekken 7, where Katsuhiro Harada, the director of the game, confirmed that it was indeed Denuvo which was causing drastic frame-rate drops in a recent update to the game, causing an outcry among the gaming community.[36] Another issue with Denuvo appeared in July 2018 in the game Sonic Mania Plus. The developer Sega released a new update for Sonic Mania that features a new version of the Denuvo anti-tamper tech. According to users, this new change caused slowdowns when navigating certain menus.[37]
If you use a firewall which disables outbound traffic (apart from whitelisted programs), then Denuvo cannot activate, and installed games using Denuvo will give an error message rather than run.[38]
List of games using Denuvo [ edit ]
There are currently 118 games that use Denuvo.
List of games formerly using Denuvo [ edit ]
There are 33 games that removed Denuvo after being implemented.
Notes [ edit ]
a b c d e f g h i Non-Scene crackThey say there are millions of people who love to help. but cannot entirely help that much due to various reasons. this next Cosplayer will undergo to our “Cosplayer Interview Series” is a Hunter X Hunter Cosplayer from Alabama. An amicable person who loves to help others, especially “Cancer Patients”
As we all know Cancer spread throughout the globe affecting millions of people. Mostly women, breast cancer is the most known one, even my closest friends had it as well. I wanted to raise an awareness to all, especially young ones to take care of their health as early as possible.
Matthew uses his superpowers to “support, honor and fight breast cancer”! through selling his photos of Nightwing for a cause. Discovered him not so long ago from a common friend who admires his passion and works.
Usually attends on different conventions in the city like Kami-con, Momo-con, Hama-con, Magic city con, Akai-con, Dragon-con, AWA, Fal-con.
Without further introduction, let’s welcome our Cosplayer of the day!
Hunter X Hunter Cosplayer, Matty G. Cosplay
Discovering Cosplay
Une publication partagée par Matthew Guarino (@mattdg4) le 26 Sept. 2017 à 15h00 PDT
I found out that the English cast of cowboy bebop was gonna be at Kami-con (2014). So I decided to go to it when I found out that a lot of people was gonna be in cosplay. I thought that would be fun! I made a bad Yusuke Urameshi cosplay, (Yu Yu Hakusho is my fave anime) and went to the convention. Seeing people who like the same things that I do. It made me want to go to more cons meet more people with the same interest and to cosplay more characters that I love.
First convention as a Cosplayer
I went to Kami-con 2014 (as Yusuke Urameshi) as I walked into the convention to get my badge I ran into a young Genkai cosplayer (a character from Yu Yu Hakusho) and her Genkai cosplay was really good! Seeing people who like the same things that I do, It made me want to go to more.
Une publication partagée par Matthew Guarino (@mattdg4) le 5 Sept. 2016 à 17h59 PDT
Costume/Gear/Props/Armor Making
My first sewed cosplay was Yusuke Urameshi.
What does a Cosplayer mean to you?
Cosplay has changed my life for the better I’ve met my closest friends in cosplay at conventions, I also enjoy getting to show my passion and creativity with cosplay.
Une publication partagée par Matthew Guarino (@mattdg4) le 2 Oct. 2017 à 18h22 PDT
Worst and Unforgettable Experience
When my green lantern Nightwing cosplay lights broke before I got to wear it at Dragon-Con 2015
Cosplayers you look up to
YES!!! I look up to a lot of cosplayer and I don’t care how many or how few followers they have. I just love to see so many talented cosplayers and how they make their cosplays. Unfortunately, they are too many for me to name.
Your Greatest Achievement
My Beastboy Cosplay
Advice would you give to New Aspiring Cosplayers
Cosplay the characters that you love and you are passionate about don’t just cosplay what’s popular.
Where can we see you?
Kami-con, Momo-con, Hama-con, Magic city con, Akai-con, Dragon-con, AWA, Fal-con and more. If you want to keep a closer track you can follow me on my accounts. My next con will be in Fal-con
Overview
Our cosplayer Mattew has indeed a huge talent to share with us! due to his situation, I completely understand and feel the sadness even the way he answers my questions.
I love his perception about Cosplay, that one should cosplay the character he/she is passionate about. I’m contented of having him in this interview!
Thanks again to our friend Sean for recommending him, I would like to extend my gratitude on Matty. Since I’ve mentioned about his fundraising, here is your chance to help him as well.
He is not just a Cosplayer but also a prop maker, Anime/comic Gamer, Fitness enthusiast and IT guy I will surely support him.
Help Matty fight cancer!
From his Instagram account written and below are the photos he is selling.
I am using my Nightwing superhero powers to support, honor and fight breast cancer! Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women worldwide and has included members of my family, including my Grandmother and Aunt. I am raising money for Nightwing Breast cancer awareness by selling 8×10 photos of me posing as Nightwing for $7.50. Photos taken by The Triforce photography and mailed. Donations are also appreciated!
Une publication partagée par Matthew Guarino (@mattdg4) le 8 Oct. 2017 à 19h01 PDT
Don’t forget to follow him on his social media accounts: Facebook and Instagram
Share this: Pinterest
Facebook
Twitter
Tumblr
Telegram
Skype
WhatsApp
LinkedIn
Pocket
Reddit
Email
Print
Like this: Like Loading...This article is from the archive of our partner.
A gang of carders -- they're the mean hackers who steal your credit card information online -- came up with a pretty creative way to spot federal law enforcement agents embedded in their networks: forced orgies. "Anyone who wanted in with [Indian cyber criminal Vikas Yadav] would have to have three-way sex, either with other men or women, but Vikas had to be involved and he would record it all and save the recordings so he could watch it on his big flatscreen TV," a police detective in Georgia recently told the Athens Banner-Herald.
First of all, that's kind of weird. Second of all, what if the Feds are into that kind of thing? According to Wired's Kim Zetter, however, it seemed to be a pretty successful strategy. Yadav enjoyed a five-year long crime spree, stuffing trucks full of flat screen televisions, before he was sentenced to a year in prison and deported back to his home country.
Image by Elnur via Shutterstock.
This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.August 28, 2017
Dear UT Community,
During the past few days, we have all watched how Hurricane Harvey has devastated large parts of our state on an unprecedented scale. UT’s Marine Science Institute in Port Aransas lay in the path of the hurricane and was severely damaged by the wind and rains, though, thankfully, all of our students and employees are safe.
To our UT students and their families who have been directly affected by the storm, know this — The University of Texas stands with you during this challenging time. Nearly one-third of our undergraduate students come from affected regions in Texas. Many of you returned to campus last week and are safely in Austin. Others are still home with your families. Our thoughts and prayers are with you as we await your return to campus.
If you cannot make it to Austin before Wednesday’s start of classes, instructors will accommodate your absences and make sure you have the time and resources to catch up on the work you miss. Faculty members will be asked to provide the greatest level of flexibility and support for students impacted by the storm. Students can fill out the Absence Notification Request Form with Student Emergency Services, but are not required to do so if it is not feasible.
To the UT students who are now on campus, we welcome you to the Forty Acres for a new semester, but we also recognize this is a difficult time to begin the academic year. If you are in need of counseling or feel that you might benefit from the resources our UT Counseling and Mental Health Center offers, I encourage you to reach out to them for support.
Although many Longhorn Welcome events are still scheduled, I have consulted with student leaders and decided to cancel the annual university-wide Gone to Texas celebration on Tuesday due to the impact of Hurricane Harvey on our community. The colleges and schools are making decisions about their welcome-back events on Tuesday, and they will be in touch directly about them.
I also urge all students, faculty and staff to get involved and contribute to the Hurricane Harvey recovery effort. The Red Cross is accepting donations for victims of the flooding and winds in Texas. In the coming days, UT and student leadership will organize and sponsor efforts to generate support for statewide relief projects, and you will hear more about them during the week.
As we start a new semester, we do so with a renewed sense of purpose. We are here to learn, teach, discover and create for the benefit of our society. So, let’s do what Longhorns do. Let’s rise to the challenge.
Sincerely,
Gregory L. Fenves
PresidentUncertainty surrounding the outcome of the presidential election appears to be rising on Wall Street with the CNBC Fed Survey of 41 respondents suggesting that a victory by the Democratic nominee is less of a sure bet than it was just last month.
The September survey of 41 respondents, including economists, fund managers and strategists, found that just 51 percent think Hillary Clinton will win the election, down sharply from 84 percent in August. However, they still see a victory by the Republican nominee as a long shot.
Just 26 percent believe Donald Trump will win the White House, up from 11 percent. The percentage who don't know or are unsure rose to 23 percent from 5 percent. Less than half of Clinton's losses translated to gains for Trump. More than half went to the "don't knows," underscoring the rising uncertainty.Mugello MotoGP
Spoiler Alert: 2011 Mugello MotoGP race results below
The 2011 MotoGP Championship headed to Italy this weekend for the Gran Premio d’Italia at Mugello, round eight of 18 in the series.
Starting from his fifth pole position of 2011 MotoGP, Repsol Honda’s Casey Stoner lead the 16-rider MotoGP grid (short Pramac Ducati’s Loris Capirossi) into turn one. And for the first few laps it looked as if Stoner would have another run-away win, having more than a two-second lead.
But with nine laps remaining, Yamaha Factory Racing’s Jorge Lorenzo began gaining on Stoner. And with six to go, Lorenzo caught and passed Stoner, taking his second win of the 2011 MotoGP Championship (first in Jerez).
On the final lap, Stoner would be passed once again, this time by teammate Andrea Dovizioso. Stoner would have to settle for third.
With his win, Lorenzo chipped away at Stoner’s lead in the overall championship. Stoner now has 152 MotoGP points, 19 ahead of Lorenzo. Dovizioso remains in third with 119 points.
As these three battled up front, behind Yamaha Factory Racing’s Ben Spies and San Carlo Honda Gresini’s Marco Simoncelli swapped positions a few times. But Spies would out-brake Simoncelli, taking fourth.
And there was also a huge battle for sixth between Ducati Team’s Valentino Rossi, Mapfre Aspar Ducati’s Hector Barbera, Rizla Suzuki’s Alvaro Bautista, Monster Yamaha Tech 3’s Colin Edwards and Respol Honda’s Dani Pedrosa.
But with 11 to go, Rossi took sixth from Barbera, leaving the Spainard a seventh-place finish. Last year’s winner Pedrosa took eight. Rounding out the top 10 were Edwards and Ducati Team’s Nicky Hayden.
The only rider to not finish Sunday’s Mugello MotoGP was Cal Crutchlow. The Brit had front-tire issues on his Monster Yamaha Tech 3 M1, similar issues plagued him last weekend at Assen.
The MotoGP Championship has a one-week break before continuing at Sachsenring in Germany July 14.
2011 Mugello MotoGP: Race Results
Pos. Points Num. Rider Nation Team Bike Km/h Time/Gap 1. 25 1 Jorge LORENZO SPA Yamaha Factory Racing Yamaha 173.0 41’50.089 2. 20 4 Andrea DOVIZIOSO ITA Repsol Honda Team Honda 172.9 +0.997 3. 16 27 Casey STONER AUS Repsol Honda Team Honda 172.9 +1.143 4. 13 11 Ben SPIES USA Yamaha Factory Racing Yamaha 172.4 +8.980 5. 11 58 Marco SIMONCELLI ITA San Carlo Honda Gresini Honda 172.4 +9.076 6. 10 46 Valentino ROSSI ITA Ducati Team Ducati 171.2 +26.450 7. 9 8 Hector BARBERA SPA Mapfre Aspar Team MotoGP Ducati 171.1 +28.745 8. 8 26 Dani PEDROSA SPA Repsol Honda Team Honda 170.8 +32.043 9. 7 5 Colin EDWARDS USA Monster Yamaha Tech 3 Yamaha 170.7 +33.421 10. 6 69 Nicky HAYDEN USA Ducati Team Ducati 170.7 +34.724 11. 5 7 Hiroshi AOYAMA JPN San Carlo Honda Gresini Honda 170.5 +37.359 12. 4 17 Karel ABRAHAM CZE Cardion AB Motoracing Ducati 170.0 +43.964 13. 3 19 Alvaro BAUTISTA SPA Rizla Suzuki MotoGP Suzuki 169.8 +47.654 14. 2 14 Randy DE PUNIET FRA Pramac Racing Team Ducati 169.7 +48.840 15. 1 24 Toni ELIAS SPA LCR Honda MotoGP Honda 168.0 +1’15.199 Not Classified 35 Cal CRUTCHLOW GBR Monster Yamaha Tech 3 Yamaha 169.0 17 Laps
2011 MotoGP Point Standings (after eight of 18 rounds)This is my third post for Easter 2015 – this time my Coconut chocolate bar.
The Atkins bar
When we first started eating Lo-Carb we were in a sudden panic about all the sweet things we wouldn’t be able to eat from our previous carby life. From what other people who’ve done this tell me, that is a common reaction. Sometimes it’s Bread, and other times it’s Pasta that people panic about. For me it was sweets.
We stocked up on bulk supplies of Atkins chocolate bars. The Atkins Endulge coconut bar is one of my favourites (sorry about the lousy focus).
Anyway one of the problems about Atkins bars is that they have a lot of sugar alcohols which Atkins treat as non-digestible fibre but for some people sugar alcohols slow their weight loss. They also have to be shelf stable for years – so they need a lot of stabilisers and preservatives and since we are now cooking all our own food I wanted to try to come up with a way to create a real food equivalent.
Temper temper
The reason a chocolate bar has a chocolate coating is to seal in the insides of the bar from the outside world – it is an edible wrapper for the soft inside contents. The first step in making a chocolate bar is learning how to make a chocolate coating that melts in your mouth, but doesn’t melt in your hand, yet provides some firm structural stability for the soft material inside – and that requires perfectly tempered liquid chocolate.
See: Make Lo-carb chocolates for more details on that art … or science as the case may be.
The right mould
The other big problem is finding a way to shape bars into reliable portions – and here we had a breakthrough. There is a kitchen device called a Sodastream that allows you to make your own sodas at home, and one of the gadgets you can buy for the sodastream is an ice cube tray that makes 10 perfectly spherical ice cubes.
This turned out to be just the perfect size to make a bar – all we needed to do was grease the tray with a little coconut kitchen spray and with the addition of a few Bar bell weights it become the perfect mould.
A much healthier bar
Finally I needed a recipe that would give a nice soft mouthfeel and a toasted coconut flavour, while still being high in fat and as low as I could make it in carbohydrates.
The atkins bar is 179 kCal and 3g carbohydrates, 12g fat, 5g protein but there are 10g of missing carbs among the various sugar alcohols. This ends up being 29% Carbs : 60% Fat.
My coconut chocolate bar is 99 kCal – and 2g carbohydrates, 10g fat, 1g protein. The bottom line here is 8% Carbs : 88% Fat.
Coconut Chocolate bar
Nutrition Facts Serving Size 1 bar Servings 10 Amount Per Serving Calories 99 Calories from Fat 90 % Daily Value* Total Fat 10g 15% Saturated Fat 8g 40% Trans Fat 0g Cholesterol 3mg 1% Sodium 14mg 0% Total Carbohydrate 2g 0% Dietary Fiber 1g 4% Sugars 1g Protein 1g 2% * Percent Daily Values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet. Your daily values may be higher or lower depending on your calorie needs. wp-nutrition-labelMedia playback is unsupported on your device Media caption As Jeremy Bowen reports, some of the mourners have expressed anger at the government
The Islamic State (IS) group is the prime suspect in the Ankara bombings that killed nearly 100 on Saturday, Turkish PM Ahmet Davutoglu has said.
No group has said it carried out the attack, but the government believes that two male suicide bombers caused the explosions, hitting a peace rally.
The official death toll is 97 but rally organisers have put the figure at 128.
Funerals for more of the victims were held on Monday, with some mourners expressing anger at the government.
Saturday's twin explosions ripped through a crowd of activists outside the main railway station in the Turkish capital.
They were due to take part in a rally calling for an end to the violence between Turkish government forces and the militant Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).
Analysis: Selin Girit, BBC News Ankara
The political campaigning has been interrupted because of the attacks. The pro-Kurdish HDP is considering cancelling all its rallies prior to the election out of security concerns.
The governing party has already cancelled its rallies until Friday but they will be holding "rallies against terror" afterwards.
Some already had doubts about how free and fair the upcoming elections would be, as there were attempts to move polls from violence-ridden areas in the south-east to more secure locations. But election officials had ruled out that option.
Saturday's attacks seem to have further polarised Turkey. Leaders cannot come together to make a united stand against violence.
Many now fear the country could end up in escalating violence that could lead to the elections being scrapped.
There is anger in Turkey that authorities were unable to prevent such a major attack - and some scepticism from opposition groups about the government's claims.
Mr Davutoglu said authorities were close to identifying one of the suicide bombers, using DNA tests, and that this would help to pinpoint which group was responsible.
He had previously said that IS, the PKK and far-left groups were all capable of such an attack.
Ankara bombings: Read more
How dangerous is Turkey's unrest? - What are the risks of the crisis deteriorating?
"This is the worst scene I've ever seen" - Shock and anger in Ankara as mourning begins
Blasts divide Turkish media - Not all commentators share the view that IS is to blame
The suspects - A look at the groups that might be responsible
Who are the Kurds? - The long history of the Middle East's fourth-largest ethnic group
Turkey v Islamic State v the Kurds - What's going on?
The situation in Turkey was tense even before the Ankara bombings.
The ceasefire with the PKK had broken down and there had been clashes between the militants and security forces, killing at least 150 since July.
Some local media have implicated the brother of a man who carried out an IS bombing in the southern border town of Suruc in July, which killed more than 30 people.
Turkey announced after the Suruc bombing that it would allow its southern Incerlik airbase to be used by the US-led coalition targeting IS in Syria. Turkey, a Nato member, shares a long land border with its unstable southern neighbour.
Image copyright Reuters Image caption The wife and son (centre) of victim Ali Kitapci attended a commemoration near the site of the explosions on Monday
Image copyright EPA Image caption Carnations have been placed near the site of the bombing, in the heart of Turkey's capital
The Ankara bombings are the deadliest in Turkey's history.
"These attacks will not turn Turkey into a Syria," Prime Minister Davutoglu said on Monday.
Speaking on Turkish television, Mr Davutoglu said the bombings were an attempt to influence elections due on 1 November, after a vote in June left no party able to form a government.
Many of the victims were activists of the pro-Kurdish HDP party, which believes its delegation at the march was specifically targeted.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Caroline Hawley answers key questions about the impact of the twin bombings
The HDP gained parliamentary seats for the first time in June's vote, depriving President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's AK Party of its majority.
In a statement released on Monday, the HDP's leaders said the AK Party was using "escalation of violence" as a strategy to push the leftist, pro-Kurdish party back under Turkey's high electoral threshold for entering parliament.
They link the Ankara bombings to the Suruc attack and the fatal bombing of an HDP electoral rally in June, labelling them a "chain of massacres", and call on the international community to take "a firmer stance" with Turkey's government.
Image copyright Hurriyet.com.tr Image caption Nine-year-old Muhammed Veysel Atilgan was killed with his father in the attack
The youngest victim, nine-year-old Muhammed Veysel Atilgan, was buried on Sunday in his hometown of Batman alongside his father, Ibrahim Atilgan who also died in the attack.
On Monday thousands of people attended funerals in Istanbul and Ankara, with many mourners venting their anger at the government.
"The killer state will be held to account!'' some demonstrators in Ankara chanted.
One of the victims of Saturday's attacks has been identified as 70-year-old Meryem Bulut, a member of the Saturday Mothers group, who have protested about their missing sons since the 1990s.
The BBC's Mark Lowen in Ankara says critics of the Turkish government believe it is using IS as a scapegoat - and that murky elements of a so-called "deep state" are to blame for the bombings.
The victims
Turkey is mourning the deaths of at least 97 people. These are just a few of those who lost their lives, clockwise from top left:
Elif Kanlioglu: A 20-year old student in her second year of university, who loved studying foreign languages.
A 20-year old student in her second year of university, who loved studying foreign languages. Yilmaz Elmascan: Described by a friend as a peace-loving man, who got married last year. His wife is also said to have been killed in the attack.
Described by a friend as a peace-loving man, who got married last year. His wife is also said to have been killed in the attack. Sebnem Yurtman: Studied at Ankara university, and later in Adana. She was described as "full of life".
Studied at Ankara university, and later in Adana. She was described as "full of life". Mesut Mak: He was a member of an agriculture and forestry union. He had a daughter.
Who were the victims?Arizona's Lawi Lalang is the first repeat winner in the 5K since Chris Solinsky in 2006-07.
EUGENE, Ore. -- Arizona senior Lawi Lalang out-kicked Oregon freshman Edward Cheserek to win the 5,000 meters Friday night at the NCAA championships.
Lalang finished in a meet-record 13 minutes, 18.36 seconds for his eighth NCAA title. Cheserek took the lead on the final lap but defending champion Lalang pulled back in front on the final 100 meters for the dramatic finish.
Cheserek, who won the 10,000 meters Wednesday night, finished in 13.18.71.
Lalang, who also will run the 1,500 on Saturday, is the first to win back-to-back titles in the 5K since Wisconsin's Chris Solinsky in 2006-07
Baylor freshman Trayvon Bromell set a world junior record in the 100 meters in 9.97 seconds for the third day of the event at Oregon's historic Hayward Field.2015 has been full of amazing giveaways here on Moogly – and I’m already lining up fantastic new ones for 2016! But first, you’ve got to check out this massive, humongous, gigantic holiday giveaway from Lion Brand and Furls Fiberarts!
Disclaimer: This post includes affiliate links.
If you follow Moogly, you know that I am a huge fan of both Lion Brand Yarns and Furls’ crochet hooks (and the jewelry is pretty nice too!). So I’m super excited to be able to combine them for a Gigantic Holiday Giveaway, featuring some of their newest products!
A couple of highlights first! Lion Brand has a couple brand new yarn they are featuring in this giveaway – Color Clouds and 24/7 Cotton!
I just got my hands on a couple of skeins Color Clouds, and it’s so pretty and soft! It’s Jumbo weight – yarn symbol 7! – and I can’t wait to start using it. And I’ll have a pattern featuring 24/7 at the end of the month – it’s a fab mercerized cotton, in fantastic colors!
And Furls Fiberarts is giving away some fantastic prizes as well, including an entire set of their new Odyssey hooks! I’ve got 2 of these myself and they are absolutely fantastic – as are their heirloom wooden hooks and yarn bowls of course!
So let’s get to the fantastic prize packages! There will be 3 winners:
GRAND PRIZE WINNER:
3 skeins of Lion Brand 24/7
2 skeins of Lion Brand Scarfie
2 skeins of Lion Brand Color Clouds
2 balls of LB Collection Cashmere
1 Furls Fiberarts Yarn Bowl
1 complete set of Furls Odyssey crochet hooks!
FIRST PRIZE WINNER:
2 skeins of Lion Brand 24/7
2 skeins of Lion Brand Scarfie
2 skeins of Lion Brand Color Clouds
1 Furls Fiberarts Yarn Bowl
1 Furls Heirloom Wooden crochet hook
SECOND PRIZE WINNER:
1 Furls Fiberarts Yarn Bowl
1 Furls Heirloom Wooden crochet hook
The Gigantic Holiday Giveaway on Moogly is open in the US only, and ends December 28, 2015, at 12:15am Central US time. To enter, use the Rafflecopter form below. If you are on mobile and have difficulty entering, please use a desktop computer to enter. Only the email option is mandatory – all other options are optional, for bonus entries only.
a Rafflecopter giveaway
Get Moogly on your favorite social media sites: Facebook, Twitter, G+, Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr, and sign up for the FREE Newsletter so you don’t miss a thing! This giveaway is sponsored by Lion Brand Yarn and Furls Fiberarts.Oklahoma had the second-highest number of hazardous liquid spills from pipelines and the third-highest amount spilled in the nation since 2010, according to data from the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.
Over the past seven and a half years, pipelines in Oklahoma have spilled or leaked more than 1 million gallons, or 25, |
looking for help in curbing their sexual desires.
Seriously? Requiring young men to make sure they have the affirmative consent of their sex partners is going to make them stop having sex? Does Murrow realize how bad he’s making these young men sound here? Is making sure you have your sexual partner’s enthusiastic consent really that hard?
And let me reiterate, again: This law does not give women “total power over the men they sleep with.” Women can already make false rape accusations. It’s rare, but it does happen. This law does not change that. Under this law, women’s word also does not count any more in court than it already does. All the law does is make it clear that sex is opt-in, not opt-out. That’s it.
Now remember, Murrow is an evangelical Christian. He actually states several times throughout his post that he is in favor of this law, because he is in favor of any law that will cut down on premarital sexual activity. He states several times that the obvious solution for men here is to just get married (never mind that this whole “affirmative consent” thing should apply in marriage too). He brings in liberals and leftists and “en loco parentis” laws simply to point out what he believes is a sort of about face on the part of the left from encouraging unrestricted sexual activity to making efforts to limit and regulate sexual activity.
I’m surprised that more Christian leaders haven’t spoken out in favor of this bill. Admittedly, it’s weird to be on the same side of an issue as Gloria Steinem. But anything that makes men think twice before engaging in a casual hookup is a step in the right direction. SB 967 is the greatest threat to promiscuity since the scarlet letter. So what do you think? Is SB 967 a good thing or a bad thing? What about young men who are falsely accused under this measure? Should we be concerned for them, or are they simply reaping what they’ve sown? I believe this is a huge opportunity for campus ministry to men. Do you agree? How can the church help guys deal with the end of the sexual revolution?
If the sexual revolution was all about sex, sex, sex, completely regardless of consent, then I suppose Murrow would be right about this being its end. And perhaps for some it was, but that’s never what it was about for feminists. If Murrow honestly thinks requiring affirmative consent will end the sexual revolution, he has a terrible opinion of both men and women. Most women like sex. Most women will engage in sex with full affirmative consent at some point in their lives, and many will do it quite frequently. As for men, they are more than capable of understanding affirmative consent. And you know what else? Most men naturally want their partner’s affirmative consent—and know how to recognize it.
And now we come to the post where I’m supposed to pull all the threads together and say something profound or memorable. And yet instead I simply feel done. I am tired of people—especially men—acting as though affirmative consent is this horribly confusing thing. I am tired of people spending more time talking about false rape accusations than about ways to prevent sexual assault. I am fed up with people who think so little of men accusing us feminists of being the ones who are man-haters. I’m tired of seeing people belittle the importance of consent and completely misunderstand what consent is, often at the same time. I’m so, so tired.Welcome to the Minilens experiment.
A thousand years into post-apocalyptic Earth, many forms of life have gone extinct, including humans. An alien robot series, called Minilens, is cleaning up the Earth and collecting the surviving flora for research purposes.
The robots' duty is to destroy all radioactive barrels and to collect all flora.
Aliens forgot that Earth has gravity, therefore Minilens can't jump.
Level packs
Tutorial - 10 levels
First contact - 10 levels
Botanica - 6 levels
Spaceship - 6 levels
Home sweet home - 3 levels
Seek and destroy - 5 levels
Special surprise - 5 levels
Video
Gallery
Authors and Contributors
Brought to you by KOBUGE Games
alketii - Project leader, code, gfx, level design
bojidar-bg - Code leader, level design
fry- - Graphics leader, code, level design
ObaniGemini - Music artist
Akien - Code refactoring, misc stuff
Special thanks to:
How to make levels
Create a subdirectory in the levels/, named as you wish.
Copy the levels/level_blank.tscn file in your new folder, name it level_1.tscn and edit it with Godot Engine.
All levels in the pack should be named level_1.tscn, level_2.tscn, etc.
If you wish, add a names.txt file to your pack to define the level names (see other packs for the syntax).
Add your new pack to levels/packs.txt as "folder_name nb_of_levels".
Support or Contact
Find us at www.kobuge.org and on the #kobuge channel of the Freenode IRC network.Berben and Wolff’s Vegan Delicatessen opening Tuesday
Berben and Wolff\’s Vegan Delicatessen will be opening it’s doors for a soft opening on Tuesday May 17 at 227 Lark Street.
Berben and Wolff’s have been supplying the seitan to local restaurants such as New World, The Ruck, Madison Cafe, and more for a while and I’m incredibly excited for them to have their own space. I’m also excited for other restaurants to start to compete in the vegan space as well as the “actually make something good and/or take some risks” space. (Side note: The Ruck, a very unlikely bar to cater to vegans has added a ton of great items to their menu in the recent past that are vegan, and are often sold out from demand.)
Their opening menu looks incredibly good, and includes items such as a popcorn mushroom po’ boy, a seitan philly, a cuban sandwich, bbq jackfruit and much more.
Head to the Berben and Wolff Facebook page to stay in the loop.I’ve been struggling to articulate to myself the difficulties that true blue Mormons have with new order Mormons. I’m not satisfied with what I’ve been able to come up with, and I hope you will be able to help me work through this.
The struggles of Mormons going through a faith transition to become new order Mormons or ex-Mormons is well documented within the bloggernacle. Through online communities they are able to find support and understanding that they may even be afraid to ask for in their families and congregations.
My concern in this post is the true blue Mormon. Are new order Mormons justified in being hesitant to come out to them? While some saints will be welcoming and loving of all people who want to be affiliated with the church in any capacity, I think a great deal of regular saints feel threatened by new order Mormons, and as a result have less than charitable reactions.
I can think of three areas in which a regular saint may feel threatened by a new order Mormon:
1. By being selective about which doctrines and practices to believe and adhere to, the new order Mormon is in effect denying the authority of the church (and by extension, God) to guide or mandate them in those aspects of their lives. This is seen as an act of blasphemy, and may be a taken as a personal affront by those who have sacrificed their personal preferences to live by the church standards.
2. A regular saint may be concerned that the new order Mormon may not be willing or able to carry his or her weight in the day to day work of the church. If they are selective about what to believe, they may be selective in how to serve, or may be seen as otherwise unreliable or untrustworthy. After all, if a true blue Mormon has difficulty making the necessary sacrifice to serve in time consuming and often tedious church callings, and they are only able to get through it because they have their faith to motivate them, how can they expect someone who lacks faith to be able or willing to carry their share of the load? The fewer people who contribute, the more work it is for those who do.
3. A person who has lost a traditional testimony, who has found an uneasy balance with their own faith and doubt may represent an implied threat to those who have not entertained doubts. The very fact that someone has expressed doubts about their faith, maybe even lost their faith, is itself a threat to the believer’s faith. It can be the start of an existential faith crisis. Our belief is so much a part of our identity, that to even think about questioning it is uncomfortable. Our faith defines who we are, how we view the world and our place in it (NOMs who have already gone through this process know exactly how painful this can be). Having a “faithless” person in close proximity can be terrifying to the faithful person whose faith is not perhaps as rock solid as they would like it to be. So the new order Mormon represents an existential threat to the faith of the true blue Mormon.
I freely admit that my analysis may be completely wrong. As I said, I’m still trying to understand this myself. Feel free to correct my list or add to it, but keep in mind the comment policy: we should respect belief and not call others’ righteousness into question.The White House Correspondents' Dinner has become a strange event. It is, ostensibly, an evening when the president and the press can come together to share a few lighthearted laughs. But it's evolved into a recital of brutal truths — albeit one neither side ever really admits happened.
The joke of President Barack Obama's performance on Saturday was that he wasn't joking. Everyone just had to pretend he was. This was true from the beginning of his remarks, when he walked to the podium to Anna Kendrick's cover of "Cups" (chorus: "you're gonna miss me when I'm gone").
"You can’t say it, but you know it is true," he told the crowd, grinning. The implication was clear: My approval ratings are going up. Unemployment dipped below 5 percent this year. My financial reforms are working, and tens of millions of people have gotten coverage through Obamacare. And the Republicans are about to nominate Donald freakin' Trump. You don't know how lucky you had it with me.
It's only on the evening of the White House Correspondents' Dinner when he can say what he really thinks: I'm pretty damn good at this job, and in a year maybe you'll start to recognize it.
Then there was this line:
In just six short months, I will be officially a lame duck, which means Congress now will flat out reject my authority, and Republican leaders won’t take my phone calls. And this is going to take some getting use to. It’s really gonna … It’s a curve ball. I don’t know what to do with it. Of course, in fact, for four months now congressional Republicans have been saying there are things I cannot do in my final year. Unfortunately, this dinner was not one of them.
Obama has made it very clear, ever since Republicans retook the House in 2010, but especially since the Supreme Court nomination fight this year, that he views Republicans' unwillingness to so much as consider administration initiatives to be unprofessional and corrosive to democratic norms that have kept the federal government functioning for centuries. That they're treating a duly elected president as an illegitimate lame duck months before his successor even receives his or her party's nomination. Obama's line has the appearance of a joke — it's funny, because he means the opposite of the literal meaning! — but it's just a sarcastic rendering of a serious point he's been trying to get across for years.
Obama followed this up with straightforward revenge fantasy:
In fact, I think we've got Republican Sens. Tim Scott and Cory Gardner. They are in the house, which reminds me … security, bar the doors. Judge Merrick Garland come on out. We are going to do this right here. Right now. It's like the red wedding.
Obama is joking that he was going to have his men murder Republican senators who accepted the Correspondents' Association's offer of hospitality at the Washington Hilton. It's good-hearted ribbing, but it's premised upon very real anger and frustration.
This approach was not limited to Republicans, as illustrated with this line toward the beginning:
I do apologize. I know I was a little late tonight. I was running on CPT, which stands for jokes that white people should not make.
This isn't making light-hearted fun of Hillary Clinton and Bill de Blasio for their cracks about "colored people time." Obama's delivery is totally stone-faced. It's a joke, but the implication is the same as if it weren't: White people do not get to joke about black people being late. Cut it out.
Same goes for the press. Obama reserved his most cutting barbs for the people ostensibly throwing this event for him:
Even reporters have left me. Savannah Guthrie, she has left the White House press corps to host the Today show. Norah O’Donnell left the briefing room to host CBS This Morning. Jake Tapper left journalism to join CNN. …I also would like to acknowledge some of the award-winning reporters that we have with us here tonight. Rachel McAdams, Mark Ruffalo, Liev Schreiber. Thank you all for everything you have done. I’m just joking. As you know, Spotlight is a film, a movie about investigative journalists with the resources and the autonomy to chase down the truth and hold the powerful accountable. Best fantasy film since Star Wars. Look. That was maybe a cheap shot. I understand the news business is tough these days. It keeps changing all the time. Every year at this dinner somebody makes a joke about BuzzFeed, for example, changing the media landscape. And every year the Washington Post laughs a little bit less hard. Kind of a silence there. Especially at the Washington Post table. I don’t want to spend too much time on The Donald. Following your lead, I want to show some restraint. Because I think we can all agree that from the start he's gotten the appropriate amount of coverage befitting the seriousness of his candidacy. Ha. I hope you all are proud of yourselves. The guy wanted to give his hotel business a boost and now we are praying that Cleveland makes it through July.
Obama did, as is custom, end the speech with an appreciation of the press's role, honoring the actual Spotlight journalists (Sacha Pfeiffer, Mike Rezendes, Walter Robinson, Matt Caroll, and Ben Bradlee Jr.) and recently freed Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian.
But only after he offered a barely restrained critique of the media's failures. It obsesses over lost planes and misreports basic facts like what a Supreme Court decision says (per his dig on CNN). It doesn't devote resources to serious investigative reporting. Traditional organizations aren't adapting to compete with sites like BuzzFeed. Everyone in the media is giving Trump a platform and elevating a dangerous racist demagogue in the process.
To paraphrase Bruce Banner, Obama's secret is he's always angry, at least about this stuff — but the White House Correspondents' Dinner is the only weekend of the year in which he's allowed to show it, because the press has promised, for that one day of the year, to pretend they didn't notice.
President Obama on Donald Trump's absence from the dinnerSome are already calling it "Paris' 9/11."
The comparison of the Nov. 14, 2015, attacks on Paris to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States evokes not just a profound level of violence and terror, but of an interruption in history, a bookmark in a timeline when the country shifted politically and allowed for an unprecedented level of government intrusion and surveillance into the private lives of its citizens.
Mass worldwide #surveillance failed to DETECT or PREVENT #Paris attacks.
In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in January, France introduced its first surveillance legislation since 1991 — a bill that would allow the government to wiretap communications, install secret surveillance cameras and sweep up metadata. Privacy advocates called it "highly intrusive" and said it posed a "grave new threat" to protected professions like journalism. The bill was passed in a landslide vote in French Parliament, 438-86.
In exchange for security, we're told we must trade our privacy, whether to the government or private corporations. And with every passing incident of aberrant violence, we're left asking when that promised security is meant to arrive.
Government officials and commentators are already trotting out Edward Snowden as an indirect cause of the Paris attacks by reasoning it could have been prevented if the terrorists didn't know the extent of government surveillance.
Commentary from terror expert on CNN: "The terrorists have read Snowden. They know not to use their phones. We cannot predict anything now."
Legislators in the United States, as well as the prime minister of the U.K., have been asking for the weakening of encryption standards across the board so that state-level actors can peer into any potential threat. Meanwhile, the near-unanimous objection of the technology community is that weakening encryption on behalf of law enforcement would provide minor gains for the government and enormous gains for hackers and criminals.
For now, encryption works: But where privacy standards remain intact, intelligence authorities are brute-forcing their own solutions.
The FBI has been accused of either trying to break anonymous-communication software Tor or manipulate its network to unmask its users. Tor is often labeled as a "Web browser for criminals," or a tool for hackers to browse the seedy depths of the "dark Web" in order to buy guns and trade child pornography. The anonymous Internet is more than that: It's also a tool for victims of domestic abuse to seek information or support, or a way for journalists to connect with confidential sources. It is how Snowden covered his tracks as a whistleblower.
Weakening encryption on behalf of law enforcement would provide minor gains for the government and enormous gains for criminals. Tweet
Criminals are most certainly using these systems to their benefit — there's very little question about that. Former law enforcement officials told Yahoo News that Apple's iMessage and WhatsApp, two messaging systems that offer encrypted communications that can be erased after they've been sent, have allowed terrorists and criminals to plan attacks while evading detections. If the attackers in Paris used these kinds of communications, it's unlikely we'll recover the intimate details of their plotting.
Is it worth handing our private lives over to government surveillance so we might have a moonshot chance of preventing a few evil men from plotting terror in a basement? And even then, would that be possible?
The needle in the haystack: There's still the very real problem of whether ubiquitous surveillance works in the case of isolated incidents, or works well enough to justify how broadly it's applied. In the years following 9/11, statistical models generated a flood of thousands of false tips every month, none of which proved valuable.
The trouble is the sheer amount of data collected, and the inability of modern algorithms and machine learning to pick singular outliers from enormous data sets. As Matthew Williams, a researcher of computational criminology at Cardiff University in Wales, put it while discussing police surveillance with Mic, picking out singular acts of crime or terror from an indiscriminate pile of civilian noise is all but impossible.
"Finding terrorism plots is not a problem that lends itself to data mining," cryptographer Bruce Schneier wrote in the years after 9/11, long before Snowden revealed the extent of NSA surveillance programs. "It's a needle-in-a-haystack problem, and throwing more hay on the pile doesn't make that problem any easier."
Too much is unknown: It's been little over 24 hours that we've been exposed to the scope and relative sophistication of the attacks on Paris. They may have been recruiting on Twitter. They may have organized on Facebook. They may have plotted on paper, employed advanced encryption techniques or simply met in broad daylight under a camera's indiscriminate watch.
Pay close attention to the intrusive surveillance the western governments will be placing on its citizens due to the attacks in Paris.
Assuming the Paris attacks will be listed in the same breath as attacks like 9/11, the Boston Marathon bombing and the Charlie Hebdo massacre, their significance is no evidence that what we need is more ubiquitous online surveillance. Politicians and national security leaders will continue to ask for more private data, more communications and more compliance from the companies that collect that information.
The act of "politicizing" a violent event is most prescient when we talk about the politics that are possible in its wake, and to say these attacks could have been prevented with increased surveillance is grounded more in rhetoric than in the science of data and technology.Image copyright AFP Image caption The militias have played a key role in recapturing land from Islamic State in recent months
A mass wedding has been held for Shia militia fighters who are supporting the Iraqi government's battle against Islamic State (IS) militants.
Iraq's youth and sports ministry organised the festivities for 250 couples in the capital, Baghdad, the privately-owned Shafaq News website reports. After a minute's silence to remember those killed while fighting IS, a banner was raised in the venue showing a fighter running towards his bride, accompanied by the slogan "towards happiness". The newlyweds are also in line for some wedding gifts - each couple will be given a television, bedroom furniture and a fridge, according to ministry official Akram Na'im. He says the bash was sponsored by several local and foreign companies, including Iraq's national airline.
The men are members of the Popular Mobilisation Units, an umbrella group for Shia militias fighting alongside Iraq's security forces. The grooms were decked out in their camouflage uniforms, a point of pride for several who spoke to Shafaq News. One groom describes getting married in his fatigues as "beautiful", because it emphasises his dedication to fighting IS.
The militias have played a key role in security operations against the radical Islamist group, most notably in the battle to recapture Tikrit in March. But they have also been accused of human rights abuses, which the militias deny.
Image copyright AFP Image caption Iraqi security forces stood guard outside as the couples tucked into their wedding cakes
Next story: Anger in Israel over film about Yitzhak Rabin's killer
Use #NewsfromElsewhere to stay up-to-date with our reports via Twitter.Dog trainers have long advised owners against reacting to their pets’ attention-seeking antics — the barking, jumping and pushiness.
“Dog owners often inadvertently reinforce (reward) these behaviors by interacting with the dog,” writes veterinary behaviorist Lisa Radosta. “Any attention can be regarded as a reward, even yelling.”
Similar advice is doled to parents of whining, tantrum-throwing toddlers. Many in the media could use it, as well. All that sputtering over Donald Trump’s personal taunts and stupid tweets is exactly what the president-elect seeks. Turn away. Turn away.
If Trump won’t take questions from serious journalists at a news conference, it’s not a news conference. Reporters are merely playing “straight man” on a reality TV show — complete with paid hecklers and promotions for Trump properties. They don’t have to be there.
Their job is to cover what Trump does, which includes his appointments and ties to foreign adversaries. If Trump publicly insults U.S. or foreign leaders, that’s still news. If he insults newspeople, so what?
But voices of high-minded journalism continue to pump up Trump as some all-powerful controller of American freedom of expression. For example, Leonard Downie Jr., former executive editor of The Washington Post, writes that Trump’s attacks pose “a deep danger for legitimate, aggressive journalism.”
They do no such thing. Trump has no control over what the professional media or anyone else says about him.
Perhaps the media should alter their own traditions in accordance with the changing times. They don’t have to obsess over every dumb thing the president-elect says, especially because his saying dumb things is no longer news.
Better to start puncturing Trump’s self-inflated titan-of-business balloon. The conservative Wall Street Journal made a fine start in reporting that Trump owed financial institutions $1.5 billion more than he listed on his disclosure forms. And it has thrown cold water on Trump’s claim to economic genius, with such headlines as “The Market Has Already Started to Dump Trump.”
Big media can stop playing defense against a man whose approval ratings are probing the earth’s core. It was a nice gesture for Fox News to defend CNN after the recent “news conference” — as CNN had done for Fox in the past. But there’s no need for a journalistic mutual defense pact. (Disclosure: I write occasional opinion pieces for CNN.)
When BuzzFeed posted the unverified stories of salacious conduct by Trump, Trump tried to blame CNN for their release. CNN explained that it did not air the nasty material, which was appended to an intelligence report on Russian interference in the recent election. CNN didn’t even link to it. It just noted its existence.
Well done, but CNN and other members of the respectable media went overboard in scolding BuzzFeed for going public with the scandalous two pages. In the digital era, the only gates a news outlet can keep are its own.
The report had been floating around Washington. If BuzzFeed hadn’t posted it, someone else would have. And if the dirty innuendo had centered on Hillary Clinton, Breitbart would have put it up in half a heartbeat.
The threat to throw reporters out of the White House press office is a recent effort to move the spotlight from Trump’s sinking currency to a thin-skinned press corps. “I want ’em out of the building,” a tough (but not tough enough to be identified) Trump official told Esquire. “We are taking back the press room.”
Well, they can have it. The reporters should be out uncovering the seediness rather than responding to Trump’s latest provocation. They are entering a golden age for American journalism and should know it.
Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com.
To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by e-mail or mail.MUMBAI: While terrorists get to enjoy 72 virgins in paradise after successfully carrying out a terror attack, people who give context, justify, or show the bigger picture around acts of terror too are rewarded for their pious act, an Islamic preacher has claimed.
The preacher Zakir Naeem referred to some old stories of 7th century Arabia and logically proved that not only terrorists, but even the terror apologists were qualified to get virgins in the afterlife, because they had played a crucial role in furthering the cause of Jihad.
“Communal bigots think that friends of Jihad are being paid to write those articles or make those documentaries, but the truth is that they are doing so out of their own free will and goodwill,” Zakir Naeem claimed, using the term “friends of Jihad” for those who are branded terror apologists by the BJP and RSS.
The preacher further claimed that these “friends of Jihad” will be rewarded in the heaven with virgins, ranging from 7 to 22 based on the “quality” and “purity” of their friendship and work.
“Someone like Rana Ayyub will surely get 22 virgins, which is the maximum a friend of Jihad can get,” Zakir Naeem explained, giving example of the former Tehelka journalist, who is currently doing independent publishing. Arundhati Roy was another name the preacher took as an example for someone who deserved the maximum.
“Yes, even women get virgins. Islam is the best when it comes to women’s rights,” he added.
When asked about Barkha Dutt, the Islamic preacher said that in his opinion, she could get anywhere between 15 to 19 virgins. Journalists of The Indian Express could be getting around dozen virgins each according to Zakir, while he calculated a maximum of 9 virgins for Rajdeep Sardesai. Ravish Kumar had earned 10 virgins till now, Zakir claimed.
“He will be one of the virgins,” Zakir said when asked about the prospects of Rahul Kanwal, the colleague of Rajdeep Sardesai and an employee of India Today.
“Allah is merciful and is compassionate. Everyone will be rewarded,” the Islamic preacher concluded.
The claim by Zakir Naeem has become controversial as expected. The named journalists have slammed the preacher for giving a bad name to the good preachers. The journalists have reiterated that they were doing their job to secure human rights for others, not to secure virgins for themselves.
However the terrorists have welcomed the preaching and have said that they were now confident of getting 72 virgins if the terror apologists were with them even after death.
“Burhan is not alone even after his death,” a Kashmiri terrorist said, welcoming the arguments of Zakir Naeem.
Share this news report
Tweet
Telegram
WhatsAppHouse prices fall in five out of eight Australian capital cities in November, survey says
Updated
Home prices in Melbourne and Sydney have started to come off the boil according to a new report by CoreLogic RP Data.
The Home Value Index for November showed that home prices fell by 1.5 per cent across Australia's capital cities over the month.
The survey found that prices fell in five out of eight capital cities in November.
Melbourne led the home price falls with prices dropping 3.5 per cent over the month, although prices were still up 11.8 per cent over the year.
The median dwelling price for the city was $602,500.
Sydney's home prices declined 1.4 per cent in November and rose 12.8 per cent annually with the median dwelling price at $810,000.
Prices fell in Hobart by 2.4 per cent over the month. In Darwin they were down 1.3 per cent and slipped by 0.5 per cent in Canberra over the month.
Prices rose by 0.6 per cent in Brisbane, 0.7 per cent in Adelaide and 0.3 per cent in Perth in November.
Over the year, home prices are down by 4.2 per cent in Darwin and 4.1 per cent in Perth because of weaker economies and a slowdown in population growth.
Hobart had the cheapest median dwelling price at $335,000.
CoreLogic RP Data head of research Tim Lawless said moves by the banks to clamp down on investor lending and tighter lending standards had dampened prices.
"What we are seeing as this market moves through this inflection point is that listing numbers are rising, buyers generally have more choice and they can take their time, they can make their decisions about buying their homes, which is a very high economic decision," he said.
Mr Lawless said annual home values had fallen significantly in Perth and Darwin.
"If you look on the year on year numbers, it's really a story about Perth and Darwin, that are the markets that are most advanced in the down phase now," he said.
"Values peaked in Perth in December last year and a little bit earlier than that in Darwin.
"Economic conditions have slowed down as they are very much linked back to the resources sector."
Mr Lawless said data released by the banking regulator, APRA, last month showed that mortgages taken out by an investor fell below 10 per cent for the first time since September last year.
APRA has set a 10 per cent annual growth limit on investor loans.
CoreLogic RP Data said the home price slowdown came after auction clearance rates had slipped to around 60 per cent since late October and average selling times and vendor discounting rates had risen from record lows.
Topics: business-economics-and-finance, housing-industry, australia
First postedGekiganger III (ゲキ・ガンガー3, Geki Gangā Surī) is an anime series within the anime series Martian Successor Nadesico that plays a critical part in the plot thereof. Gekiganger III was designed to mimic 1970s Super Robots, especially Getter Robo. Initially, only Gai Daigoji and Akito Tenkawa are depicted as enjoying the series. Later in the series, Hikaru Amano becomes the other resident anime fanatic, and towards the end of the series everyone on the ship learns to love the series.
Story [ edit ]
Gekiganger III exists only as brief clips within Nadesico, but a basic storyline can nonetheless be determined. As seen in the OVA, the story began with Professor Kokubunji (a character similar to the professors seen in other Super Robot series, such as Professor Saotome of Getter Robo) discovering cave paintings somewhere underground placed by the "Super Paleolithic people". The paintings predicted that the Kyo'akk Empire would invade the Earth, and provided plans for a super robot, Gekiganger III.
Other clips seen throughout Nadesico establish the characters and setting. The main characters, and pilots of the titular robot, are Tenku Ken (A reference to Voltes V's sword name), Umitsubame Joe, and Daichi Akira. The characters are similar in appearance and personality to the Getter Team from Getter Robo, as well as having counterparts in Nadesico itself (most prominently Gai and the Jovian robot pilots).
Also similar to Getter is the Gekiganger robot, which is made up of three machines: the Gekiga Jet, piloted by Ken; the Gekiga Marine, piloted by Joe; and the Gekiga Tank, piloted by Akira. The names of the machines are similar to three of the component parts of Combattler V, bringing another 70s mecha anime into the influence on the series.
Like Getter, the machines assemble in three different ways to form three robots: Gekiganger III is formed with Jet as the head and torso, Marine as its waist and upper legs, and Tank as its lower legs, and is similar to Getter 1 in its preference for air combat. Umiganger is formed with Marine as the head and torso, Tank as the waist and Jet as the legs, and is the fastest, but weakest, form of Gekiganger. Finally, Rikuganger is formed with Tank as the head and torso, Jet as the waist and Marine as the legs, and is slow but has great brute strength. These last two, however, switch their best areas of battle from Getter Robo: Umiganger works best underwater and Rikuganger works more on land, whereas Getter 2 was the land-based robot and Getter 3 was for water in that series.
The villains of Gekiganger are the Kyo'akk Empire, an alien race from the "Dark String Universe" (a galaxy shaped like the infinity symbol). They are led by the Emperor Hyperion, and under him Prince Akara. Throughout Nadesico we see that Akara sends out many "mecha-monsters" to fight Gekiganger.
There are only a few major plot advancements that occur in Gekiganger, many of which are actually shown out of order in Nadesico. In one clip, a new character, Cowboy Johnny is introduced. He is from America, and pilots the "Texas Robo" machine, an obvious parody of Jack King and the "Texas Mack" from Getter Robo. Another clip features the death of Akara's sidekick, Mii-e Mii-e who was in love with the oblivious prince. Akara himself is killed later after infiltrating a highschool finding to his shock that humans are capable of emotions.
By far the most important plot moment in Gekiganger is the death of Joe, at the hands of Prince Akara's replacement, General Masaka. In Nadesico, seeing this scene is a major bonding moment between Akito and Gai, and it is seen and heard several times in the first few episodes.
The characters continue to watch Gekiganger past this point, though not much is known about the remainder of the series. Joe is replaced by a new character, Ryuuzaki Tetsuya, and the Gekiganger III is replaced by Gekiganger V. (Like Combattler V, the V is pronounced as the letter V; the English dub, however, referred to it as "Gekiganger 5"). Eventually, it is seen that Masaka is defeated. The final episode features a battle between the Gekiganger V (upgraded into "Spaceganger") and Emperor Hyperion, which Gekiganger is losing until the original Gekiganger III appears, piloted by Joe. With a final Super Passion Slash and Double Gekigan Fire, Hyperion is defeated. However, by this point most of the Nadesico characters have given up their fanaticism over Gekiganger; several characters criticize the ending.
OVA [ edit ]
The Gekiganger III OVA, "Hot-Blooded Great Battle!" includes all clips of Gekiganger shown in Nadesico, a few never-before-seen clips, and a new "movie" featuring a battle between Gekiganger III and the Super Paleolithic people who designed it. Akara is also seen here, but later allies himself with the heroes against their common enemy. The opening mimics that of Mazinger Z vs. The Great General of Darkness, showing pictures of Gekiganger III that children drew, and involves a similar plotline to that movie as well.
Gekiganger within Nadesico [ edit ]
As Nadesico progresses, we find that the very reason the Jovians (who are really humans) are attacking Earth is because they believe their cause to be just and that their path is the only true righteous one as they idolize the Gekiganger anime series. Toward the end, even Captain Yurika Misumaru is a Gekiganger otaku. In the end, the Gekiganger series becomes a lesson on why people should not be narrow minded and think that their point of view is that of everyone else. That their moral code is the only one. A lot of violence and death occurs as a result of the Jovian's adaptation of this point of view into their society and their leader's attempts to preserve this adapted moral code.
Episode 14 of Nadesico, Let's go with hot-blooded anime, is both a recap episode for that series and an episode of Gekiganger III. In that episode, the characters from Gekiganger watch Nadesico's recap episode and comment on it at times. Both the heroes and villains of Gekiganger draw inspiration from Nadesico for their new technologies, with Prince Akara copying the Nadesico's distortion field and Professor Kokubunji countering it with the Gekigan Flare, which he later admits was inspired by Nadesico. At the end of the episode, the Nadesico crew is seen watching the Gekiganger episode. Despite the continuity paradoxes this relationship causes, |
and be productive," said Assemblyman Jerry Green (D-Union), one of the legislation's main sponsors.
The new law cuts the wait period for the expungement of a criminal conviction from 10 years to five, and the period for disorderly persons offenses from five to three years.
N.J.'s new laws -- and bills Christie killed this week A look at the key bills Gov. Chris Christie signed into law or rejected on a busy Tuesday
Under the expungement process, records of a person's arrests, detention or conviction are placed under seal if the expungement is approved by a judge. The new law allows drug court graduates -- people who have gone through the state's special probation program for drug addicts -- who have not been charged or convicted since their prior offense to see their records swept clean.
Assemblyman John McKeon (D-Essex), another sponsor, said drug court graduates have a far lower recidivism rate than other convicts.
"If we want these individuals to continue on the right path, then we have to give them the chance to do better instead of setting up roadblocks," McKeon said.
The measure was part of a flurry of bills approved by the governor on Tuesday.
S.P. Sullivan may be reached at ssullivan@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter. Find NJ.com on Facebook.Three members of the Kelowna Rockets have been identified by NHL Central Scouting in its November preliminary Players to Watch list for the 2015 NHL Draft today.
Nick Merkley, Joe Gatenby and Tomas Soustal are all ranked on the list, along with 59 other Western Hockey League players.
NHL Central Scouting identifies players with a rating system that includes four ratings. The ‘A’ rating indicates a 1st Round candidate, a ‘B’ rating indicates a 2nd/3rd Round candidate, and a ‘C’ rating indicates a 4th/5th/6th Round candidate. An ‘LV’ rating indicates Limited Viewing of injured players who have not had sufficient viewings to be categorized.
Merkley was assigned an A rating, along with seven other WHL players including Mathew Barzal of the Seattle Thunderbirds, Paul Bittner of the Portland Winterhawks, Brandon Carlo of the Tri-City Americans, Jansen Harkins of the Prince George Cougars, Ivan Provorov of the Brandon Wheat Kings and Swift Current Broncos’ forwards Jake DeBrusk and Glenn Gawdin.
Both Gatenby and Soustal were given C ratings, indicating a possible draft spot in the fourth to sixth rounds of the 2015 NHL Entry Draft.IDEAS Bruce Barcott is the author of "Weed the People, the Future of Legal Marijuana in America."
Correction appended, April 20, 2015.
The legalization of marijuana in Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Alaska, and Washington D.C. has moved pot from the realm of criminal arrest to customer service. But many of those now-legal customers are entering a new world of products, prices, and potency. It ain’t about a ten-dollar bag of weed anymore. During the two years I spent researching Weed the People, I acquired a new vocabulary of weights, measures, brand names, plant strains, and markers of quality. With 4/20 upon us, test your own legal pot knowledge with the quiz below.
Correction: The original version of this quiz misstated the states that rejected legalization in the past five years.
“Weed the People, the Future of Legal Marijuana in America,” from TIME Books, is available wherever books are sold, including Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and Indiebound.
7 Dizzying GIFs of Spinning Cannabis Strains Nugshots Nugshots Nugshots Nugshots Nugshots Nugshots Nugshots Nugshots Nugshots 1 of 9 Advertisement
Contact us at editors@time.com.Most people, who like Linux, love Ubuntu. Oh they may object to Ubuntu's new Unity desktop, but at day's end, they still use Ubuntu. Technology businesses though have a more jaundiced view of Canonical, Ubuntu's parent company. Canonical, though, is now taking steps now to make its potential hardware and software partners happier.
First, Canonical is trying to become better friends with its reseller partners. Their new channel partner program, Ubuntu Advantage (UA) is "designed to help resellers bring a new set of support services for Ubuntu server, desktop and cloud installations direct to businesses. The program is launching with global partners, including CSS in the US, Asia and Europe, Middle-East and Africa (EMEA)."
The name of the game, according to Canonical, is to "provide enterprise customers with access to the tools and support they need to get maximum return from their Ubuntu infrastructure including round the clock support, Ubuntu Landscape management and monitoring tool, knowledge base and legal cover. Ubuntu Advantage helps to minimize any impact on mission-critical services and reduce the cost of system downtime. The Ubuntu Advantage partner program extends the availability of these services beyond Canonical and, for customers, adds local resources and responsiveness to the expertise that Canonical continues to provide."
What resellers will get out of this is the usual additional revenue streams from new services. In addition, Canonical promises that they'll get "marketing, technical, commercial and pre-sales support and an assigned account manager as part of the UA program."
We've been here before. Canonical has offered enterprise software stacks in partnership with IBM; the Ubuntu distributor also briefly tried a retail, open-source software package; and has long been targeting Red Hat and the other server operating system giants for the Linux server market. While Canonical has had some success with that last mission-albeit Red Hat continues to be server Linux's 800-pound gorilla--over the years its partners have been happy with it.
As The VAR Guy Website observed Canonical has lots of good partner ideas but they haven't pulled them off because "Canonical experienced multiple management changes and product launches that pushed - and pulled - the company into new directions."
After years of covering the reseller and enterprise market, I can safely tell you that neither resellers nor business customers like constant change from a company. They want, they need, a constant, steady channel program and product line. As a Linux lover, you probably find constant change and small improvements exciting. Businesses much prefer stability.
In addition, Canonical is simplifying its hardware certification program. In the past manufacturers had a choice of two levels of endorsement for systems: "Ubuntu Certified" and "Ubuntu Ready." Canonical recognized that this was confusing so starting with October's Ubuntu 11.10 release there will only be one Canonical-endorsed hardware certification program: Ubuntu Certified.
Just like resellers and corporate customers, original equipment manufacturers (OEM)s and original design manufacturer (ODM)s much prefer simple and stable over constant small changes and tweaks.
If Canonical is successful in doing all this, and in stabilizing it own management structure, then Canonical, and Ubuntu, will have a much better chance of moving from Linux lovers' desktops to corporate offices and server rooms. That's easier said than done though. We'll see how they do this time around.
Related Stories:
The Five Best Desktop Linux Distributions
Windows' Endgame. Desktop Linux's Failure
Mint 11: The "Un-Unity" Ubuntu desktop Linux
Canonical switches to OpenStack for Ubuntu Linux cloud
Canonical, Ubuntu Linux, CTO leavesSecular Buddhism, “like all ‘isms’…is at best a parody, at worst a constriction.” (Nick Land*)
I am working on a detailed critique of the Secular Buddhist movement in the West. The critique employs speculative non-buddhist theory. What it shows is that Secular Buddhism is beholden to the identical transcendental norm as the most flagrantly religious and conservatively orthodox forms of Buddhism.
In the meantime, I read Stephen Batchelor’s “A Secular Buddhist.” This short piece is being distributed in advance of a public discussion between Batchelor and Don Cupitt, a self-described “secular Christian,” at London Insight Meditation. (Link below.)
Here, I would like to offer a raw reader-response account of my reading of Batchelor’s statement. I know that his piece itself is too brief to base a broad criticism on. But there are two good reasons to attend closely to it. The first is that, according to the website, it represents Batchelor’s “outlining” of his vision “for a contemporary spirituality.” The second, and more important reason, is that it contains axiomatic features that are endemic to all writing on Secular Buddhism—whether in Batchelor’s numerous books or on the newly sprouting Secular Buddhist websites, blogs, forums, and Facebook pages. These features form the very foundation on which Secular Buddhism is currently building its house. I say that they are axiomatic because these features go unchallenged, indeed unquestioned, by Secular Buddhists of all stripes, including the secular-scientistic community around Jon Kabat-Zinn. These features, in short, constitute the faith at the heart of Secular Buddhism. It is a faith, moreover, that renders Secular Buddhism indistinguishable from every other system of religious belief. The grounding of an “ism” in faith is neither new nor interesting. It is, however, a serious—perhaps debilitating—weakness in one that claims to reach for the values encapsulated in the term “secular.”
Radical?
James Blake’s comments introducing Batchelor’s and Cupitt’s statements alerted me to the first of several constrictions that render both arguments anemic. Blake announces that:
Both visions are radical…Radical is a paradoxical word, associated with the new and sometimes shocking, but literally meaning ‘of roots’. Stephen and Don are in this sense true radicals.
Blake says that Batchelor’s and Cupitt’s arguments are “rooted in deep study of the evidence for the lives and philosophies of the Buddha and Jesus respectively.” Batchelor confirms this claim of radicality when he writes that his vision is “not just another modernist reconfiguration of a traditional form of Asian Buddhism…It is more radical than that: it seeks to return to the roots of the Buddhist tradition and rethink Buddhism from the ground up” (pp. 3-4).
That sense of “radical” is, in Batchelor’s case, fraught with more pitfalls than the ostensible badge of honor is worth. First, as Batchelor himself notes, the Pali canon—Secular Buddhism’s go-to scripture—is a “complex tapestry” of data “shot through with conflicting ideas” (pp. 4-5). It is thus not the case that there is no ground to be staked out for a contemporary Buddhism on the basis of the Pali canon; rather, it is the case that there are numerous overlapping and intersecting grounds. Do you want your Buddhism to promise (actually, in the original context, threaten) rebirth? fiery hell? blissful heaven? It’s all in the canon. Would you like your Buddha to converse with horny spirits and cutesy gods til the wee hours of the morning? Grounds for that, too. How about a supernaturally powerful, miracle-performing Buddha? Yep. Oh, you prefer a Buddha who despises all of that mumbo-jumbo? Sure, no problem. How about banishing a member from your sangha for holding hands with a woman? You may do so! It’s canonical!
Batchelor is, of course, aware of the schizophrenic nature of the canon. So, he devises a methodology to get at the goods he wants. His method is to “bracket off anything attributed to the Buddha in the canon that could just as well have been said by a brahmin priest or Jain monk” (p. 5). Why this? Because if a Brahmin or Jain could have said it, that is evidence prima facie that it was “determined by the common metaphysical outlook of that time” and “derived from the worldview of 5th century India” (p. 5). And if only the Buddha said it? Well, then it is “an intrinsic component of the dharma.” And here we have Secular Buddhism’s first article of faith.
First Article of Faith: Transcendental Dharma
The dharma is unconditioned. It is not the product of any century, particularly not of that century in which its creator (discoverer?) lived. It is timeless. Being so, it somehow nonetheless clarifies for us here and now, “in this world, in this century (our saeculum)” (p. 1), the “great matter of birth and death” (p. 5). The dharma—that unity of unique and timeless truths uttered by the enlightened Buddha—addresses and resolves our “ultimate concern” as human beings. Interestingly, Batchelor, unlike the communities that his work has spawned, comes clean here: “my secular Buddhism still has a religious quality to it” (p. 5; emphasis in original). He reminds us, too, that “ultimate concern” is Paul Tillich’s gloss on “faith.” What did Tillich mean?
Paul Tillich believed that the essence of religious attitudes is “ultimate concern.” Ultimate concern is “total.” Its object is experienced as numinous or holy, distinct from all profane and ordinary realities. It is also experienced as overwhelmingly real and valuable—indeed, so real and so valuable that, in comparison, all other things appear empty and worthless. As such, it demands total surrender and promises total fulfillment (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; s.v. “Concepts of God”).
Why does Batchelor use for support, of all people, a Christian theologian? He gives a hint in his opening remarks:
I am a secular Buddhist. It has taken me years to fully “come out,” and I still feel a nagging tug of insecurity, a faint aura of betrayal in declaring myself in these terms (p. 1).
Stephen Batchelor needn’t be concerned; for he now holds the beacon that illuminates the ultimate concern. That light is “the dharma.” The first article of faith of all Secular Buddhists is that “the dharma” contains teachings that are (i) crucial to human flourishing, and (ii) otherwise unavailable or available only in inferior form from elsewhere. (Batchelor names four specific teachings. I will come back to these in a moment.) In my extended critique, I show that “the Dharma” is the transcendental norm that functions in all varieties of Buddhism, whether secularist-scientistic or flamboyantly devotional, in ways that are indistinguishable from other universal absolutes, such as God, Logos, Dao, or intelligent design. Here, I will only mention the logical impossibility of a timeless saeculum, and the irony of a Secular Buddhism grounded in deep religious sentiment. The first is absurd. The latter borders on bathos.
Why does Batchelor even bother to attach “secular” to his “Buddhism”? Here we have another constriction. The history of secularism is rich and complex. Contemporary secularism draws its inspiration from thinkers of the ancient Greek and Latin worlds through the Arab middle ages; it continues into the European Enlightenment with figures such as Voltaire, Spinoza, Locke, and James Madison, and comes down to modern times through Max Weber and Bertrand Russell. As this diverse gallery of thinkers suggests, there is not one secularism, but many. The term cries out for nuance. So, what hints does Batchelor’s outline “for a contemporary spirituality” offer about his usage of the term? All we get is the prosaic and literal “in this world, in this century (our saeculum)” (p. 1). That’s it? What about—just for starters—secularism as a robust rejection of religious faith and, indeed, of anodyne “spirituality” itself?
Second Article of Faith: The Buddha
Secular Buddhism’s second article of faith concerns the human source of this timeless dharmic clarification of the great matter of life and death: the Buddha. To arrive at just the right Buddha—the one who shares Batchelor’s unspecified secular values—Batchelor must perform yet another act of constriction. He writes:
And when you bracket off the quasi-divine attributes that the figure of the Buddha is believed to possess…and focus on the episodes in the canon that recount his often fraught dealings with his contemporaries, then the humanity of Siddhattha Gotama begins to emerge with more clarity too. All this supports what the British scholar Trevor Ling surmised nearly fifty years ago: that what we now know as “Buddhism” started life as an embryonic civilisation or culture that then mutated into another organized Indian religion. Secular Buddhism, which seeks to articulate a way of practicing the dharma in this world and time, thus finds vindication through its critical return to canonical sources, and its attempts to recover a vision of Gotamas’s own saeculum (pp. 6-7).
Batchelor already admitted to the cacophony of the Pali canon. So, to what canonical sources is he returning to extricate this humane master for our saeculum? I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating here.
Why do x-buddhists continue to embrace their Sunday-school fable of the Buddha? It is particularly curious that the scientifically-allied, ostensibly de-mythologized modern variety of Secular Buddhists do, isn’t it? Why this recurring, and seemingly unacknowledged argument from (mythological) authority? And why this dishonesty about the lack of reliable data for the so-desired authority? Or is it ignorance rather than dishonesty? And if ignorance, is it the dark unknowing kind or the willful variety? I admit that, in past writings, I myself have done some damage in arguing for the reconstruction of a recoverable historical figure named “Gotama.” Let me repent. My several years’ effort of searching for a reliable historical basis for a biography of Siddhattha Gotama can be summed up as this: Gotama is a ghost. He is a non-entity. Or, he is an entity like Ahab—a literary fiction. So, I now refer to him as “the Protagonist:” Protagonist, The. The progenitor of the Buddhist dispensation. He is referred to by various names, such as “The Buddha,” “Gotama,” “The Blessed One,” etc. Speculative non-buddhism’s designation “The Protagonist” is intended to indicate the irrefutable fact that “the Buddha” is a historical figure entirely overwritten by a literary one. Not the slightest wisp of evidence has survived that sheds light on the historical progenitor. Any reliable historical evidence that once existed has been reduced to caricature by the machinations of internecine Buddhist institutional shenanigans and the stratagems of ideological dupery. The figure of the Buddha in the classical Pali texts is a concoction of the collective imaginations of the numerous communities that, over several centuries, had a hand in the formation of the canon. Add to this imaginative mélange the imaginings—cultural, political, fantastic, ignorant—of all the iterations of all forms of x-buddhism, and the result is Buddha as Cosmic Magic Mirror, reflecting all things to all people. A viable composite human figure “The Buddha” can be salvaged from this protean symbol of buddhistic vanity only with force of the darkest, most atavistic yearning of puerile nostalgia for The Great Father.
May Secular Buddhists, in our time, put away their childish obsession with the ghost of Gotama.
Third Article of Faith: Special Teachings
Now, what about those presumably unique teachings that Gotama bestowed on humanity? That they are both exigent and unique constitutes the Secular Buddhists’ third article of faith. Batchelor writes:
Tentatively, I would suggest that this “bracketing” of metaphysical views, leaves us with four distinctive key ideas that do not appear to have direct precedents in Indian tradition. I call them the four “P”s: 1. The principle of conditionality
2. The process of four noble tasks (truths)
3. The practice of mindful awareness
4. The power of self-reliance Some time ago I realized that what I found most difficult to accept in Buddhism were those beliefs that it shared with its sister Indian religions Hinduism and Jainism. Yet when you bracket off those beliefs, you are left not with a fragmentary and emasculated teaching, but with an entirely adequate ethical, philosophical and practical framework for living your life in this world. Thus what is truly original in the Buddha’s teaching, I discovered, was his secular outlook (p.6).
This statement echoes the apparently universal acceptance among Secular Buddhists of the sufficiency of the four noble truths/eightfold path framework for our saeculum. Now, with loud thumping of the canon, traditionalists will, of course, argue that such a constricted version of the teachings does precisely leave us with “a fragmentary and emasculated teaching.” (Why emasculated, anyway? Does Buddhism have a penis?) But that point does not interest me in the least. Neither does it interest me that a careful reading of Buddhism’s “sister Indian religions” reveals precisely the opposite of what Batchelor claims: there is much shared ground, much borrowing and reworking of each others’ ideas and practices. I am assuming that Batchelor knows that to speak of “Hinduism” at the time of the Buddha is wildly anachronistic—by well over a millennium; and that by “Indian religions,” he means the teachings that would eventually be recorded in the Upanishads, the Jaina canon, and the ancient yogic material. If that’s the case, he needs to return to those sources and read with heightened care. He will discover, if not outright incestuousness, at least a very close kinship between Buddhism and its “sister religions.” (Why sister, anyway? Buddhism is male and all the others are female?) But none of that interests me in the least. Finally, I will mention, though with disinterest, that Batchelor further constricts his Buddhism by reducing our expectations suddenly to a merely “adequate ethical, philosophical and practical framework for living your life in this world” (p. 6; first emphasis added).
What does interest me is the fact that “the four Ps” render Buddhism wholly expendable. If the four Ps encapsulate crucial knowledge about how we should live as human beings at this time (saeculum), we can do drastically better than to look to Buddhism for that knowledge. For, all four have been articulated throughout history, and continue to be formulated and developed, in ways far more sophisticated, hence appropriate to a modern audience, than Buddhism’s ancient, ascetically-driven versions. Secular Buddhism’s fourth article of faith is thus the inviolability of the principle of sufficient Buddhism.
Fourth Article of Faith: The Principle of Sufficient Buddhism
It does not matter that Aristotle, Hume, and Parfit, for instance, provide us with vastly more nuanced and astute thinking on “the principle of conditionality.” No need for comparison to or dialogue with these thinkers: Secular Buddhism’s version is sufficient.
It does not matter that fields such as philosophy, psychology, biology, literature, neuroscience, medicine, and the arts have developed effective and often profound models and applications for fulfilling “the process of four noble tasks” (namely: fully knowing suffering; letting go of craving; experiencing cessation of craving; and cultivating the eightfold path). No need for comparison to or dialogue with these fields: Secular Buddhism’s version is sufficient.
It does not matter that the world’s treasure house of culture is teeming with suggestions for how to realize the “practice of mindful awareness.” Virtually every religious tradition includes a contemplative practice that has been lovingly transmitted through the centuries. Psychoanalysis, from Freud to Gendlin, has given careful thought to the nature of attention and the movements of the mind. So has philosophy, from the Stoics and Epicureans to Aristotle, and from Descartes and Kierkegaard to Wittgenstein-inspired thinkers such as Peter Winch, Norman Malcolm, and D.Z. Phillips. I could go on. Think of the creative practices of our poets and painters. But it wouldn’t matter. There is no need for comparison to or dialogue with these traditions: Secular Buddhism’s practice of mindful awareness is sufficient.
Finally, it does not matter that Emerson’s thinking on “the power of self-reliance” makes the Buddha’s look like a novice’s. Let’s bring others into this conversation about self-reliance. How about Thoreau? Montaigne? Pascal? Nietzsche? Hell, while we’re writing invitations, why not invite the great American self-helpers like Dale Carnegie and Napoleon Hill? None of these thinkers will never get his invitation to the dialogue on self-reliance because Secular Buddhism’s version is wholly sufficient for our saeculum.
Fifth Article of Faith: Ideological Rectitude
Why do Batchelor and the Secular Buddhists believe that they possess an “entirely adequate ethical, philosophical and practical framework for living your life in this world” and thus have no need of consulting the wider world of knowledge? The answer lies in their fifth article of faith. Batchelor is apparently convinced that what he is proposing as a Buddhism for our saeculum is—and these are universal Secular Buddhist buzzwords— natural, empirical, pragmatic, and in accord with science. The teachings, as the ancient trope has it, are simply how things are. They are phenomenologically obvious. Thus, they posit not matters to be believed but tasks to be done. Batchelor writes:
Above all, secular Buddhism is something to do, not something to believe in…Instead of trying to justify the belief that “life is suffering” (the first noble truth), one seeks to embrace and deal wisely with suffering when it occurs. Instead of trying to convince oneself that “craving is the origin of suffering” (the second noble truth), one seeks to let go of and not get tangled up in craving whenever it rises up in one’s body or mind. From this perspective it is irrelevant whether the statements “life is suffering” or “craving is the origin of suffering” are either true or false. Why? Because these four so-called “truths” are not propositions that one accepts as a believer or rejects as a non-believer. They are suggestions to do something that might make a difference in the world in which you coexist with others now (p. 7).
Students of ritual have a saying: power is not manipulative; disguising power is. The Secular Buddhist propositions are precisely there to be accepted as a believer or rejected as a non-believer. Whether you accept or reject the postulates makes a world of difference. Acceptance of those postulates conditions you for a particular way of seeing things, of interpreting experience, and so on. So, of course, you see things in those terms. You thereby share with others quite specific representations, language, and ideas about the world. Congratulations! You have an ideology (like the rest of us). The crucial question is whether the ideological nature of your worldview is overt or covert. Given its rhetoric of naturalness, pragmatism, and so on; given its fervent insistence on the obviousness of The Dharma; given its refusal to subject its beliefs to the rigors of humanistic discourse, Secular Buddhism cannot avoid the label of covert ideology.
I am not saying that Secular Buddhists intentionally disguise their ideological machinations, and thereby gain influence over their adherents. I am suggesting something deeper and darker than that. I am suggesting that Secular Buddhists themselves mistake the (ideological) lens for the data. They are blind to the fact that they even have an ideology.
Conclusion
Secular Buddhism and Stephen Batchelor are not, I suppose, necessarily synonymous. But you couldn’t blame someone for thinking that they are. Just read first some Batchelor and then visit the ever-proliferating array of Secular Buddhist sites. The two are intimately entwined. The pervasiveness of Batchelor’s influence throughout the Secular Buddhist universe is unmistakable. It often manifests in the form of his exact words. So, I think that it is legitimate to argue—at this juncture anyway—that Batchelor’s faith is Secular Buddhism’s faith as well.
A couple of final responses from my reading.
Contrary to James Blake’s enthusiastic proclamation, secular Buddhism, as it is manifesting in the works of Stephen Batchelor and on the budding Secular Buddhist community websites, blogs, forums, and Facilebook pages is not radical in any but the most trivial sense. It does not constitute a “reimagining [of] the dharma from the ground up.” It is the same old exercise that Buddhists have been engaged in since their revered teacher made—what my Buddha would consider—the colossal mistake of opening his big mouth: endlessly tinkering with the dharmic details. Batchelor is doing exactly what he asks us to believe he is not doing; namely, creating “just another modernist reconfiguration of a traditional form of Asian Buddhism” (pp. 3-4). I have seen nothing in the Secular Buddhist corpus that suggests otherwise.
I share the conviction that we need a radically new form of thought and practice for our time. So, I think it is unfortunate that Secular Buddhists have faith that they are salvaging eminently usable planks from the ancient, teetering, and dilapidated vehicle called Buddhism with which to build that new form. Slapping “secular” on a tradition born and nurtured in a world-renouncing asceticism inconceivable in today’s world, makes Secular Buddhism terribly close to a form of parody. Uttering “secular” before “Buddhism” certainly changes very, very little—and when Buddhism’s countless revisions throughout the centuries are taken into considerations, it changes nothing substantial whatsoever.
I have to wonder if Batchelor and the Secular Buddhists truly want such a radical reimagining of traditional Buddhism. In the end, they seem to swap radicality and innovation for the timeless certainties promised by traditional Dharma. The Secular Buddhist quest, then, becomes identical to that of the mythical Buddha: recovery of a lost truth. As Batchelor expresses it in his somewhat millenarian final words:
Perhaps we have reached a time when we need to recover and practice again a solar dharma, one concerned with shedding its light (wisdom) and heat (compassion) onto and into this world (p. 8).
Does Secular Buddhism represent a first attempt, however frail, at a genuinely radical re-imagining of Buddhist postulates for the twenty-first century? Or is it a phantasmagoric mythos sprinkled with pseudo-philosophical platitudes, bad science, and facile recommendations for living? Something else?
Until Secular Buddhists ask long, hard, and, of course, potentially destructive, questions about their need to bolster up and preserve Buddhism or “Gotama’s teachings” or “the Dharma,” they risk being agents peddling the very goods they claim to be disposing us of: subscriptions to an ancient religion. Disguising that religion as “secular”—is that really what we need in our saeculum?
*Original: Like all ‘isms’, libidinal materialism is at best a parody, at worst a constriction. Nick Land. The Thirst for Annihilation (London: Routledge, 1992), p. xxi.
Stephen Batchelor, “A Secular Buddhist.”Here at Oddly Developed Types, we don't believe that giggling like a loon is incompatible with scholarship. If you want vague, quasi-superstitious speculations on type, or if you prefer dry-as-dust reading material, go elsewhere. You would only spoil our fun if you stayed.
THE GOALS
1. Present specific facts instead of vague generalities
While other type websites provide vague generalities without explaining where they got their (heavily rehashed) material, Oddly Developed Types gives you the real dope--facts, numbers, and percentages with citations to back them up. If possible the studies themselves are linked so that you can follow up on the subject if you want. The goal is to put knowledge straight into your hands. Check out the Online Type Library and explore the free type research available.
2. Don't hide the bad stuff
There's an understable but unfortunate tendency in the professional type community to hide unpleasant facts. Researchers are rightly worried that information in the hands of mean people could lead to type bigotry or hurt the feelings of people who feel bad enough about themselves already. But silence has its price too. If a person has a medical condition that comes with a high risk of heart attacks, isn't it the duty of the doctor to warn them to eat right and exercise? Many of the type-specific "diseases" might be preventable if a person only knew what they were up against. It seems best to present the truth in a spirit of compassionate understanding, knowing that it will ultimately prevent more serious harm.
3. Continually Improve
You know those type websites that haven't been updated since 1995? This isn't one of those sites. Oddly Developed Types is continually agglomerating new material as more research becomes available. Check back every few months, and see what new stuff we have to offer!
4. Lighten up
If you can't laugh at other people's weird habits, then what can you laugh at? :) I hope you will forgive the warped INTP sense of humor that pervades this site. It was inevitable; I would be bored otherwise, and so would you.
Welcome to Oddly Developed Types!The typical follow-up question I get when I mention my field of study is, “You look at rocks all day or what?” That’s Geology, not Geography, and I’ll tell them as much. “Oh, so, you learn about capitals,” they’ll say, which is not incorrect, but does show a lack of understanding of the full spectrum of the subject. I’ll respond by telling them just how much I love memorizing those, hoping they’ll at least understand the full spectrum of sarcasm.
Some people do get Geography, though, and they’ll ask me, “You like maps, don’t you?” Fuck yes, I do.
With a map, you can figure out exactly where you are and how you relate to the Earth. You can briefly remove yourself from the reality of your world, and observe landscapes beyond the pulsating dot on your phone’s GPS–And, as a Geographer, I’ve learned that the people who create maps control much of our society today.
We are all affected by maps, in more ways than most people realize: The design of your neighborhood, your local shops, the services near walking distance to you, and even the ethnicity and income of your community are all influenced by geographic forces.
Ever wonder why, at one moment, you might be in a “nice” area, but if you walk down a couple of blocks, the scenery change is drastic? Or why the northern idyllic suburbia suddenly shifts to southern fenced-in homes with large dogs, overgrown vacant lots that corral abandoned furniture? At times it might seem like invisible lines divide the town, and sometimes they are very visible walls, like a freeway, or train tracks. This particular phenomenon is especially prevalent if you live within an urban Central Valley town.
But, before many of those visible lines, there were other lines that separated communities:
The Red Lines
In the early 1930s, long before the Civil Rights Movement or the construction of I-5, Congress established the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), to counteract the urban foreclosures during the Great Depression. The program was a tremendous success, but only for some.
From 1932 to 1964, the FHA with the assistance of HOLC helped hundreds of thousands of people become new homeowners, financing over $120 billion of new housing. However, less than 2% of this real estate was available to people of color. This government-led discrimination institutionalized segregation and destroyed the possibility of investment wherever people of color lived, especially in the urban cores, where most minorities resided.
The FHA explicitly practiced a policy of redlining–methodologically denying or limiting financial services to communities of color solely based on their racial or ethnic composition. The term redlining comes from using red lines on a map to delineate areas where financial institutions should not invest. By 1938, HOLC had surveyed and “graded” neighborhoods in California’s major cities: Oakland, Sacramento, San Francisco, Stockton, Fresno, San Jose, San Diego, and Los Angeles. These classifications were deeply racist. Grade “A”, in green, were typically homogeneously white, suburban enclaves—hotspots for investments. The lowest ranking, “D”, were neighborhoods highlighted in red based on pollution, proximity to industrial zones, and infiltration of “Mexicans, negroes, and orientals.”
Recently, a team of scholars from four universities put together an interactive map titled “Mapping Inequality” which digitized over 150 HOLC’s maps and descriptions in high-resolution. The project, which is hosted by the University of Richmond, overlays these historic maps with a current map of US streets and symbols.
You can find the interactive maps here.
When looking at the site, you can select a city to reveal its historic maps, the rankings, and the reasons why neighborhoods were graded a particular way.
“There is a concentration of Mexican residents in the area, as well as many negroes and orientals. The best that can be hoped for this area is that it will develop into a business or industrial section. The area is graded low red.” This is a summary for a D-grade Stockton, CA neighborhood.
A report on a redlined community in La Jolla, CA reads: “This area is known as the servants’ quarters of La Jolla, being populated with the serving class of whites, negroes and Mexicans,” whose neighborhood was “set aside by common consent for the colored populations.”
Many of the Sacramento’s West End neighborhood were redlined due to “subversive racial elements” where one section’s “particular hazard is ‘racial’; 30% of the population is foreign, including Orientals, Mexicans, and low-class Italians.”
These classifications drastically affected the ability of property owners to finance maintenance and repairs to their property, severely reducing the value in these areas. From 1938 to 1949, property in Sacramento experienced a 46 percent increase in value, while redlined neighborhoods decreased in value by 30 percent.
The story is the same in many cities; redlining steadily decreased property values of the urban core while suburbs and businesses expanded to the outer rings. Eventually, the construction of highways that connected these “homogeneous” enclaves and the subsequent “urban renewal projects” led to a forced exodus of entire non-white communities from the urban cores (such as the destruction of Little Manila in downtown Stockton.)
I know I said I love maps, but I wish some were never made.
Take a look at your city, your community, have things changed or have they remained the same since these maps were created?
NOTE: The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily |
I believe the socio-economic benefits that will result from the deregistration of the common land will be of significant public benefit to both the immediate area and beyond.”
With the approval of the S16 application, HOTVDC can reveal that the required financing package is in place to support the project for the full amount and have an exclusivity contract in place with the financial backers who are in the process of completing due diligence. Once these have been completed, the supporters of the project will be publicly announced and detailed construction timelines revealed.
Michael Carrick, CEO of HOTVDC: “We would like to thank local councils, Welsh Assembly Members and the local community who have supported the project throughout the planning process up to this point. The Circuit of Wales has the ability to generate thousands of employment opportunities, attract greater long-term investment and deliver regeneration into Blaenau Gwent and South Wales."
Following the end of the judicial review period, and once construction and finance contracts have been finalised, on-site activity will commence.
Additionally, HOTVDC are pleased to announce the appointment of Martin Whitaker as Circuit of Wales CEO who will be charged with managing the transformation of 830 acres of Blaenau Gwent into an international motorsport circuit, technology park and training facility, utilising his extensive experience of working both on and off track. This appointment will allow Michael Carrick to focus his attentions on his role as CEO of the Heads of the Valleys Development Company, specifically managing the financial aspects of the project whilst remaining an active board member for the Circuit of Wales.
Michael Carrick, CEO of HOTVDC: “Martin’s track record speaks for itself as he is one of the few men operating at the top level of international motorsport whose experience covers almost every facet of the sport. Martin has managed a modern Formula 1 venue at the Bahrain International Circuit, worked for both the sport’s governing body, the Federation Internationale de l’Autombile (FIA), and its commercial rights holder, plus the UK’s governing body - the RAC Motor Sports Association. Additionally, he has led a major motor manufacturer’s competition department and one of the world’s most celebrated racing series.
“The Circuit of Wales is already gaining experience and knowledge through our role as promoter of the British MotoGP. As we now focus our attentions on the build phase of the project, Martin’s guidance and experience will be invaluable to realising its potential as a catalyst for investment in the local economy and across the motorsport industry in Britain.”
After leaving the UK for the Kingdom of Bahrain, Martin was tasked with shaping every aspect of the Bahrain International Circuit as CEO helping to deliver the inaugural Formula 1 race in the Middle East in 2004. In subsequent years the circuit quickly became the ‘Home of motorsport in the Middle East’, attracting an array of international motorsport series, and developed into the leading corporate, cultural and community facility in a region without a long association with the sport.
Martin Whitaker, Circuit of Wales CEO: “It is with enormous excitement that I look forward to working with Michael and the team at the Circuit of Wales to deliver this unique project for the British motorsport industry, the automobile industry and the people of Blaenau Gwent.
“I am passionate about the economic and social benefits that a venue such as the Circuit of Wales will bring, and firmly believe that the time is ripe for this development not only as an amazing entertainment and leisure centre, but also as an invaluable resource for the entire British motorsport and automotive industry.”In a notable moment of divergence between the White House and perhaps its most reliable media booster, Fox News host Sean Hannity said Thursday that President Donald Trump was wrong to blame the failure of the Republican health care bill on the faction of GOP lawmakers known as the Freedom Caucus.
"Now in my opinion, it's not the Freedom Caucus that's responsible for the GOP failure in this case to repeal and replace Obamacare," Hannity said on his eponymous program. "Now this legislation was flawed from the beginning. It was created behind closed doors. Not one single member saw the bill until it was rolled out. And that made it a disaster."
Hannity's commentary came hours after Trump lashed out at the Freedom Caucus, a group of hardline conservatives and libertarians in the House of Representatives, for the demise of the American Health Care Act.
In a tweet on Thursday morning, Trump said the caucus "will hurt the entire Republican agenda," and suggested that members should face primary challenges next year.
Hannity said that Trump was off the mark with the tweets.
Related: Conservative media at crossroads early in Trump era
"Now I don't know who's telling the White House to focus their anger on the Freedom Caucus, but I do think it's misplaced," Hannity said. "Because the Freedom Caucus, I've talked to them, they want to make a deal, and they want the win for the president and the country."
The tepid disagreement was nevertheless significant coming from Hannity, who has been loathe to criticize Trump for anything. Through his radio and television shows, Hannity has acted as an unofficial surrogate both for the Trump campaign and the new administration.
After the AHCA was withdrawn from the House last week, Hannity insisted that it was "not President Trump's failure."
But Trump's criticism of the Freedom Caucus put commentators like Hannity and Laura Ingraham at odds with the White House.
Ingraham, a Fox News contributor who was a candidate to serve as White House press secretary under Trump, joined Hannity's program on Thursday, where she said the "White House was not as involved as it should have been" on the health care effort.
"It's ridiculous at this point to start pointing fingers at the Freedom Caucus," Ingraham said. "I don't understand Donald Trump's tweets at all about that today."Earlier today I wrote about the curious proliferation of post-election recriminations that blame President Obama for paying insufficient attention to the needs of political, economic and media elites. After the 1994 election, Michael Kinsley sounded a vaguely similar theme:
The widespread public misperception about spending and—especially—taxes helps to explain the puzzle of President Clinton's unpopularity. No doubt his own personal and political failings play a role, as do the skill and viciousness of the Republican opposition. But if most people are nursing the impression that their taxes have gone up (with no resulting benefit), when in fact they haven't gone up, and have even gone down in many cases, that also must be part of the explanation.
The remaining puzzle, of course, is: What explains the widespread public misperception—or "false consciousness," as Marx liked to call this sort of thing? The crude but unavoidable answer is that the 1.4 million whose taxes went up are a lot more influential in our political system than the 15 million whose taxes went down. The "Clinton tax increase" hit people with family incomes over about $185,000 a year. This may be just a tiny fraction of the general population, but it covers almost everybody in the opinion-forming elite. That group includes not just the upper reaches of Washington journalism. It includes Jay Leno and David Letterman. It includes Rush Limbaugh—who starts every day's radio program with a denunciation of the 1993 budget, which he calls "the raw deal. " It includes T.V. anchors and newspaper publishers.
A similar dynamic is occurring once again over taxes. Kinsley's piece is worth re-reading because it does quite a good job of describing the current political landscape as well.WaitI beg you pardon what did you call me GildaPersonally I would like to see some more griffons in FIM but not really like meanie Gilda unless they redem her at some point hmmmmmMLP title cards because why not the creative team behind the show deserve itI want to make one for every episode with its own quirky style that best suits that particular episode its very ambitious as I want to get it done before heaths warming eve if its possible lol. With the other jobs and shenanigans I doing out side of this it could be longer but wish me luck Bronies I hope to do our fandom proud.I managed to find a font thats close too the shows one for the credits so it should look not so basic now and fit in to the shows style better I may buy the actual font later on to be spot on.I enjoy experimenting with the type design as much as the illustrations especially when you have a little pinkie in there. lolBy the way fellow Bronies you will be pleased to know that I am working on party of one title card right nowcupcakes.but after that I would like you to pick which episode gets the titled treatment next. Although I have gone with season one so far I would like you to choose it for me get the community involved i am doing this for you awesome guys as well ☺Sorry I am not a premium member or I would have set up a poll insteadUntil next deviation LATERSAll drawn on Photoshop CS6 with my Wacom tablet 5Like ithate itits up to you not marmiteHomes Photo Credit: Harbin King ©
Everything You Need to Know About Building a Remote Island Getaway
Vancouver architect Jason King shares his tips for building a dream vacation home on B.C.’s Gulf and Discovery Islands.
By Christine Beyleveldt July 11, 2017
Jason King first turned his attention to British Columbia’s beautiful island communities when he was tasked with designing a home on Gambier Island, part of the Sunshine Coast. Unfortunately, King never got to see the project through to completion (plans were scrapped following the 2007/2008 recession), but the Vancouver-based architect’s fondness for taking his work away from the hustle and bustle of the city has only continued to develop—he loves the lush forests, beaches and privacy that come with island living and, of course, the opportunity to help homeowners design their dream getaway.
Last year, King helped John and Anne Thompson build their Cedar Rock house (the first island home he’s seen through to completion) on the northeastern side of Quadra Island. And now, after embracing the unique challenges posed during construction, King is sharing his advice for others who are interested in building on the Gulf and Discovery Islands. Read on for King’s best tips for minimizing costs, achieving sustainability and going off the grid.
1. Reduce Transportation
Getting to and from any property in remote B.C. is challenging, and transporting building supplies with you can make it even more difficult. According to King, the best way to effectively lower cost is to decrease the shipping distance—think of it as a 100-mile diet, only you’re looking for supplies to pick up close to the build site.
2. Work with the Land
Unwilling to compromise the beauty of the forest that surrounded their home, the Thompsons only cleared as many trees as were necessary (15 in total) to make room for the 2,000-square-foot structure. They then constructed the home using Douglas fir, hemlock and a single red cedar from the property. “Cedar is a terrible wood to use structurally,” says King. “It’s strength-to-weight ratio is very low.” But that didn’t stop them from wanting to use such a beautiful resource. Luckily, the size of this particular trunk didn’t compromise its strength so a local structural engineer happily signed off on it—the tree now stands proud and tall in the centre of the house, holding up the Crow’s Nest (the Thompsons’ nickname for their attic).
3. Find a Local Contractor (If Possible)
“There’s a lower cost of living [on the islands],” says King, but expertise is harder to come by, and like building supplies, bringing contractors from Vancouver to the island is an unnecessary cost. But, according to King, many of the men and women living on the islands are used to getting jobs done with their own hands and are therefore a valuable resources. The Thompsons were lucky enough to find a modern renaissance man (a structural engineer, fisherman, search and rescue leader and builder living on Quadra Island) who felled, stripped and dried the aforementioned cedar for them.
4. Take Creative License
There are a lot of city bylaws that can slow the building process. “In Vancouver you have to show your plans [to so many people]—your neighbours can look at your plans and object to things about the house that you’re proposing,” says King. “But on the islands you usually don’t see your neighbours.” The Thompsons’ five-acre lot, for example, is ensconced in thick woods, allowing them to have more creative freedom.
The Cedar Rock home ended up resembling a clam shell or geode, but John and Anne were originally inspired by the appearance of a sailboat, hence the Crow’s Nest attic, prow-like patio and awning. “The sailboat [idea], for me, was about the sense of living on a sailboat where everything has a function,” says Anne. Ever practical, King ensured that no element of the house is without a purpose: wood benches double as storage chests and there’s a space underneath the deck for kayaks and paddleboards—a must for the couple’s outdoor lifestyle.
READ MORE
Photos: Gorgeous Gulf Island Retreat
5. Protect Yourself from the Elements
Nature aggressively works against everything you build, cautions King, and it’s important to take preventative measures. The Cedar Rock home is clad in cedar strips, a wise choice for exterior panelling because they produce a natural resin and therefore don’t need any extra varnish for protection against the elements. “It is a rain forest,” says King, “so the minute you’ve finished your house, nature is trying to turn it black.” This particular cedar panelling, although protected by its natural lacquer, changed colour soon after the house was completed (a welcome change in the Thompsons’ eyes) and now has a softer, earthy tone.
King recommends roofing that’s made with metal instead of asphalt; the roof will last longer against the elements, he says. With massive panes of glass that let in gorgeous views and natural light, shutters or sliding panels are another practical investment. “Storms throw big branches and all kinds of stuff at your house,” explains King. “It’s [about] protecting it from people and the weather.” In terms of planning for durability, it also makes sense to drive the building perimeter a few feet into the ground so burrowing animals can’t easily get underneath. The same goes for attic space, which should have no nooks and crannies for birds to roost.
6. Go Green
Sustainability is a discussion most of King’s clients want to have, but living the eco-friendly life comes with a hefty price tag. “Most people don’t understand the cost-benefit,” he says. “They want to be as green as possible until you tell them how much it costs.” Installing a solar panel roof, for instance, can require upwards of $25,000—but it would cost the same to bring electricity to a lot that’s not connected to the main power lines.
Most properties on the Gulf and Discovery Islands are off the grid, so owners have to function accordingly. If Island dwellers want to stay connected and adopt an energy-efficient lifestyle, they’ll have to decide whether or not they want to invest both their time and money in the project. King estimates that solar panels start to pay for themselves after 10 to 15 years, and can save owners thousands of dollars in electricity costs by the end of their lifetime.
7. Disconnect!
What the Thompsons love most is the fact that they have no internet connection. John says time moves slowly on the island and the ambience is perfect for sorting your thoughts. Their goal was to build a getaway that wouldn’t disturb the natural splendour that surrounds them, and they joke that one day people will pay to rent cabins with no internet connection so that they can truly get back to nature. Building on the Gulf and Discovery Islands comes with a set of unfamiliar challenges, but also the opportunity to innovate.For a typical college student, if it didn't happen on Facebook, it didn't happen. That gives the social networking behemoth an out-sized influence on the confines of political debate, if that debate falls outside what Facebook deems acceptable discourse.
Proponents of marijuana legalization, which is on the California ballot in 2010, have hit a Facebook wall in their effort to grow an online campaign to rethink the nation's pot laws. Facebook initially accepted ads from the group Just Say Now, running them from August 7 to August 16, generating 38 million impressions and helping the group's fan page grow to over 6,000 members. But then they were abruptly removed.
Andrew Noyes, a spokesman for Facebook, said that the problem was the pot leaf. "It would be fine to note that you were informed by Facebook that the image in question was no long[er] acceptable for use in Facebook ads. The image of a pot leaf is classified with all smoking products and therefore is not acceptable under our policies," he told the group in an email, which was provided to HuffPost.
Noyes is on vacation and didn't respond to an email. A request sent to Facebook's general press address generated an auto-reply indicating that the company receives many requests and intends to respond. [Scroll down for a Facebook statement.]
Facebook's ad rules, however, only ban promotion of "[t]obacco products," not smoking in general. Since the 1970s, shops selling marijuana paraphernalia have sought ways around the law by disingenuously claiming their products are "for tobacco use only." The Just Say Now campaign is arguing the exact opposite: No, really, it's for marijuana, not tobacco.
The censorship is a blow to the campaign, which is gathering signatures on college campuses calling for legalization and registering young people to vote. "It's like running a campaign and saying you can't show the candidate's face," said Michael Whitney of Firedoglake.com, a blog that is part of the Just Say Now coalition.
Conservative college students condemned the site's restrictions. "Our generation made Facebook successful because it was a community where we could be free and discuss issues like sensible drug policy. If Facebook censorship policies continue to reflect those of our government by suppressing freedom of speech then they won't have to wait until Election Day to be voted obsolete," Jordan Marks, the head of Young Americans for Freedom, told HuffPost in an email. YAF was founded in the 1960s and William Buckley's estate; Buckley was a longtime supporter of marijuana legalization. Marks is a member of the Just Say Now board.
Aaron Houston, the executive director of Students for Sensible Drug Policy, said that Facebook was out of touch with its customers.
"Their business will suffer if they don't reverse this decision. We're way beyond reefer madness and censorship. Facebook should get with the times," he said.
While Facebook is banning the ad, a number of conservative and liberal blogs and news outlets have agreed to run it beginning on Tuesday. The Nation, The New Republic, Human Events, Red State, Antiwar, Reason, Drug War Rant, Stop The Drug War, Daily Paul, Lew Rockwell, The Young Turks, MyDD, AmericaBlog, Pam's House Blend and Raw Story are among them.
To protest Facebook's decision, Just Say Now is launching, naturally, a Facebook petition, cognizant that the social networking company often responds to user feedback. The group is also asking people to replace their profile picture with an image of a censored pot leaf.
"By censoring marijuana leaves, Facebook is banning political speech. This is unfair, and unacceptable," reads the petition. "Facebook should reverse its decision and allow the free discussion of U.S. drug policy that the country is ready for."
UPDATE: The Libertarian Party has had the same problem. Spokesman Kyle Hartz emailed HuffPost to say that after initially approving the ad, Facebook reversed its decision and censored the ad on July 23rd.
"Thanks for writing in to us," a Facebook representative wrote to the party. "I took a look at your account and noticed that the content advertised by this ad is prohibited. We reserve the right to determine what advertising we accept, and we may choose to not accept ads containing or relating to certain products or services. We do not allow ads for marijuana or political ads for the promotion of marijuana and will not allow the creation of any further Facebook Ads for this product. We appreciate your cooperation with this policy."
UPDATE II: Facebook spokesman Noyes says in a statement: "The image in question was no longer acceptable for use in Facebook ads. The image of a marijuana leaf is classified with all smoking products and therefore is not acceptable under our policies."
UPDATE III: Facebook objects to the pot leaf under medical circumstances, as well. As Washington, D.C.'s city council was debating how to write regulations to permit the cultivation and sale of medical marijuana, the District of Columbia Patients' Cooperative took out Facebook ads to encourage city residents to attend the hearings, the cooperative's Nikolas Schiller tells HuffPost. Facebook shut it down, though the hearings went on regardless. The ads contained a pot leaf and were, like the others, initially approved and later rejected.
"The aim of the District of Columbia Patients' Cooperative use of targeted Facebook ads was to engender community support for the DC medical cannabis law which had been placed on ice for 12 years by Congress," said Schiller. "We created the ads to target those on Facebook who are sympathetic to the subject and might be interested in coming to District Council hearings and meeting with elected officials. While we were able to organize through Facebook, our efforts were severely hampered by Facebook's continued rejection of our ads. The ads ran between between January and May 2010, with the final rejection on May 10th--the ad stated "Have you spoken to your doctor yet? You will soon be able to use medical marijuana with a recommendation from your doctor!" and contained a cannabis leaf with the DC flag superimposed over it."
UPDATE IV: Johnny Dunn writes in to say that Facebook initially blocked ads for his t-shirts, which read "Legalize Gay Pot," merging two pop-culture streams. He took the pot leaf off and they are now apparently in compliance.Grand Kingdom’s Latest Trailer Stars The Fighter, Medic, Hunter, And Witch
By Jenni. May 31, 2016. 11:30am
The latest Grand Kingdom trailer stars some characters that people in the PlayStation 4 beta will find familiar. The second character trailer focuses on the Fighter, Hunter, Medic, and Witch. It’s a well-rounded presentation, as the Fighter is a melee unit, the Hunter’s ranged, the Medic is a specialist, and the Witch is a magic unit.
Each of these classes are basic characters that can offer solid support in a battle. The Fighter is a melee unit that uses swords and shields. He has solid attacks and a helpful guard. The Hunter can attack from a distance, sending off multiple arrows to hurt enemies. The Medic does damage, inflicts status ailments, and can heal allies. Finally, the Witch has various magic attacks that, once charged, unleash damage on a single character or entire line.
Grand Kingdom will be coming to European PlayStation 4s and PlayStation Vitas on June 17, 2016. A North American release will follow on June 21, 2016.Securing a strong team composition on the draft screen can feel like solving a puzzle, and Heroic Duos is here to help! Each week, we highlight a pair of heroes who, when played together, have proven to be effective at the highest level of competition. This week’s duo is a Heroes League fixture that can devastate unprepared opponents.
Illidan’s evasive abilities are taken to the next level when he’s supported by the burst healer Rehgar, and when the ultra-mobile Illidan is imbued with Lightning Shield, he’s capable of taking on multiple enemies on his own. Because both of these heroes are good at taking mercenary camps, which can be useful both when you’re defending a lead or mounting a comeback, they’re especially effective on objective-heavy battlegrounds like Blackheart’s Bay, Sky Temple, and Infernal Shrines.
Check out the following matches to see Rehgar and Illidan in action:
TEAMS BATTLEGROUND VOD MVP Black vs. mYinsanity Sky Temple Vox Nihili vs. Gul'DansGame Sky Temple Misfits vs. Fnatic Blackheart's Bay
What makes this duo so dangerous is its persistence and snowball potential. When Illidan and Rehgar focus on a single target, the enemy is forced to either retreat or counter-engage. The latter plays right into the duo’s hands, because Rehgar’s heals, working in tandem with abilities like Evasion and Metamorphosis, ensure that the enemy will find themselves in trouble long before Illidan does.
Once the enemy starts running, the real fun begins. Rehgar and Illidan both have excellent mobility and the ability to stay on a target. Rehgar’s Feral Lunge, passive Spirit Wolf movement speed, and Earthbind Totem are valuable tools against fleeing heroes, and the duo achieves maximum kill potential when Illidan is also chasing using a combination of Dives and Sweeping Strikes.
Looking to some recent matches for examples, here are some important things to keep in mind when playing this duo:
One of Illidan’s most important roles in a team fight is to make himself a target. His quick movements and evasive abilities allow him to dive deep behind enemy lines and survive longer than any other Assassin. Watch how the Illidan in this clip stalls the entire enemy team, affording his allies an opportunity to regroup.
Rehgar's timely Cleanse saves Illidan in the middle of a team fight.
When played aggressively, Rehgar can do a decent amount of burst damage on his own. The Rehgar in this clip dives alongside Illidan, providing Lighting Shield damage and Feral Lunging as many times as possible.
The timing of Ancestral Healing is tricky, but it’s a hugely effective ability once mastered. A skilled Illidan player can ensure his survival and maximize the effect of Ancestral Healing by using Metamorphosis immediately after it is cast.
“The best thing about this combo is that Illidan's Metamorphosis makes Ancestral Healing really easy to hit. Rehgar just has to cast Ancestral Healing on Illidan when he is low on health, and then Illidan uses Metamorphosis, which guarantees that Ancestral Healing will yield maximum effect.”
- Christoph 'Cris' Gowitzke, Team Liquid
TALENT CHOICES
The main aim for Rehgar and Illidan is survival. These talents are important to getting the most out of the two heroes and represent one of many possible routes a player can take to build either hero.
Illidan LEVEL Rehgar Immolation helps Illidan to clear mercenary camps and minion waves more quickly, and is recommended on most battlegrounds. 1 4 Reflexive Block reduces incoming damage when Illidan uses Dive, enabling aggressive play. 7 A well-timed Cleanse affords Illidan much-needed protection against stuns. 10 Ancestral Healing is simply too impactful to pass up. Any Illidan on your team can play much more aggressively knowing that this powerful heal is on standby. Nimble Defender increases Illidan's resistance for two seconds after damaging an enemy with Sweeping Strike—one of his staple attacks. 13 16 Rising Storm does extra damage based on how many times enemies are struck by Lightning Shield. Illidan's stickiness makes him the ideal target for this buff. 20
COUNTERS
Illidan and Rehgar are persistent enemies, but they have weaknesses too. The easiest thing to capitalize on is the duo’s lack of stun, crowd control abilities, and burst damage. Tanky heroes who can hold their ground against Illidan are a good match, as are any heroes who can stun or silence nearby enemies. Here are some other things to consider when facing this duo:
Rehgar and Illidan have no crowd control or burst damage ability, which makes it difficult for them to deal with bruisers like Arthas and Sonya.
Incorrect use of Ancestral Healing and Metamorphosis leaves Illidan vulnerable.
Illidan is reliant on his Betrayer’s Thirst passive, which heals him as he deals damage. Any hero who can deny Illidan the ability to auto-attack swiftly will be a valuable asset on your team.
Rehgar likes to be aggressive alongside Illidan, but he isn’t nearly as elusive. Rehgar is unable to cast Ancestral Healing on himself, so if there is ever an opportunity, turn around and punish his aggressive positioning.
“In terms of supports, Li Li and Brightwing are both great counter picks. Neither hero can interrupt Li Li's Jug of 1,000 Cups, and their damage is significantly reduced by Blinding Wind. Meanwhile, timely Polymorphs from Brightwing can deny Ancestral Healing and Metamorphosis.”
- Quinn 'Srey' Fischer, Dumpster Tier Superstars
Illidan and Rehgar can take mercenary camps easily, and will try to capture them during the early game to split your attention between objectives. If you see this happening, take mercenary camps of your own, as trying to chase after the highly mobile duo will rarely net any kills.
Armed with this knowledge, hopefully you feel empowered to play better not only as part of this duo, but also alongside or against it. Are you prepared to make big plays with Illidan? Do you have the discipline required to play as Rehgar? Let us know how you’re getting on and share any additional Illidan and Rehgar tips in the forums.A bust of Emperor Nero, circa 65 A.D. Henry Guttmann/ Getty Images
The story that Nero played the fiddle while Rome burned conjures up images of the emperor, dramatically backlit by the flames from the burning city, alone, calmly playing his fiddle while his people cried out in suffering.
To the contrary, Nero actually did take immediate and expansive measures to provide relief for his citizens. He rushed back to the city when news of the fire reached him at his palace at Antium, on the outskirts of Rome. The historian Tacitus, who was a boy in Rome during the blaze, provides accounts of the steps Nero took in the midst of the fire. The emperor himself coordinated fire fighting efforts on the first night. He also opened the public buildings and his own gardens as temporary shelter for homeless residents. Nero imported grain from nearby cities and supplied his citizens with food at a fraction of the normal cost.
Yet the idea that he had fiddled while Rome burned persisted, and still does to this day. Why?
One explanation is that Nero actually did consider himself a serious musician. While he certainly didn't play the fiddle -- since it was not yet invented -- Nero did play another stringed instrument, the harp-like cithara.
Roman historians record that Nero had a real passion for the cithara. In conquered lands, Nero coordinated festivals that featured musical competitions on such dates that he could attend and compete in them all. Nero is said to have been very emotionally invested in these competitions [source: Gyles].
Nero's interest in these musical competitions apparently bothered some of his rivals in the Senate, who found the idea of the emperor competing side by side with common musicians unseemly.To his legions of fans, was a flamboyant - and very British - rock star.
But in the background was a much more complex sense of identity, summed up by one picture: a black and white image of a baby called Farrokh Bulsara smiling in his pram, watched over by an African nanny in the gardens of the home in colonial Zanzibar where his Indian parents lived.
The little boy in the pram would go on to change his name to Freddie Mercury, achieving wealth and fame before a life cut short at 45 by AIDS.
As he became a worldwide star, little was said of his boyhood in the dying days of Empire, being brought up by his Indian parents in wealth - then having to flee a bloody revolution which took the family to London to build a new life.
The pictures of life before fame were revealed as his family prepare to mark the twentieth anniversary of his death and discuss their pride in his Asian heritage.
Mercury's background - his family are Parsees, followers of the Zorastrian religion whose ancestors came from Persia - was never in the forefront as he sang in Queen. There were sometimes whispers in the Asian community that he ignored his heritage.
But to his family it was an essential part of his identity.
His father, Bomi, was born in India and like many went to a British possession in Africa to work as a registrar for the colonial government, taking with him his wife Jer.
They brought up Freddie, his younger sister Kashmira, in Zanzibar, now a part of Tanzania, but then a colony in its own right.
When he was eight Mercury was sent to St Peter's, a boarding school near his parents' home city of Bombay, now Mumbai, and showed a natural talent for the piano.
Mrs Bulsara recalled: "He was quite happy and saw it as an adventure as some of our friends' children had gone there.
"Right from the start, Freddie was musical. He had it on his mind all the time.
"He could play any tune. He could hear something and play it straight away."
He honed his piano skills by playing Indian tunes, then joined his first band, called The Hectics.
When he left school, now known as Freddie, a nickname given to him by schoolmates, he returned to Zanzibar, but its independence in 1963 was followed by a revolution which saw the largely poor Africans involved in riots which targeted the wealthier Indian population.
The Bulsaras fled to London in 1964 and settled in Feltham, swapping a life of servants for a semi-detatched home in the suburbs.
Mercury enrolled at Isleworth Polytechnic to study graphic design, but it was music which entranced him, shifting from the Indian tunes he had played in Bombay.
Mrs Bulsara, 89, said: "He would write songs from an early age. I kept on saying, as all mothers do, carry on with your studies and clean up your bedroom.
"Once when I went into his bedroom at our home in Feltham, I told him I was going to clear up all the rubbish including the papers under his pillow.
"But he said 'Don't you dare'. He was writing little songs and lyrics then and putting them under his pillow before he slept.
"It was more music than studying and my husband said he didn't understand what this boy was going to do.
"I made him type some letters for jobs and when he posted the applications he said' I hope I don't get these jobs'.
"The applications were for graphic design. Had he got one of those jobs, things would have been quite different.
"In the end, he thought it was too much because he was in his bedroom most of the time and an elderly neighbours were complaining about the noise and he decided to leave home."
Mercury formed Queen with Brian May, Roger Taylor and John and the band's first major concert was as a support act to Mott the Hoople at Hammersmith Odeon in 1973.
His parents were the very antithesis of the glam rock movement which was sweeping the nation, but they were there, somewhat to the surprise of members of the audience.
"My favourite memory of him is that very first concert at Hammersmith Odeon," Mrs Bulsara said.
"My boy was showing the best of himself as support to Mott the Hoople,
"When the show was over people came over to me and my husband and said it was nice that we supported him. I said simply: 'Well, he is my son.'
"Rock and roll was not my lifestyle, but I said I would attend every concert. It was very exciting for me. It was 1973 and he always used to dress flamboyantly.
"But I used to tell him to have his hair cut short as it was long. He said 'No, no mum, that is the way I am.
"But when short hair came into fashion he said: 'You see I've had it cut short. I did it'."
As he was on the verge of musical success, he failed his driving test, but told his family not to worry.
His mother said: "He said it didn't matter. I said he didn't want to spend his life on buses and he said: 'It doesn't matter because one day I will be chauffeur driven everywhere'.
"I thought that my boy certainly had a dream."
As he became more famous, his Asian upbringing and heritage faded increasingly into the background.
But it was never something he forgot himself, his family say; being Asian was part of his life.
His background made his sense of identity complex. Being a Parsee meant he identified more with his Persian ancestry than India, where his parents were brought up and he was educated. Hurtfully, there were people who said he was burying his Asian roots.
Roger Cooke, his brother in law, said: "To an English mind, Asian means Indian. It doesn't in Freddie's particular case, he was Persian by ancestry.
He was accused of denying his Indian heritage. I don't think he ever did, but if he did, it would have been because he was Persian."
His mother added: "Freddie was a Parsee and he was proud of that, but he wasn't particularly religious."
At the height of his fame, Mercury would want nothing more than to sit in the kitchen as his mother cooked for him.
"He wanted to be as normal as possible," she said.
"Business was on one side and his family on the other. He would come home and say'Mum are you making your special cheese biscuits?'
"Whenever he was in the studio and working long hours, he would say 'Mum, make some more because all the boys are there' and I would say of course, why not.
"He just wanted a normal life at home and to leave his work on the side.
"But he was just so good to us and tell us everything that was happening. He would send postcards from around the world."
This week his mother and sister will attend The Asian Awards in London to receive a posthumous honour, The Founders Award, for Freddie's life and outstanding contribution to music, on his behalf.
Their presence will emphasise that they combine love of Mercury with pride in his roots. But the greatest comfort his family have is that Mercury's songs remain ubiquitous.
Kashmira said: "We are very proud and happy of him. The group has been together 40 years, but 20 of them without Freddie. That really hits me hard because when you are hearing Freddie on a daily basis, you lose track of time.
"He has been dead 20 years this November, that is a long time.
Because we hear him every day, it is almost as if he is around. I don't have to play his records because they are on the radio every day." Mrs Bulsara added:"I am proud for everything that comes up for my boy. The whole world seems to know him. They know who Freddie Mercury is. My boy was a genius.
"It makes me proud that he remains my Freddie and has not been forgotten.
"It is because God loved him more. That |
fault: by scalping the Advantage program, which subsidized housing for those in shelters willing to work 20 hours a week, an alternative to the homeless population immediately disappeared at the end of 2011. Also, by law, the city must provide some sort of refuge for the homeless. So, with these two parallel actions, the shelters are filling up but no one’s leaving them.
This point was brought up by The Daily News yesterday: Homeless shelter applications are actually down but, once again, the city admitted the 50,000 mark can be attributed to a lack of government intervention. That might help explain the whole Great Depression thing — when City Hall is financially unable to provide an escape from the shelter, it’s only natural that this is going to happen.
At least our elected officials can admit that to themselves.By Katie Frates, DCNF
The Obama administration made Canada pay for the entirety of a $2 billion border bridge by refusing to cover the U.S. customs plaza.
President Donald Trump is currently pushing to build a U.S.-Mexico border wall; the wall was a major cornerstone of his presidential campaign. He signed an executive order Wednesday starting the wall’s construction. “A nation without borders is not a nation,” Trump said. “Beginning today, the U.S. gets back control of its borders.”
Canada agreed to pay for the new Detroit-Windsor bridge, U.S. customs building and the access roads around the bridge in 2015, according to The Globe and Mail. Ottawa failed to get the U.S. to pay for the $250 million customs building, and the Canadian government had already agreed to pay for 95 percent of the bridge’s costs. The bridge is scheduled to be finished in 2020.
In 2012, former Prime Minister Stephen Harper insisted the customs building was “the responsibility of the U.S. government.” Washington, D.C., only said the U.S. would operate and staff the building — not pay for it — and Canada caved.
The original agreement between Michigan and Canada included a provision stating that if U.S. federal funds weren’t available for the customs building, Canada and its private partnerships would pay, according to CBC News.
Trump hasn’t explained how exactly the U.S. will get Mexico to pay for the wall, but he hinted Thursday American taxpayers could pay for it initially. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said the wall could cost anywhere from $12 to $15 billion.
Then-Sens. Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton all helped pass a 2006 law authorizing construction of 700 miles of fencing along the southern border.
Follow Katie on Twitter and Facebook
Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected].The Personal Audio System
Personal Audio, Inc. was founded in 1996 with a mission of offering personalized audio to listeners over the Internet. The company worked to develop an audio player that could download, store and manipulate audio files to fulfill this mission. This system along with related ideas was described in several patent applications filed in October 1996. The Company’s system and patent application pioneered techniques now commonly used today in smartphones, tablets and other devices that store and play audio and video files that work with downloaded playlists, Other pioneering innovations included the uploading and distribution of episodic content such as podcasts and serialized television shows.
The Personal Audio patents issued starting in 1998. In 2009, Personal Audio, LLC was founded to market the innovations described in the patents and Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi L.L.P. was engaged to assert the patents against Apple Inc. and others. The complaint resulted in a jury trial in July 2011 and Apple was found to have infringed U.S. Patent 6,199,076. Today the Personal Audio patents are licensed by a number of major consumer electronic firms.Hurricane Irma battered the Florida Keys over the weekend, but the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum in Key West, its staffers and its 54 six-toed cats were unharmed by the storm, the Orlando Sentinel reports.
Jacque Sands, the general manager of the Hemingway Home told the newspaper that the building was not severely damaged by the hurricane, and that the museum's 10 staffers and the dozens of polydactyl felines that populate the property are safe and accounted for.
The museum's staff made headlines after announcing that they wouldn't heed orders to evacuate the Keys, thought to be particularly vulnerable to Irma's wind and rain.
Mariel Hemingway, the actress and Ernest Hemingway's granddaughter, had urged Sands to leave the house and seek safer shelter, the Telegraph reported.
“I think that you're a wonderful and admirable person for trying to stay there and save the cats, and save the house, and all that stuff," Hemingway told Sands. “But ultimately, it’s just a house. Save the cats. Get all the cats in the car and take off.”
The Ernest Hemingway’s home was named a national historic landmark in 1968. The author lived in the house for eight years in the 1930s.
Hemingway wrote some of his best-known work while living in the house, including the novel “To Have and Have Not” and the short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” It remains a popular tourist attraction for visitors to the Keys.
Dave Gonzales, curator of the museum, told Forbes that he didn't think the house would be damaged, despite predictions of widespread damage in the Keys. “The home is constructed of 18-inch blocks of solid limestone,” Gonzales said. “It hasn't suffered damage in any hurricane since the day it was built in 1851.”
Gonzales said the storm had knocked out running water, Internet service and electricity to the house, but that they do have air conditioning, thanks to a generator.
He told MSNBC that the cats, who roam freely around the museum's grounds, had sought shelter indoors as the hurricane approached.
“The cats are also accustomed to our voices and our care," he said. “We're comfortable with them; they're comfortable with us. We love them. They love us. We all hung out last night together.”
Gonzales said the cats seemed to sense the hurricane's arrival before it battered the island chain south of the Florida peninsula.
“The cats seemed to be more aware sooner of the storm coming in, and in fact when we started to round up the cats to take them inside, some of them actually ran inside, knowing it was time to take shelter," he said. "Sometimes I think they're smarter than the human beings.”
ALSO
Stranded by Irma, manatees get rescued by bystanders and deputies
A windy night among strangers — human, canine and otherwise — as Hurricane Irma blows through
The incredible stories of the die-hards who looked Irma in the face — and stayed
Why not go to a hurricane shelter? Two reasons: the boat and the dog========================= NumPy 1.6.2 Release Notes ========================= This is a bugfix release in the 1.6.x series. Due to the delay of the NumPy 1.7.0 release, this release contains far more fixes than a regular NumPy bugfix release. It also includes a number of documentation and build improvements. ``numpy.core`` issues fixed --------------------------- #2063 make unique() return consistent index #1138 allow creating arrays from empty buffers or empty slices #1446 correct note about correspondence vstack and concatenate #1149 make argmin() work for datetime #1672 fix allclose() to work for scalar inf #1747 make np.median() work for 0-D arrays #1776 make complex division by zero to yield inf properly #1675 add scalar support for the format() function #1905 explicitly check for NaNs in allclose() #1952 allow floating ddof in std() and var() #1948 fix regression for indexing chararrays with empty list #2017 fix type hashing #2046 deleting array attributes causes segfault #2033 a**2.0 has incorrect type #2045 make attribute/iterator_element deletions not segfault #2021 fix segfault in searchsorted() #2073 fix float16 __array_interface__ bug ``numpy.lib`` issues fixed -------------------------- #2048 break reference cycle in NpzFile #1573 savetxt() now handles complex arrays #1387 allow bincount() to accept empty arrays #1899 fixed histogramdd() bug with empty inputs #1793 fix failing npyio test under py3k #1936 fix extra nesting for subarray dtypes #1848 make tril/triu return the same dtype as the original array #1918 use Py_TYPE to access ob_type, so it works also on Py3 ``numpy.f2py`` changes ---------------------- ENH: Introduce new options extra_f77_compiler_args and extra_f90_compiler_args BLD: Improve reporting of fcompiler value BUG: Fix f2py test_kind.py test ``numpy.poly`` changes ---------------------- ENH: Add some tests for polynomial printing ENH: Add companion matrix functions DOC: Rearrange the polynomial documents BUG: Fix up links to classes DOC: Add version added to some of the polynomial package modules DOC: Document xxxfit functions in the polynomial package modules BUG: The polynomial convenience classes let different types interact DOC: Document the use of the polynomial convenience classes DOC: Improve numpy reference documentation of polynomial classes ENH: Improve the computation of polynomials from roots STY: Code cleanup in polynomial [*]fromroots functions DOC: Remove references to cast and NA, which were added in 1.7 ``numpy.distutils`` issues fixed ------------------------------- #1261 change compile flag on AIX from -O5 to -O3 #1377 update HP compiler flags #1383 provide better support for C++ code on HPUX #1857 fix build for py3k + pip BLD: raise a clearer warning in case of building without cleaning up first BLD: follow build_ext coding convention in build_clib BLD: fix up detection of Intel CPU on OS X in system_info.py BLD: add support for the new X11 directory structure on Ubuntu & co. BLD: add ufsparse to the libraries search path. BLD: add 'pgfortran' as a valid compiler in the Portland Group BLD: update version match regexp for IBM AIX Fortran compilers. ``numpy.random`` issues fixed ----------------------------- BUG: Use npy_intp instead of long in mtrand Checksums ========= d0e109f787fc1b3144317c167f6a4ccd release/installers/numpy-1.6.2-py2.5-python.org-macosx10.3.dmg 07a0ee5371203650302f12b5b2482404 release/installers/numpy-1.6.2-py2.6-python.org-macosx10.3.dmg f6af9b293add397515271462a3ddebab release/installers/numpy-1.6.2-py2.7-python.org-macosx10.3.dmg 465a8ad223aeb77c7987c3bc4306a632 release/installers/numpy-1.6.2-py2.7-python.org-macosx10.6.dmg 5238e2a80a62deadc0d5941baec3c639 release/installers/numpy-1.6.2-win32-superpack-python2.5.exe 514148711e8a88475ac4af70a145bc09 release/installers/numpy-1.6.2-win32-superpack-python2.6.exe b3c9e0d5711ff210f7ea98db583e14ec release/installers/numpy-1.6.2-win32-superpack-python2.7.exe 22f7f43a11c0e539de5f73afe8aeb42a release/installers/numpy-1.6.2-win32-superpack-python3.1.exe 8411ec9102294fc815780d0c0770cac7 release/installers/numpy-1.6.2-win32-superpack-python3.2.exe 95ed6c9dcc94af1fc1642ea2a33c1bba release/installers/numpy-1.6.2.tar.gz 7e13c931985f90efcfa0408f845d6fee release/installers/numpy-1.6.2.zipDisney has roped in composer Henry Jackman for the score of their upcoming 54th Animated Feature, Big Hero 6, which releases later this year.
Jackman is known for his fantastic work on Disney’s two recent animated films, Winnie The Pooh and Wreck-it Ralph. He also scored the recent Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
With news of a casting announcement and a teaser poster, it looks like we are finally starting to get news on the eagerly awaited animated superhero flick.
Disney’s Big Hero 6 tells the story of a brilliant robotics prodigy, Hiro Hamada and his robot Baymax, who discover a criminal plot and must team up with a misfit bunch of crime fighters in the midst of the metropolis San Fransokyo. The CGI animated film is based on the Marvel comic of the same name and is directed by Don Hall (Winnie The Pooh) and Chris Williams (Bolt) and releases on November 7, 2014.A Criminal Investigation Department (CID) police officer, 26, was arrested for sexual assault Wednesday after he confessed to molesting a woman in the Wan Chai Police Headquarters’ female toilets.
In the early hours of Tuesday, the woman, 33, had just been released on bail for theft when the officer, surnamed Kwong, reportedly saw her leaving the station and told her she needed to be frisked first.
After the officer showed her his badge, she followed him to the station’s women’s bathrooms in the basement where he proceeded to “frisk” her, touching her chest twice.
Apple Daily reports that she felt scared, but did not dare argue with the officer.
Later, feeling increasingly suspicious, she called the police station to inquire about the incident.
The police saw on their CCTV that the officer did indeed stop her outside the station, and a security guard claimed he saw him enter the women’s bathroom with the woman.
Kwong, who has been in the police force for over five years and just recently switched to the CID, was arrested at his home on Wednesday and will appear in court today.
In 2008, a police officer was charged with the rape of 19-year-old woman in the Mong Kok police station.
Photo: Funki_Munki via FlickrRep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) on Sunday suggested President Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE's recent Twitter rant about FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is actually a "gift" to special counsel Robert Mueller.
“Trump’s Twitter feed is the gift that keeps on giving. Merry Christmas Robert Mueller,” Lieu tweeted.
.@POTUS has tweeted quite a bit about career FBI official Andrew McCabe, who could be called as a witness against Trump in an Obstruction of Justice case. Trump's Twitter feed is the gift that keeps on giving. Merry Christmas Robert Mueller. pic.twitter.com/gIG0LIhSoQ — Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) December 24, 2017
Mueller is conducting an investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, a wide-ranging investigation that many Trump critics hope will lead to obstruction of justice charges for the president. The probe has thus far netted two indictments and two guilty pleas.
ADVERTISEMENT
Trump has in recent days torn into the FBI, specifically targeting McCabe. Trump has gone after McCabe over his wife’s ties to prominent Democrats.
“FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is racing the clock to retire with full benefits. 90 days to go?!!!” Trump tweeted Saturday.
The president interviewed McCabe to be FBI director in May, after Trump fired James Comey James Brien ComeyExpect little closure on collusion 'Dear Attorney General Barr': Advice from insiders Rosenstein: My time at DOJ is 'coming to an end' MORE from the post. Trump ultimately tapped Christopher Wray to lead the bureau.
Wray is reportedly under pressure to remove McCabe, who Trump also apparently sees as too closely tied to Comey.
McCabe spent hours behind closed doors this week on Capitol Hill being interviewed by members of three congressional committees probing Russia's interference in the election and the FBI's handling of federal probes.
Lieu has been a frequent and vocal critic of Trump’s. He gave a floor speech last week warning the president that firing Mueller “will not end well for him.”
He has previously said Congress will move to impeach Trump if he fires Mueller.
Trump and the White House have said the president is not considering firing the special counsel.LG has just announced that they’ve claimed title of first manufacturer to deliver Android 5.0 Lollipop to the masses. The upgrade is headed to owners of their flagship Android phone LG G3 in Poland starting this week. LG didn’t have any news to share for other countries or regions, though we imagine they won’t be taking long to get the rollout going for folks in other parts of the world.
LG says they’re also planning to bring the upgrade to other LG smartphones at some point soon. We know the company is planning to deliver the goods to owners of last year’s LG G2, though a timeline isn’t immediately available.
“LG is absolutely committed to giving our customers the best mobile experiences available and bringing Android Lollipop to G3 owners as soon as possible is a top priority,” said Dr. Jong-seok Park, President and CEO of the LG Electronics Mobile Communications Company. “The new features and improvements in Android 5.0 will bring a whole new user experience to the G3 and make it even better than it already is.”
Early leaked screenshots of Lollipop on the LG G3 didn’t show us much, but LG has seemingly stuck to their tried-and-true user interface sitting on top of the sweet treat. Notable changes in that leak were newly-styled notifications and a profile photo in the upper right corner of the notification pane. There wasn’t much else new compared to LG’s KitKat design, though it’s still unclear if that leaked screenshot was from an early build. We’ll be looking to track down the changelog for LG’s official Lollipop upgrade in the moments to come.
This breakneck pace of upgrades by Android’s prominent device manufacturers signals a huge shift in focus for the industry. Just a couple of years ago you’d be hard-pressed to hear anything about the latest versions of Android for your device for months at a time, but companies are beginning to note the importance of timely and frequent upgrades when it comes to developing a loyal consumer base.
Just this past week, Motorola began delivering Lollipop to Moto X soak test members for an eventual wide scale rollout (and if we know anything about soak tests, it’s that it doesn’t take long for Motorola to push the green light for a seemingly stable kit of firmware). Sony has also started teasing Lollipop on their Xperia Z devices, though the company hasn’t yet shared any detailed rollout schedules. NVIDIA promised the upgrade by the end of November for their SHIELD Tablet, while HTC committed to having the upgrade out within 90 days for the HTC One M7 and HTC One M8.
We hope this is a good sign that OEMs have finally realized just how important these upgrades are to users, and that they will look to have this attitude for many more versions of Android (even minor ones) going forward.CHANDIGARH: Can an unmarried man demand a bride from a candidate ahead of Lok Sabha elections? You can in Haryana, a state with the lowest sex ratio in the country - 877 women per 1,000 men.An abnormally large number of unmarried men in Haryana has even led to the creation of informal "randa unions". Their slogan is "Bahu dilao-vote pao" (Get us a bride-get our vote) ahead of elections.The gender imbalance caused by female foeticide has become so acute that members of these unions and elders in many villages say they will raise the issue when politicians arrive for poll meetings. "The villagers will raise this issue, though in a lighter vein," said Sunil Jaglan, sarpanch of Bibipur village in Jind.The "bahu dilao-vote pao" slogan came from the Kunwara Union, set up in Jind in 2009 by Pawan Kumar, now its chairman. "The government must not only attack female foeticide but also find jobs for young men in Haryana. Unemployment is also a factor for us not getting brides," he said. The union had even organized a protest march five years ago to demand brides.Senior INLD leader and Kalayat assembly segment MLA Rampal Majra said, "We may have to deal with this issue once campaigning begins. The government should generate more jobs for youths and make a serious effort to curb female foeticide."However, Congress Lok Sabha candidate from Hisar Sampat Singh said, "Former chief minister Om Prakash Chautala would often woo voters with promises of conjugal bliss to unmarried men. But, we believe this is a social issue and can be resolved only with awareness."According to Shyam Sunder, secretary of the Red Cross Society of Yamunanagar, each of the 7,000-odd villages in Haryana has 150 to 200 youths who are 25-plus and unmarried. Twenty is considered the ideal age for marriage in rural Haryana.Pune-based NGO Drishti Stree Adhyayan Prabodhan Kendra, which surveyed 56,520 residents in 92 villages of Haryana in 2010, had found that 13.5% men in the age group of 25-29 were unmarried.The government claims many gender sensitivity schemes have been launched but women activists like Jagmati Sangwan feel that a mass movement is required to save the girl child in Haryana.In the outskirts of Cardiff lies a town named Caerau, which was once a powerful Iron Age community. It is there that a shocking discovery was made, not by archaeologists but by a group of volunteers. The excavation was led by professional archaeologists in hopes that they would find more of the Roman pottery that was found the year before, but what was found was much more valuable. The first discovery was made by a six-year-old boy who discovered a Neolithic arrowhead. After that more digging took place, and many more prehistoric weapons were found, making researchers believe that the spot in which they were found was home to a great battle.
Some of the items dug up by volunteers were flint tools and weapons, which included arrowheads, scrapers, awls, as well as other weapons made from stone such as axes. These items were dated over 5,000 years old. The excavation was put on by faculty of Cardiff University. Co-director of the project, Dr. Dave Wyatt, states that the find shocked him and his colleagues. He expected to find items that were at most 3000 years old, but finding items from the Neolithic period is hitting the jackpot. No one knew that the area was occupied for so long, predating the construction of the area’s Iron Age hill fort.
“Caerau”, which is Welsh for “Fort”, sits at the bottom of a hill slope outside of Cardiff, and wasn’t a part of Cardiff until 1922. The highlight of the town is the remains of an Iron Age hill fort. Most of it has crumbled away but the foundation gives a big clue into what it once was. Many items have been discovered in Caerau that dated back to the Iron Age. In 2012, a television documentary discovered that there were a lot of pathways through and around the hill, and that Caerau might have been the main stronghold of a people that formed a resistance of Roman opposition called the Silures. The recent dig that found the Neolithic items shocked scientists because the pottery and armour found at the site in recent years were dated back to 1000 BC.
The other director on the project, Oliver Davis, remarks that the Neolithic people may have used the land for agricultural purposes. He states that Caerau may have been a hub for many smaller communities where the people could celebrate, hold feasts and in general just socialize. Caerau seems to have been an important place for different sets of people for several thousands of years. He adds that a lot of the arrowheads that were found were broken, which most likely came as a result of impact. Hence, there may have been a war in the area 5000 years ago.
Experts are now looking at this find plus soil samples to find out more about the occupants of the land over the years, and of the history of Caerau in general. Wyatt and Davis were helped by a total of 250 volunteers from a variety of communities and schools. They state that if the project wasn’t supported by so many people, this discovery would not have been made.This post is a collaboration between the Priceonomics Data Studio and Digg. Does your company have interesting data? Become a Priceonomics customer.
***
What’s the best thing on the Internet right now?
Between the latest longform deep dive, the wonky thinkpiece du jour, the video currently going viral, and the eighteen other tabs you have open in your browser, the Internet is an embarrassment of riches. Sadly, there are only so many hours in a day and so many megabytes in your data plan.
We decided to analyze data from the from the front page of Digg to see which publications and authors were making the most popular content. Digg’s frontpage is a tasting platter of the best of the web. Visitors are treated to a mix that is serious and irreverent, inquisitive and whimsical, and funny and surprising. The site’s frontpage includes the title, blurb, and hyperlink for around 40 articles and videos.
But the site is also a snapshot of our politics and culture at any given moment. What topics are capturing the popular imagination? Which publications and writers are tapping into the zeitgeist? Drawing on Digg’s data from mid-2012 to the present, we decided to find out.
What we discovered was a mix of old media and new, well-known writers and up-and-comers, the rise and fall of various publications, and an enduring interest in the personages of Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and God.
* * *
We began our analysis by looking at the most popular publications on Digg from 2012 through 2016.
We find a familiar cast of characters at the top of the list. The New York Times, TheAtlantic, Wired, and TheGuardian are exactly the top-tier media sites one might expect on a roundup of the best writing and content.
Still, there are a few surprises. Amidst the titans of old media, we find insurgents like Pacific Standard, Nautilus, Aeon, and Atlas Obscura.
The mix of old and new is by design. According to Digg Editorial Director Anna Dubenko, the site’s seven editors look anywhere and everywhere for content that is “smart, interesting, tailor-made for curious people—but not a listicle or pedantic.”
“Tailor-made” is a sharp departure from the Digg of yesteryear. Those of us who remember the olden days of Web 2.0 (back when Facebook was private and Twitter was a little known “microblogging service”) remember Digg as an uncurated forum for video game tips, tech news, and insular memes. Digg was the stream of consciousness of mid-2000s nerdom—Reddit before there was Reddit.
But starting in 2012, Digg reinvented itself. Rather than rely on the whims and clicks of its users, Digg’s editors purposefully pick and choose articles, essays, and videos. It isn’t about click-chasing. Dubenko says she hopes publishers and writers will see Digg as “a merit badge for their journalism.”
Digg awards those merit badges to big and small sites alike. That’s why some of the most popular writers on Digg are not New York Times or Atlantic staffers, but people like PetaPixel’s Michael Zhang and Atlas Obscura’s Dan Nosowitz.
When we exclude the 100 most popular media sites, we can see writers from small or independent publications—like Slade Sohmer of Hypervocal—who Digg really “dugg.” If you don’t recognize these names, that’s the point. Curators want to highlight writing and authors you wouldn’t find otherwise.
“Linking to the latest Times magazine feature,” says Dubenko, “is maybe doing some discovery for some people, but people can find that stuff on their own. Our value is sitting and sifting through stuff, exposing you to sites you might not come across on your own.”
And if Digg’s plan is to keep surprising its readers, it has to keep up with the newest publications and content producers. We looked at the top ranked sites on Digg in 2013 and compared them to the top list from this year.
While a handful of old guard media companies like the Times and the Atlantic dominate the top ten in both years, the above chart documents the rise and fall of different publications. Here the constant churn of the media environment is on full display.
Since 2013, Atlas Obscura, FiveThirtyEight, and Medium have either launched or come into their own as longform-oriented media companies. Other sites have fallen from prominence. Some of these changes represent economic trends in the media industry, while others reflect editorial changes.
Take Modern Farmer, for example. The site, which offers a fun, accessible take on food and agriculture issues, made it into the top 50 list in 2013. But at some point the magazine changed their style from literary and accessible to practical.
“Less ‘weird goats’ and more ‘what to feed your goat,’” says Dubenko. As a result, Modern Farmer fell off the list.
Digg’s frontpage doesn’t just track changes in the news industry. It also reflects the most talked about people. The list below shows the top ten people covered on the site between 2013 and 2016. We were able to determine if a person was the subject of an article by feeding the text of every article on Digg into Google’s Natural Language API. (The API counts “God” as a person.)
From the Boston bombing in 2013 (Dzhokhar Tsarnaev) to the unrest in Ferguson in 2014 (Michael Brown) to the interminable election season that dominated the news in both 2015 and 2016 (Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump), the table provides a brief history of the people and stories that have seized the spotlight every year.
Still, no matter how the public’s attention has shifted, some things never seem to change. In each year, Barack Obama and God have been popular topics on Digg. But they were both eclipsed by Donald Trump.
***
Note: If you’re a company that wants to work with Priceonomics to turn your data into great stories, learn more about the Priceonomics Data Studio.Crackdown since protests over disputed election raises number of imprisoned journalists to 33 - more than any other country
Iran's media crackdown since protests over the disputed election earlier this month means more journalists are in jail there than in any other country, including China or Cuba, according to Reporters Sans Frontières.
The press freedom campaigning body said that more than 33 journalists were in jail in Iran, up from just a handful before 14 June, when protests over the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad began. Iran has leapfrogged China and Cuba, according to RSF.
At least 25 journalists arrested since the disputed election remain in prison, the Paris-based organisation said on Friday.
This clampdown has also seen Iran jump above Burma, which RSF claims has 14 journalists in jail, Eritrea, which has 17 jailed reporters, Cuba with 24 and even China, where 30 reporters – out of the 166 that RSF claims are imprisoned worldwide – are jailed. China was previously the biggest international jailer of reporters, according to RSF.
The press freedom organisation said it feared for the safety of those imprisoned in Iran. "Several witness accounts make us fear that torture and ill-treatment are being systematically inflicted on prisoners who have demonstrated against the regime," RSF added.
"Several journalists and bloggers were brutally treated by the guards and by men employed by the state prosecutor, Saaed Mortazavi."
Amnesty International today called for the Iranian authorities to release the journalists arrested since the elections. Journalists are at risk of torture in detention, the human rights organisation said, adding that the location of most remained unknown.
"It is shocking that journalists whose job it is to provide information to others are being detained, on top of all the other draconian measures the authorities have taken to restrict the free flow of information about what is really happening in Iran," said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, the deputy director of Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa programme.
"Rather than trying to investigate alleged abuses, the only message the authorities are sending is that they are seeking to hide the truth, both from their own citizens and the rest of the world."
Last week the entire staff of defeated Iranian presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi's newspaper, Kalemeh Sabz, was arrested, marking the intensification of pressure on domestic journalists reporting the ongoing protests.
The Iranian foreign ministry also accused the BBC and Voice of America of being mouthpieces of their respective governments and seeking to engineer the ongoing riots that followed the presidential election.
Another Iranian ministry also threatened to take "more stern action" against British radio and television networks if they "continued to interfere" in the country's domestic affairs.
This followed an announcement by the BBC World Service on 16 June that it was attempting to combat continued broadcast interference from within Iran by increasing the number of satellites it uses to transmit its Persian television news service and extending the channel's hours.
• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediatheguardian.com or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000.
• If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".“The Lord of the Rings” producer Barrie M. Osborne is launching a Kickstarter campaign to help fund “Talk Is Cheap,” an environmental-themed family drama.
The 30-day campaign has a $1.5 million goal.
Jim Jarrett is producing and directing from his own script. The story centers on an estranged father and daughter and how one teenager’s viral vow of silence ignites a revolution after a documentary filmmaker follows a popular talk radio host for 48 hours.
Osborne, Jarrett and producer Jon Labrie announced the independent film project Thursday and formally launched their Kickstarter campaign, asking only $1.00 per person to help finance production costs. Contributors will be credited on screen and on the film’s website as an associate producer.
“It’s a rare and great privilege when you come across a project that you really like that has something very meaningful to say, while also being very entertaining,” said Osborne. “This film really illustrates the power of one voice to make a difference in the world. Through social media, with the right message at the right time, you actually can change the world one person at a time. That is the heart that drives our movie and it is the heart and soul of our Kickstarter campaign.”
Labrie served as the Chief Technology Officer for Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital. Osborne’s credits include “Face/Off,” “The Water Horse” and “The Warrior’s Way.”
Kickstarter campaigns last year raised $5.7 million for the “Veronica Mars” movie and $3.1 million for Zach Braff’s “Wish I Was Here.”Toronto
Media lawyers will be in court Tuesday trying to obtain search warrant documents possibly connected to the drug controversy swirling around Mayor Rob Ford.
Lawyer Iain MacKinnon, who will represent a number of media agencies including the Toronto Sun, said the 9:30 a.m. hearing will be the first step in an effort to gain access to search warrant records for Ford’s friend Alexander ‘Sandro’ Lisi.
Lisi was arrested Oct. 1 during police raids on an Etobicoke dry cleaning business and faces a number of charges including conspiracy to commit and indictable offence, drug trafficking and drug possession.
According to police documents obtained by the Toronto Sun, Lisi was allegedly offering to swap a pound of marijuana for the return of an associate’s cellphone. That associate is Mayor Rob Ford, a source told the Toronto Sun.
“(Lisi) has close ties to the Mayor and the question is what else is in the search warrant materials that sheds any light or any connection the Mayor may have to this guy who has been charged?” MacKinnon said.
The hearing will set out a timetable and process for hearings which could see the records opened in part or in whole. Some of the information may be blacked out to protect third-parties, MacKinnon said.
“I don’t think there is any doubt (media) are going to get access, the question is, how much access?” he said.
Lisi came to the attention of police during the Project Traveller investigation in June. That police operation focused on gang and drug trafficking in Etobicoke.
Police allegedly intercepted communications between Lisi and someone who was targeted during the Project Traveller investigation. That lead to the creation of an independent investigation dubbed “Brazen 2” lead by senior Toronto Police officer Det. Sgt Gary Giroux.
Media lawyers will also be before the court in connection with more police documents linked to the Project Traveller investigation.If U.S. President Donald Trump attempts to impose unfavourable terms of trade, Mexico may retaliate by ceasing to co-operate on drug enforcement, migration control, security and intelligence, a Mexican cabinet minister told The Globe and Mail in one of his government's most explicit warnings to date in the rhetorical battle with the new U.S. administration.
"There is so much at stake for the interest of the U.S. as a country," Mexico's Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo said in an interview in his office in the country's capital.
"We have been a great ally to fight problems with migration, narcotics … If at some point in time things become so badly managed in the relationship, the incentives for the Mexican people to keep on co-operating in things that are at the heart of [U.S.] national-security issues will be diminished.
Story continues below advertisement
Read more: Canada, Mexico must stand firm on trilateral NAFTA: Mexican Economy Minister (for subscribers)
Opinion: What Mexico – and Canada – stand to lose in the Trump years
Read more: Southern exposure: The costly border plan Mexico |
orbiting Nibiru Planet X! & Nibiru “heading in, toward us”( Must see!) Additional planets exist in our solar system, according to astronomers at the Complutense University of Madrid in Spain. Scientists observed strange orbital patterns of rocky objects near Pluto, and believe this points to the existence of two previously undiscovered planets, one of which is 10 times the mass of Earth.
A Spanish astronomers have found two extremely large new planets within our solar system irbiting Dwarf star known as Nibiru Planet x – one of which has a mass 10 times that of Earth – as seen in video below.
After observation of the anomalies with the orbits of other rocky objects near pluto, the astronomers have relaised they have come across something they have never accountered before.
Space is a huge mystery to us all, we know more about the moon than we do our own ocean. This is very concerning when you really thing about it. It drives home the reality of how little we really know about the planet we are on. So we really have no really solid knowledge of space and what waits for us out there.
Scott Sheppard from the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC, one of the discoverers of 2012 VP113 said; “As there are only a few of these extremely distant objects known, it’s hard to say anything definitive about the number or location of any distant planets. However, in the near future we should have more objects to work with to help us determine the structure of the outer solar system.”
Astronomers have relaised they have come across something they have never accountered before
With the recent discovery of these two unidentified planets is it so unrealistic to think that they could have been hiding right under our nose. These planet X’s were discovered recently.
Dr Scott Sheppard from the Carnegie Institution, who was not involved in this research said: ‘The search for these distant inner Oort cloud objects beyond Sedna and 2012 VP113 should continue as they could tell us a lot about how our solar system formed and evolved.’
Could this be UFO’s and Alien illusions? A huge intersteller black hole projection? Or just a complete goof. all I can suggest you do is watch the informative video below and draw your own conclusions.
JAPAN TV is showing the PLANET-X
By. MyDailyInformerAnother beautiful way our community shows their support is through their creativity. We have so many talented artists and musicians who pay homage to our world. We’ve chosen some of our favourites to share with you in this Fan Art Update!
The artists featured in this update are:
1. Nikola Odic
2. Igor Artyomenko
3. sukreih
4. Gregory Sujkowski
5. James W Cain
6. Lekso Tiger
7. kad
8. Akogare
9. yokaiy
10. Shalizeh
11. Lili Ibrahim
12. EternalAnomaly
13. AnatoFinnstark
One of our Artists, Igor Artyemenko shared views on what inspired him about the Banner Saga:
“I was in awe of how a small force can create a very stylish and beautiful graphics. For me, the Banner Saga has become the benchmark of good taste and design.”
Igor spent several hours demonstrating his artistic talent live, on a Twitch stream during which he created a beautiful, Banner Saga inspired scene. You can view his time-lapse video, here:
Igor Artyomenko
Also, artist Angela Bermúdez (@AngelaBermudezA) recently did a live art show while Austin Wintory (@awintory) inspired her with his music! You can see the final results, here:
Angela Bermúdez
And check out this incredible speed painting of Bolverk, done by fan Sebastien Annoni (@annoniart):
Bolverk by Sebastien Annoni
Shout Out!
We just can't thank Tycho and Gabe at Penny Arcade enough for their Banner Saga 3 Promotion Thingy. It's poetic. It's beautiful. It's incredible.
You can watch the Promotion Thingy Video here on YouTube:
Gabe and Tycho Promotion ThingyEconomist Art Woolf looks at Vermont's gross domestic product trend. (Photo: Getty Images)
The best summary statistic we have to describe a state or nation’s economy is gross domestic product, the total dollar value of all goods and services produced within its borders. Vermont’s GDP — $30.4 billion in 2015 — pales in comparison to the U.S. total of $17,800 billion. That’s usually referenced as $17.8 trillion, but it’s hard enough for me to conceptualize a billion dollars, much less a trillion, and comparing Vermont’s GDP to the nation is best done using the same units of measure. We could also say that Vermont’s GDP is $0.0304 trillion, but that’s even harder to conceptualize. At any rate, Vermont’s GDP is the smallest of any state in the nation, below even Wyoming, the only state with fewer people than Vermont. At the other end of the list, California leads the nation with a GDP of $2.5 trillion.
Vermont may have a small GDP, but it’s as big as some countries’ GDP. It’s about the same as Nicaragua or Chad — both of which have more people than Vermont. A lot more. Nicaragua has about 10 times Vermont’s population and Chad has nearly 20 times as many. Both are desperately poor countries and on a per person basis Nicaragua’s GDP is about $5,000 and Chad’s is half that. Nicaragua’s per capita GDP is about where the U.S. was in the late 19th century and Chad’s is where we were before the Civil War.
Today, Vermont’s per capita GDP is $43,500, many times the level of those two nations but about 15 percent less than the U.S.’s $50,000. It’s also a little higher than England or France, with both at $41,500. Making these kinds of comparison — with other states, nations, and over time — is one reason GDP is such a useful summary measure.
The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis just released its state-level GDP numbers and they show that Vermont’s GDP, adjusted for inflation, rose by a scant 0.2 percent in 2015. That’s well below the U.S. growth rate of 2.4 percent and is fourth lowest in the nation. Only West Virginia, Alaska and North Dakota grew more slowly than Vermont, and the economies of all three of those energy producing states were affected by rapidly declining energy prices in 2015. That certainly was not a cause for sluggish growth in Vermont.
Over the past five years Vermont’s GDP grew at an average rate of only 0.8 percent per year, the 11th slowest in the nation and a full percentage point below the nation. The only year in the last five when Vermont’s GDP grew by any appreciable amount was in 2014.
Over the past 10 years, which includes the Great Recession and its sluggish aftermath, there have been only two years when Vermont’s GDP grew significantly faster (or shrank significantly less) than the nation. Overall, Vermont’s economic growth experience during the past decade has not been very good.
That wasn’t the case in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In more than half of those years Vermont’s performance was above, and often well above, the national growth rate. And from 1988 to 1998 the state’s economy grew at an average rate of 3 percent, more than a full percentage point faster than our growth rate during the 2000s. That 1 percentage point difference is important when it’s compounded over many years. If Vermont’s economy had grown at 3 percent instead of its actual rate of 1.9 percent since 2000, the state’s economy would be one-quarter larger than it is today. Because of our sluggish growth, the average Vermonter has a lower income, the state has less tax revenues, and businesses, small and large, have earned less profits.
There is no magic elixir for faster GDP growth. My recipe starts with an understanding and acknowledgement of the benefits of economic growth. That mentality can then be baked into policy making and business decisions. Add some ingredients like a stable and predictable economic environment, a high quality infrastructure, a skilled, mobile and adaptable labor force and mix them together and you get an outcome that’s favorable for economic growth. You end up with an economy more like the U.S. than Chad or Nicaragua — or even England or France.
Art Woolf is associate professor of economics at the University of Vermont.
Read or Share this story: http://bfpne.ws/29f9plKby
The most telling line from PBS’s Frontline piece ‘The Untouchables,’ on the absence of criminal prosecutions for the large-scale bank lending fraud behind the financial crisis of 2008, came when the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Enforcement division, Lanny Breuer, voiced his concern that bringing criminal charges might cause thousands of bankers to lose their jobs. This came after voluminous evidence was provided that senior bankers, including former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, were culpably aware the mortgage securitization businesses they were running were purchasing, packaging and re-selling trillions of dollars of mortgage loans that were never intended to be paid. It also came after it was known the economic calamity caused by corrupt bankers cost tens of millions of people around the globe their jobs, homes, life savings and all hope for a better future.
As with nearly all reporting on the economic debacle of 2008 – 20??, the story behind the piece was placed in the past tense as regrettable events that should have been attended to but weren’t. But a number of economic reports in recent weeks place the ongoing debacle in the economy squarely in the present. The first was an update on income distribution since the Great Recession began from U.C. Berkeley economist Emmauel Saez illustrating that the benefits of the economic ‘recovery’ have gone exclusively to the reigning plutocracy, the top ‘1%’ of income earners. The second report came from retailer Wal-Mart– the initial iteration of the ‘Grand Bargain’ struck in Washington to raise taxes on the top 0.3% of income earners, that more pointedly ended the payroll tax ‘holiday’ for the working poor, caused Wal-Mart sales to materially stall. The link between the two stories is the Federal government’s role in keeping Wal-Mart’s customers shopping via the payroll tax cut and transfer payments.
Following the airing of ‘The Untouchables’ Mr. Davis tendered his resignation—a coincidence assuredly unrelated to his public explication (and implementation) of the ‘Geithner Doctrine’ of unfettered delivery of public resources to, and immunity from prosecution for crimes committed by, culpable bankers. The ‘Geithner’ in the eponymously named Doctrine refers of course to Timothy Geithner, Mr. Obama’s Treasury Secretary and ‘our man in Washington’ as he is known to Wall Street. It was Mr. Geithner who, after delivering several trillion dollars in bailout money and ongoing guarantees to the Wall Street bankers behind the most gargantuan epic of lending fraud in human history, warned of the ‘moral hazard’ of allowing portions of the mortgages taken out by defrauded borrowers to be written down to current house values lest it set a bad precedent for the newly defrauded borrowers soon to come. (Some proportion of borrowers were undoubtedly complicit in the fraud, but (1) assessing the ability to repay loans is the charge / skill of lenders, not borrowers and (2) the systematic nature of the fraud, with masses of loans preemptively identified by bank credit departments to be fraudulent ‘waived in’ by these same banks to feed their securitization pipelines, is evidence senior bankers were looting ‘their’ banks with their securitization businesses).
In a move that drives establishment ‘economists’ right up the wall, actual economist Saez provides his income distribution data sans ‘transfer’ payments like unemployment and disability benefits from the government. What his data does represent is the distribution of income from the ‘private’ economy such as wages and the monetized gains on the stocks and bonds owned mostly by the rich. As establishment economists (and Wal-Mart executives) would have it, the actual plight of the rapidly increasing numbers of poor and near poor has been (marginally) improved by transfer payments and the payroll tax cut. And since Wal-Mart volunteered for the task, it seems that Wal-Mart also benefited from the transfer payments and payroll tax cut—witness the drop in sales coincident with the end of the payroll tax cut. In fact, in a broad sense that is how transfer payments were intended to work. However, the (Keynesian) economics only work if Wal-Mart pays their workers (and suppliers) commensurate with their economic contribution. But not doing so is the entirety of Wal-Mart’s business model. And a (partial) difference between the proportionate wage and what Wal-Mart workers actually earn is a ‘gift’ from we, the people. Another way to put this is the owners of Wal-Mart are the very same reigning plutocrats benefiting from the ‘recovery’ in the ‘private’ economy that, with income distribution data at hand, wouldn’t be without the helping hand of government.
With the remainder of Mr. Obama’s Grand Bargain on (temporary) hiatus, the question for the moment is: five years into a purported economic recovery, why would re-instating the payroll tax to its prior level cause undo hardship among America’s working poor? Mr. Saez provides the answer—in 2007 the incomes of rich and poor alike fell off the proverbial cliff. The incomes of the rich have largely recovered thanks to bank bailouts, stealth transfers, ‘Quantitative Easing’ that lifts financial asset prices and ongoing government guarantees of the financial system, while the incomes of the lower 99% have continued to decline. The only source bridging this shortfall for all but the very rich has been the Federal government. Re-instating the full (regressive) payroll tax appears to be causing a near instantaneous reaction from the American ‘consumers’ who, because of its regressive nature, would be expected to be most affected by the change. Until there is a recovery in the ‘private’ economy that boosts incomes and employment, any reduction in government payments will quickly become evident in the economies of the growing numbers of poor and near poor. And any suggestion from the wealthy that they, the wealthy, are not the ‘dependent’ class is an ignorant lie. Remove government support for the financial economy and stealth wage subsidies for the rich and this would be evident within minutes.
What then is the relation between the bank lending fraud behind the housing bubble, the continuing decline in the economic fortunes of the great majority of the population and government ‘efforts’ to restore a functioning economy? Bank lending fraud produced three main outcomes—(1) wildly inflated house prices, (2) the placement of a significant proportion of the population into permanent debt servitude against houses now worth far less than the money owed against them and (3) crashing the global financial system, and with it the global economy. In the aggregate, those with mortgages now earn less than they did when they took out the mortgages and the houses they bought / re-financed in the housing bubble are worth less than the mortgage amounts owed against them. In this context, government efforts to restore the Wall Street banks behind this fiasco while doing little / nothing to extinguish the ill-gotten debts leaves most Americans (and peripheral Europeans) in a debt-deflationary spiral. Put another way, companies won’t hire despite alleged government efforts to ‘fix’ the economy because as they see it, the economy has still not been fixed. Those that are hiring are systematically underpaying labor because of weak labor market conditions. And banks (thankfully) won’t lend because they’ve turned their prospective retail customers into debt slaves unqualified for additional credit because of the economic circumstances they (the banks) created.
Between 1950 and the mid-1970s government transfer payments, including unemployment benefits, bridged lost ‘consumption’ in the temporary recessions engineered by the Federal Reserve to keep labor ‘pliable.’ The Federal Reserve would raise interest rates to dampen ‘inflation,’ a/k/a increasing wage demands, unemployment would rise, the Fed would then lower interest rates and unemployment would fall. Unemployment benefits (transfer payments) were designed to last the approximate length of these engineered recessions. They provided incomes lower than wages but high enough to keep the masses from starvation until the jobs returned. Beginning around 1990 bouts of unemployment began to outlast unemployment benefits. (Source data: St. Louis Fed; 12 month rolling difference Fed Funds versus 24 month forward 12 month rolling difference Civilian Unemployment Rate, 1954 – present). Additionally, proportionally fewer unemployed have been eligible for unemployment benefits in recent decades. Despite extending eligibility for Federal unemployment benefits for up to two years in the Great Recession, millions of unemployed have run out of benefits without finding new employment. And reversing the payroll tax cut is in no way ‘symmetrical’ with raising marginal tax rates by 2% on top earners (the Obama ‘compromise’). As Wal-Mart sales are demonstrating, the economic fragility of the poor and near poor shows up instantly in their inability to buy basic necessities whereas the tax increases on the top 0.3% are not material to levels of consumption given very high levels of income.
Mainstream economists consider all of this—the impoverishment and debt servitude of the masses and the continuing decline in our economic fortunes, to be unfortunate accidents. Liberal economists add that Keynesian policies to support ‘the economy’ could lessen the economic impact of the Great Recession and with it the attendant human misery. Left unsaid is that the bankers who created this circumstance are in every way benefiting from it. Through Bush and Obama administration actions banks received ‘no-strings’ bailouts to recover their ‘businesses’ while those who owe the banks have lost their houses and / or are permanent debt slaves to them as their incomes decline. Bank debts are repaid in the quantity the money was borrowed in whereas declining asset values allow the banks to use that money to buy assets for less money. Weak labor markets allow businesses to systematically underpay labor leaving more revenues with which to repay business loans. And banks have been granted the franchise to create money through the existing debt based money system meaning they control its creation, and through it, the political system and ‘the economy.’ But more than just bankers have seen their incomes recovered—the reigning plutocracy including industrialists, bankers and inherited wealth, a veritable ‘ruling class,’ have seen no effort spared by the Federal government and the Federal Reserve to restore their lot to its former level. Explanations of accidents—both of nature or economic policy, fill the mainstream whereas true accidents wouldn’t so unwaveringly fill the pockets of the rich and connected.
Of current interest is that there is no self-generating economic recovery for all but the very richest, at least none to be found in the income distribution data. Given the only time in prior U.S. history most citizens lost as much income as in recent history was in economic depressions, the 99% entered an economic depression in 2008 that has, outside of help from the Federal government, only gotten worse since then. This help from the Federal government is ending, beginning with restoration of the full payroll tax. The fools, crooks and sociopaths running the banks were left in place and the ‘liquidity’ provided by the Federal Reserve is fueling new and ‘exciting’ speculative bubbles. The banks retain social control through debt servitude and political and economic control through their franchise to create and control debt-based money. The mainstream press reports ‘the world’ is back to business as usual and except for the economic lot of the overwhelming majority of citizens of the West, they are correct.
Current focus by the ‘liberal’ Obama administration on raising the minimum wage is better than a kick in the teeth, but all the solutions being proposed to recover a functioning economy assume ‘the economy’ was functioning before the onset of the Great Recession in 2007. In fact, while it was unknown in 2005 that the banks would need (and receive) trillions of dollars in emergency welfare assistance, history revealed that such was the case. It is this system of massive corporate welfare grants under duress used to restore the fortunes of the already rich that is the only aspect of ‘the economy’ that has been recovered. Additionally, the current system of debt-based finance guarantees environmental rape and pillage to sustain the cash flows required for debt service. At this point in history the world can ill afford more environmental destruction because of global warming. A government jobs program designed to build out an environmentally sustainable economy is likely the only solution to the end-time scenarios currently being orchestrated in the capitols of the West. Such a program could provide guaranteed employment to all comers at the minimum wage adjusted for both inflation and productivity gains (about $16.50 per hour) plus health care through Medicare. Through subsidies and state-granted monopoly power private employers are already receiving the difference between these wages and what they are actually paying ‘their’ workers. As there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell this program will be implemented short of a credible threat of revolution, please enjoy whatever they’re showing on television these days.
Rob Urie is an artist and political economist in New YorkThe Riversimple Urban Car is powered by a hydrogen fuel cell, but the biggest difference between it and other alternative-energy cars is its open-source development model.
The Riversimple Urban Car was nine years in the making. But when the diminutive, hydrogen-powered prototype debuted in London recently, the biggest difference between it and other fuel-cell vehicles wasn't its in-wheel electric motors or banks of ultracapacitors. It was its development-and-business model.
The two seater is the work of Hugo Spowers, a former motorsports engineer. Spowers not only developed the car and its powerplant, but also its nonconformist R&D philosophy. Plans for the Riversimple Urban Car will be "open source." Like a Wikipedia entry or the Firefox browser in which I'm typing this post, the Riversimple will be open to tinkering by a community of experts free to download the plans and make their own changes. Spowers says open collaboration on the Riversimple car will speed development and improve the end product.
The plan is also not to sell the Riversimple, but to lease them. Manufacturing won't take place in a city-sized factory owned by a single, giant automaker, but distributed to small, local factories.
The Riversimple weighs only 772 pounds and emits less than a third of the C02 produced by the newest hybrids. Propelling force comes from four in-wheel electric motors that can regenerate electricity during braking, stored in a bank of ultracapacitors to be reused to power the motors during acceleration. Its light weight allows for a mere 6kW fuel cell, not the 100 kW found in Honda's FCX Clarity fuel-cell vehicle now in fleet testing.
The company needs $32.5 million in investments to make the Riversimple project a driveway reality.
[via Gizmag]Image copyright Stewart Gledhill Image caption The box in Almondbury was put back in place after restoration
A Grade II-listed police box, similar to one on which Doctor Who's Tardis is based, has been returned after it was removed for restoration.
The timber box in Almondbury near Huddersfield, West Yorkshire is thought to date from the 1920-30s.
The boxes were used by officers on the beat to report to headquarters and for people to make emergency calls.
It is no longer used by the force but a West Yorkshire Police spokesman said: "It's back where it's meant to be".
Live updates and more from Yorkshire
District Commander Steve Cotter said he was delighted the box in Northgate was displayed in its "former glory" and "now it's back where it's meant to be".
The box dates from about the same time as the versions designed by Gilbert MacKenzie Trench, on which the Tardis is based, also began to appear in London.
It has had a chequered recent history having been listed in 1987 and has been closed several times since but was in use as late as 2014 for officers to take a break in.
The renovation, paid for by the police, meant the box was removed from the street for four months.
Image copyright Google Image caption The box in situ in 2009
Image copyright Stewart Gledhill Image caption The box was used to get police help when telephones were a rarity
Image copyright Stewart Gledhill Image caption Looking less than perfect as it was fixed in a workshop
The Almondbury box had deteriorated over time and the wood had rotted in places and had been vandalised, said the force.
The refurbished box now has a concrete base to help it weather the elements, it said.
Although it is not identical to the box used in Doctor Who, the Almondbury "Tardis" does share a connection with the long-running sci-fi show.
Jodie Whittaker, who has been named as the 13th Time Lord, was born in Huddersfield.
The 36-year-old is the first female to be cast in the role and takes over from Peter Capaldi, who leaves the show at Christmas.
Image caption Jodie Whittaker, the new Time Lord, is also from Huddersfield
The Doctor and her time machine
Tardis stands for Time and Relative Dimension in Space
Throughout most of the Doctor's travels it has retained the outer appearance of a British police box
The BBC and the Metropolitan Police had a legal wrangle in 2002 over the trademark of the distinctive image
In the 1960s the box was a common sight when used on TV by William Hartnell, the first Doctor
And finally... of course it is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.
Source: Doctor Who - The Tardis and Tardis! the real police box
Police boxes were first unveiled nationally in the 1920s but forms of police kiosk had been used since the 1890s
Most disappeared as more people had telephones in their homes.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption A police box in the 1930s
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption A police box in a suburban street attracts some attention c.1926'Wolf Warrior 2' represents China in bid for foreign language film Oscar
The mega-hit action film Wolf Warrior 2 has been selected to represent China in the bid for the Best Foreign Language Film at next year's Oscars.
The film has raked in more than 5.3 billion yuan (796 million US dollars) at the box office as is the highest-grossing film of all-time in Chinese cinema history.
It took only 12 days for the film to beat the previous record set by Stephen Chow's "The Mermaid," which earned 3.39 billion yuan last year.
Directed by and starring martial arts expert Wu Jing, Wolf Warrior 2 tells the story of Leng Feng, a former Chinese Special Forces officer, reprising his role as a rescuer and protector of civilians after getting involved in a war in an African country.
The movie's plot echoes the Chinese navy's evacuation of Chinese nationals from war-torn areas of Africa.
The huge demand for tickets has also prompted distributors to push back the film's off-screen date twice.
It is expected to be removed from cinemas on October 28.
Wolf Warrior 2 is one of 92 films up for consideration in the Oscars's foreign language film category.
Haiti, Honduras, the Laos, Mozambique, Senegal and Syria are first-time runners in the category.
Nominations for the 90th Academy Awards will be announced on January 23, 2018.We pride ourselves on having a free market economy where supply and demand are the only regulators of prices and trade, but that’s not actually the case — especially when it comes to craft beer in Texas.
An economic study commissioned by the Texas Craft Brewers Guild says that the craft beer industry, while booming, is artificially hindered by restrictive laws.
According to the study, Texas craft brewers, both in brew pubs and breweries, had an economic impact of $608 million on the state in 2011. While that sounds like a ton of cash — and it is a big impact — it could be bigger. The study estimates that the craft brew industry’s economic impact for Texas could be as much as $5.6 billion a year with an addition of 52,000 new jobs by 2020, if legislation is created to support it.
"Craft beer is a growing part of the economy and it could grow more. We are constrained right now. We don’t have the same rights that wineries or other out-of-state breweries enjoy. The growth is hampered by the current laws." - Ron Extract
That’s an optimistic estimate that requires a long-winded explanation of the equation for economic impact. The number is a combination of direct impact (the actual sales of the beer and wages calculated at $221.6 million), indirect impact (the money and wages made through related industries dependent on beer money calculated at $173.9 million) and induced impact (an extrapolation of the cash from direct and indirect money calculated at $212.6 million). Phew.
Lately, demand for craft beer around the country, and in Texas particularly, has been stout. The number of breweries and brew pubs in Texas has increased exponentially in recent years with 78 actively licensed brewers in 2011 up from 52 the year before, and another 61 licensed brewers in planning. Sales increased 13 percent in 2011 over the previous year, and the amount of beer brewed jumped 46 percent.
Many of the brewers in Austin, like Austin Beerworks, Jester King Craft Brewery, Hops & Grain Brewing and Live Oak Brewing Co. say they are doing everything they can just to make enough beer to satisfy thirsty Austinites. To remedy the shortage, 92 percent of the study’s survey respondents said they would invest in expanding their production if the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Code (TABC) were changed to lift restrictions on market access.
The estimated economic growth prediction is predicated on continued growth in the industry as well as a change in current laws. “In other states, brewers can sell their packaged goods directly to consumers through tasting rooms... brew pubs can sell beer off premises, at festivals, for instance, and as packaged goods in retail stores, not just at their brew pub location,” says study author and University of Texas at San Antonio professor Scott Metzger. “These sales opportunities are lost for Texas craft brewers — and they add up.”
“If regulations were to change, the entire craft beer environment in Texas would change for the better. We would see a drastic increase in revenue, and subsequently tax revenue, from our tap room sales. These sales are taxed at a higher rate than our wholesale sales through our distributor. With the ability to sell our beer in our tap room we could generate more revenue for our business as well as for the state,” says Josh Hare, brewer and founder of Hops & Grain Brewing.
Ron Extract, managing partner at Jester King Craft Brewery, agrees. “Craft beer is a growing part of the economy and it could grow more. We are constrained right now. We don’t have the same rights that wineries or other out-of-state breweries enjoy. The growth is hampered by the current laws. The chances of a new brewery succeeding are much, much lower in the current climate.”
Efforts to address the laws are underway and there is hope that constraints will be removed during the next legislative session. In addition to active lobbying by brewers, consumer group Open the Taps is working to change the state’s legislative and regulatory process.
It will be a tough battle in light of the failure of similar legislation in Texas last year, but the community is hopeful that beer drinkers will join the cause. “If you want to see a better economic climate for Texas craft beer, you should reach out to your legislators and weigh in on the law," Extract says. "The legislators need to hear from their constituents that we want to see things change."
The next time you're thirsty for a take-home six-pack of Uncle Billy’s Hop Zombie from the brew pub, take action by contacting your senator. You may get the beer you want and you’ll improve the state’s economy at the same time.Image copyright NCA/Polizia di Stato Image caption Left: An image of the man believed to be Mered Medhanie previously released by the UK National Crime Agency; Right: the man said to be to be Mered Medhanie who was extradited to Italy
Friends of a man extradited to Italy on Tuesday on people smuggling charges say police have the wrong man.
Prosecutors believe Mered Medhanie, known as The General, is at the heart of the operation to smuggle migrants from Africa to Europe.
An Eritrean man authorities say is Mr Mered was held in Sudan in May and flown to Rome on Tuesday.
But the man's friends told the BBC there had been a case of mistaken identity and he was innocent.
He was named by friends as Mered Tesfamariam.
A woman in Norway identified herself as the sister of the man arrested, telling the BBC's Newsnight programme her brother was "completely innocent".
But Britain's National Crime Agency (NCA), that was also involved in the operation, said it was "too soon to speculate" about the claims.
"The NCA is confident in its intelligence gathering process," a statement said.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Journalist Meron Estefanos says she is certain authorities have the wrong man
An Italian police official told the BBC that he was unaware of any investigation into the identity of the suspected smuggler.
The BBC understands that the Italian police still believe they have the right person.
Mered Medhanie profile
Has Eritrea's migration problem been exaggerated?
Europe's migrant story enters new phase
Crisis in seven charts
Image caption Images of Mered Tesfamariam given to the BBC resembled the man in custody
Image copyright AFP Image caption A police photo showed the suspect arriving on Italian soil
The NCA said it had tracked the suspect down to an address in Khartoum, where he was then arrested.
Images of him arriving in Rome were distributed by Italian police on Wednesday.
Hermon Berhe, who lives in Ethiopia, said he grew up in Eritrea with the man now in jail in Italy.
"I don't think he has any bone in his body which can involve such kind of things," he said. "He is a loving, friendly and kind person," he told the BBC.
Meron Estefanos, a Swedish-Eritrean journalist who interviewed Mr Mered last year, raised the alarm after she was contacted by the arrested man's relatives after posting details of the arrest online.
"I called the refugees who know the real smuggler and I showed them the picture of what the Italians published and then everybody said 'No, that's not the smuggler that smuggled us into Europe'," she told the BBC.
"I believe they have the wrong person. This is a refugee who happened to be in [Sudanese capital] Khartoum at the wrong place at the wrong time," she said.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Mr Mered is believed to have planned a boat trip during which more than 350 migrants died
Italian news agency Ansa said Mr Mered was accused of being "the leader and organiser of one of the largest criminal groups operating between central Africa and Libya".
Prosecutors accuse Mr Mered of running the network alongside an Ethiopian accomplice, who is still at large.
The two men are accused of buying up kidnapped migrants from other gangs and sending those migrants on barely seaworthy ships across the Mediterranean towards Europe.
Known as "The General", as he styled himself on late Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi, Mr Mered is also said to have driven around in a tank and boasted: "Nobody is stronger than me."
The NCA says Mr Mered is thought to have arranged the transit of a boat that sank near the Italian island of Lampedusa in October 2013.
At least 359 migrants died when the boat, travelling from Libya, capsized. Most were from Eritrea and Somalia.THURSDAY: Each of the many -- seven? eight? -- Karl Strauss brewpubs will tap a cask of Grapefruit Pintail Pale Ale at 5 p.m. Expect waves of citrus flavors, thanks to a recipe that includes tropical Motueka hops from New Zealand and, yes, actual grapefruit zest.
Karl Strauss: 5801 Armada Dr., Carlsbad; (760) 431-2739; karlstrauss.com for information on all locations
SATURDAY: Jimmy's Famous American Tavern (J-Fat) has been hosting Sunday brunch since opening in the America's Cup marina in 2010; now it's added a Saturday brunch, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
J-Fat: 4990 N. Harbor Dr., San Diego. (619) 226-2103; j-fat.com
SUNDAY: Local Habit's IPA Days, Sundays and Mondays, offers flights and pours of eight West Coast India pale ales: The Brewery's Death or Glory IPA, Eel River's Earth Thirst DIPA, Pizza Port Carlsbad's Man Shot, Pizza Port Ocean Beach's Burning of Rome, Port Brewing's Hop 15, Societe's The Bachelor and two from Stone, 15th Anniversary Escondidian Imperial Black IPA aged in Scotch barrels and 16th Anniversary IPA with green tea leaves.
Local Habit: 3827 5th Ave., San Diego; (619) 795-4770; mylocalhabit.com
SUNDAY: The manager of Firestone Walker's barrel room, Jeff Richardson, headlines O'Brien's FW Beer Dinner, which begins at 6:30 p.m. The menu runs the gamut from ahi; a dish inspired by beef Wellington; and house-made cheese. Glasses will be filled with FW's 15th and 16th Anniversary Ales, Parabola (the bourbon barrel aged imperial stout), 100 percent oak fermented Double Barrel Ale, Brettaweisse (a new release from the barrel room), Cask Pale 31, Pivo Pilsner and others. The cost is $50, cash; pay at the bar in advance.
O'Brien's: 4646 Convoy St., San Diego; (858) 715-1745; obrienspub.netA man was captured on surveillance footage calmly eating noodles amid a horrifying street fight in Keelung City, Taiwan. The brawl, involving around 40 knife-wielding triad members, resulted in sliced hand tendons and a cut off nose.
The video, which was shot in January but only recently published online, shows a man in a blue shirt dining in a street food stall just three meters away from the chaotic scene. Even as the opposing gangs stood |
the intelligence community and federal law enforcement officials who have come under criticism from Trump and some allies.
King said he first read the news about the allegations regarding Trump late Tuesday after House votes.
“When I got back to my apartment, I read BuzzFeed, and the first thing I thought was, ‘This is the sort of thing that floats around all of the time on people in public life.’ Our intelligence community is constantly dealing with reports, tidbits from overseas agencies, reports from allies, forgeries, phony information,” King said. “So I don’t think the media should have published it since there is no indication that any of it is accurate, like most other rumors.”
[Trump acknowledges Russian involvement in meddling in U.S. elections]
Democrats treated the matter carefully Wednesday.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) declined to say whether she was briefed on the allegations as part of the congressional Gang of Eight leaders privy to highly classified intelligence updates. She said it was “unfortunate that uncorroborated information was released” on the matter.
She called on the intelligence community to release more about its assessment of ties between Trump and Russia and said she hopes there would be an investigation into those issues.
“The more you can declassify, the more truth gets out to the American people,” she said.
Pelosi mused: “I always wondered, what did Russia have on Donald Trump that Donald Trump would question our sanctions that we have imposed? This is essential to our national security, essential to NATO. What is it that he’s appointed a secretary of state that’s not only violated those sanctions but didn’t even think that they should maybe exist.”
Asked about the implications if the allegations are verified, she said, “I don’t want to go there.”
When asked Wednesday morning about the reports, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) responded, “I’m not commenting.” Speaking later on the Senate floor, Schumer said that “the reports of the past 24 hours are extremely troubling.”
Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.) openly worried that the revelations could be used as an “excuse to further undermine or weaken the credibility of our intelligence community.” He called for a “cautious, bipartisan independent” investigation to avoid that.
“If the outcome of this is a widening of the gap of trust between the intelligence community and the incoming administration and president, then Vladimir Putin will have gotten what he wanted,” Coons said.
Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and a member of the Gang of Eight, again called for the establishment of an independent commission or at least a congressional panel to investigate the allegations of hacking and influence by Russia in the U.S. political system.
Nunes dismissed those suggestions, as he has previously: “No, there’s not going to be any select committee. Why not? Because we have a committee that does the work.”
Sen. Debbie Stabenow (Mich.), who helps lead the Senate Democrats’ messaging wing, said her party must be careful to avoid infusing the situation with politics. Stabenow encouraged investigators to “follow the facts” and said it was crucial that the allegations be corroborated or debunked. But she said the allegations could not be dismissed entirely at this point.
“This is a potential compromise to the American government in a way that is unprecedented,” she said.
Asked what the implications would be if the allegations are corroborated, Stabenow said, “We’ll see. It’s very serious. It’s way beyond politics.”
Karoun Demirjian, John Wagner, Tom Hamburger, Rosalind S. Helderman, Greg Miller, Steven Mufson, Abby Phillip and David A. Fahrenthold contributed to this report.
Read more at PowerPostthatmusiczine:
Grimes Fanzine includes illustrations, an article and a pull out paper doll activity page!
Click here for Etsy listing
Launch: Table D5 at True Believers Comic Festival, Cheltenham on Saturday 6th February!
Contributors A-Z: Angus Medford Art, The Astral Gypsy, B. Mure, Bryan Hemmings, Chaz, Chibi Shibby, Drew Askew, Jack Devereaux, James Johnstone, Julia Scheele, Kayleigh Causton, Kellie Huskisson, Laura Watton, Paddy Johnston, RAMZEE, Sammy Borras, Sarah Burgess, Siobhan McKenna, Yen Quach and Zain McMillan
Cover illustration and compilation by Sammy Borras
Printed by Elyse & Reece from Rope Press
www.facebook.com/ropepress
A5 staple bound zine (148x210mm/5.8x8.3inches)
24 Interior pages (risograph - black ink)
Double sided cover (risograph - black and fluorescent pink ink)
Double sided pull out activity sheet (risograph - black and fluorescent pink ink)
Special thanks to everyone who sent their work! The zine is beautiful!Andy Lyons/Getty Images
Miami Heat point guard Mario Chalmers has had better nights.
It's just getting hard to remember what those felt like.
After scoring just two points on 0-of-5 shooting in the Miami Heat's 111-92 loss to the San Antonio Spurs in Game 3 of the NBA Finals, Chalmers was at a loss.
In 22 minutes, the 28-year-old guard couldn't seem to do anything right. He gave the ball away three times, committed four fouls, missed open shots and never managed to put himself in the right place at the right time.
Unfortunately, his ugly night was the continuation of a disturbing postseason trend.
Chalmers is averaging just 3.3 points per game on 25 percent shooting in these Finals, and he hasn't cracked double figures since Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Semifinals against the Brooklyn Nets.
That was over a month ago.
Now, to be clear, the Heat don't expect Chalmers to lead them in scoring or control the offense for whole quarters at a time. But they do need him to contribute something positive in his limited role. In fact, the relatively minimal demands Miami places on him make his inability to perform even more perplexing.
Just make open shots, Mario. It's not that hard.
This isn't new territory for Chalmers, who's long been the teammate on whom LeBron James and Dwyane Wade take out their frustrations. Watch any Heat game closely and you're likely to see one of Miami's stars shooting frustrated glances toward Chalmers.
And things get pretty confrontational sometimes, as the notoriously confident Chalmers often snaps back.
Still, Miami's leadership has managed to keep things cordial most of the time.
But from the sound of it, Chalmers is starting to feel sorry for himself, which is definitely a bad sign with so much on the line and the Heat now behind in the series.
And with the Spurs looking stronger than ever, the Heat know they can't afford to let Chalmers' confidence erode any further.
The Heat will do their best to pick up their fallen teammate, but Chalmers' recovery will have to come from within.
If he can't get his game together, Miami may soon be forced to play even larger chunks of the Finals without a conventional point guard on the floor. That may sound like an appealing option, but Tony Parker and Patty Mills are too quick and mobile for any of Miami's bigger wings to cover for long stretches.
Norris Cole has had his moments but is shooting just 41.5 percent in the playoffs. And it's unclear whether Erik Spoelstra would even consider using Toney Douglas in anything but garbage time.
Chalmers' poor play and concerning mental state may not seem like a big deal, but he's still a guy the Heat would prefer to have in the rotation. He's hit big shots before, and he's still probably the best option to use against Parker (next to James, of course, whom the Heat don't want to wear out with a tough defensive assignment until they turn him loose in the fourth quarter).
Following an eye-opening loss in which the Spurs looked nearly unbeatable, the Heat are showing a few cracks. They don't need Chalmers to be another weak link—even if that's how they've treated him for years.If brownstone neighbors thought challenges to the Prospect Park West bike lane were a nuisance—they point to community board votes and supportive surveys—it has turned out to be an expensive one at that. According to documents obtained by The Brooklyn Paper, the riotously named Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes has so far cost the city $140,000 in legal fees defending the lane, a price that will no doubt rise now that the suit has been appealed.
Just as NBBL believes it is its right to have the bike lane removed from “its backyard,” it believes it has a duty to spend the city’s money.
Jim Walden, a lawyer for the bike lane opponents, says critics of the Prospect Park West path have the right to appeal — and the case is more than worthy of one — because they aim to expose a government agency of wrongdoing. He described criticism of the appeal as Kafkaesque. “This is America,” said Walden. “Get real.”
Ironic for a group stocked with current and former politicians.
mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYCTHE future of the statue of British naval hero Lord Nelson could be in jeopardy after a prominent writer said he was a ‘white supremacist’.
Columnist Afua Hirsch has taken issue with Nelson’s Column which stands in London’s Trafalgar Square, however, a monument to Nelson also stands in Old Portsmouth while a column in his honour overlooks the city on Portsdown Hill.
Portsmouth was the city where Nelson departed before famously losing his life in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 in which he led the British to victory - a key turning point in the Napoleonic Wars.
Ms Hirsch told Sky News: ‘When you think of Nelson most people think about the naval hero who gave his life for his country but how many people actually know that he was, what we would now call in modern language, an unashamed white supremacist?’.
‘I say that not lightly but because at a time even when parliament was vigorously debating the need to abolish slavery, Nelson was vigorously defending it.
‘He believed that black people were inferior, that they belonged on plantations working under conditions of torture and exploitation and he used his incredible position of influence to try and prolong that situation.’
Ms Hirsch’s controversial comments caused a stir on Twitter with #NelsonMustFall in circulation on the social media site.
It follows unrest in the USA last week in which violent protests broke out after the planned removal of a Confederate monument in Charlottesville. One woman lost her life in the protests.
Numerous monuments, including those in Portsmouth and London, have been created in Nelson’s memory and his legacy remains highly influential.On "Real Time" Friday night Bill Maher suggested that this weekend was the perfect time for President Obama to announce that he would repeal "don't ask, don't tell," due to the fact that Obama will be speaking to a gay rights group on Saturday and because of the march for gay rights in Washington Sunday. Maher referred to "don't ask, don't tell'' as a policy that "never made sense to begin with."
The HBO host then delivered some particularly amusing reasons why Obama should end the policy. "Forget all the good arguments for repeal, like, because it's the right thing to do, or because it was promised in the campaign," Maher said. Instead:
"Do it because it will make Rush Limbaugh explode like a bag full of meat dropped from a helicopter," he said. "Do it because it will make Sarah Palin go rogue in her pants."
WATCH:
<0--1622--hh>0--1622--hh>Talented Canadian Denis Shapovalov has already established himself as the most prominent player of his generation, and he confirms that yet again this week. A month and a half after winning his first Futures title (read more about that HERE), Denis become the first player born in 1999 who scored a Challenger win! He received a wild card at home tournament in Drummondville and took full advantage of it, beating fellow Canadian and former junior number 1 Filip Peliwo 6-2 3-6 6-1 in just 73 minutes.
After the match, Peliwo said that he clearly wasn't at his best, struggling with some physical issues, but we can't take anything from the youngster's triumph. Denis fired 10 aces and saved 5 out of 6 break points, to add another big milestone to his career resume.
Denis played better in the crucial points of the first set, saving all 4 break points and taking Peliwo's serve on both opportunities he got. He was off to a great start, breaking rival in the very first game, and he sealed the first set with another break in game 7, taking it 6-2.
The second set was closer and this time Peliwo was the one who took his chance on return, breaking in the second game which was enough to win it 6-3. It looked that former junior Grand Slam champion has found his rhythm and that he will be stronger in the third set, but Shapovalov had the other plans, showing how good he already is despite being just 16.
He lost only 3 points on serve in the third set, breaking Filip in games two and four to wrap up his first Challenger win, in only the second tournament of this level he has entered. ALSO READ: Federer Tweets Surprise News, Leaves Everyone Cheering!The most pungent response I've yet heard to the Conard thesis comes from a fellow member of the wealthy investor class, Nick Hanauer, the co-author with Eric Liu of Gardens of Democracy.
I spoke to him by phone earlier today. The following is not an exact quote—Hanauer was talking too urgently for me to capture every word, but here's the gist:
Risk-taking? These guys aren't risk-takers. Think of the founders of Google. They came from middle-class families and went to Stanford. Short of inheriting the crown of England, there's nobody in this life less exposed to risk than a Stanford Ph.D. in computer science. They had a business idea. They didn't put up their own money. They used other people's money—venture capital. And the venture capital company wasn't using its own money either. They were investing other people's money too—and taking fees of 2% on principal and 20% of profits for their trouble. You know the only people at risk in this deal? The teachers and university professors whose pension money would have been lost if the business had failed. Pension funds and insurance companies: they're the source of almost all our domestic investible funds. It's the middle-class and working-class people whose wages go into those funds who are at risk, not the rich—and especially not a chop shop like Bain, where they buy a company, lever it up, charge huge fees, and then sell the parts.A Yale University conference is soliciting papers comparing the “racist right” to “previous racist groups…[like] conservative and authoritarian religious and nationalist groups.”
The fifth annual Conference of the International Consortium for Research on Anti-Semitism and Racism will focus specifically on "Racism, Antisemitism, and the Radical Right," implying that the recent increase in anti-Semitism is a conservative phenomenon.
“What kinds of racism and/or anti-Semitism do they advocate?"
The conference, set for September, will be hosted by The Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism and the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration.
[RELATED: App State requests gender-inclusivity disclaimer on papers]
Organizers recently put out a call for papers, asking applicants to focus their work on the “alt-right” and other “far-right wing” groups that have emerged from “recent political events.”
“Recent political events in the United States have turned the spotlight on what for many years has been a shadowy phenomenon: the existence of openly racist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, homophobic, and misogynistic groups on the far-right wing of the American political spectrum,” the prompt begins, then alleging that far-right groups are responsible for “the increase in hate crimes since the Presidential election.”
The prompt asks applicants to address a series of questions on the topic, including ones that call “conservative religious and nationalist groups racist movements akin to the KKK and Nazis.
[RELATED: Columbia law journal tracks Trump’s threats to human rights]
“What are their links to previous racist movements (the KKK, the Nazi party, conservative and authoritarian religious and nationalist groups, etc.)?” it asks. “What kinds of racism and/or anti-Semitism do they advocate? Which groups of people do they target and why?”
Campus Reform reached out to the conference organizers for additional comment on the event, but did not receive a response in time for publication.
Follow the author of this article on Twitter: @amber_atheyTENNESSEE — A man and a woman were sentenced to 35 years in prison Monday after a 5-year-old girl was forced to drink large amounts of grape soda and water and died, according to The Tennessean.
The girl’s father, 41-year-old Randall Lee Vaughn, and stepmother, 58-year-old Mary Lavonne Vaughn, were sentenced Monday.
In Jan 2012, officials say the Vaughns forced Alexa Linboom to chug 2.5 liters of grape soda and water over a one to two-hour period after she had a couple of drinks from her stepmother’s grape soda.
Linboom became unresponsive and was taken to the hospital. She was later declared brain-dead and removed from life support.
The couple pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and aggravated child neglect after a two-year investigation determined Alexa died from fluid intoxication.We’re a connector and a convener, and our events are times and places where folks meet on common ground to share and exchange ideas about our state’s vibrant and venerable living traditions.
We’re committed to the idea that our cultural expressions are born from and flourish because of their diverse influences, and our many programs and projects promote inclusion and experiential learning for novice and accomplished participants alike.
Our organization was founded by volunteers in 2000, and we’re sustained through the support of our current Friends of Louisiana Folk Roots and our Lifetime Members along with numerous public and private funders.
We’re based in Lafayette, the heart of Cajun and Creole Louisiana, and we’d like to spend some time with you, so please browse our events and archives, and get in touch with us anytime. Merci beaucoup!Tree trimmers mistook Michael Smith's realistic pistol-in-the-waistband tattoo for a real gun March 18, 2014, prompting police to briefly surround his home in Norridgewock, Maine. (Photo11: David Leaming, Morning Sentinel/AP)
Michael Smith always packs a pistol, even asleep or showering or yelling at tree trimmers who wake him up.
And though it's only a tattoo, the inky realism of his gun on the gut prompted a Maine State Police SWAT team to surround the night-worker's home Tuesday morning for a few tense minutes.
"Obviously it was a misunderstanding and he didn't have a weapon, but we had to respond to the initial report as if he did," Maine State Police Trooper Scott Duff told the Morning Sentinel.
The tree trimmers "weren't 100% sure what he was saying, but he was yelling and they thought it could be some sort of a threat," Duff said.
"We take all precautions when we don't have the details," he added.
The details, as reported:
Tree trimmers working for Central Maine Power Co. woke Smith up as they were about to cut branches around electrical lines outside his home in Norridgewock.
Wearing only pants, Smith went out into the icy day and ordered the crew from Lucas Tree Experts to get off his property. One worker saw the tattoo and, thinking Smith had a pistol in his waistband, called police.
Maine State Police Trooper Scott Duff trains his rifle toward the home of Michael Smith in Norridgewock, Maine, after Smith's realistic-looking gun tattoo prompted a brief scare March 18, 2014. (Photo11: David Leaming, Morning Sentinel/AP)
Smith went back to bed.
Troopers armed with assault rifles showed up, surrounded his house and ordered him to come out.
Smith revealed his concealed-carry tattoo, averting tragedy.
And a good thing, too.
"I got plans today," he said after police left. "I didn't want to get shot."
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1g1WZZnInstructor claims university’s gun policy is unconstitutional after state passed ‘strict scrutiny’ on gun restrictions
A University of Missouri professor is suing his employer for banning guns on campus, claiming that the university policy is unconstitutional after the state strengthened its gun rights in 2014.
Royce de R. Barondes, an associate professor of law at the university, is questioning the campus’s gun policy, which states that “the possession of firearms on university property is prohibited except in regularly approved programs or by university agents or employees in the line of duty.”
Barondes is a concealed carry permit holder in the state of Missouri and also teaches a course on firearms law, according to The Washington Times.
The state amended its constitution in 2014 to provide “strict scrutiny” of gun restrictions. The amendment reaffirms the state’s commitment to the Second Amendment and states that the right to keep and bear arms cannot be questioned and is “unalienable.”
“This case is an opportunity for good constitutional jurisprudence with us passing an amendment to our constitution last year,” said Barondes’s lawyer Jennifer Bukowsky, according to The Times. “The university’s rule is so obviously in violation of our state’s constitution, we see this case as being the best vehicle to protect one of our nation’s very first freedoms — our freedom to self-defense,” she added.
Reached for comment via email, Barondes told The College Fix: “The Curators of the University of Missouri have specifically cited my alleged statements to the media as a basis for filing counterclaims against me and seeking attorneys’ fees. I would like to provide further comments, but, to avoid further retaliation from my employer, at this time I am constrained to stand on my legal filings in this case.”
The College Fix reached out to Mizzou’s police department for comment on the school’s gun policy. “It is our job to enforce the laws and policies and we will continue to do so,” Brian Weimer of the Mizzou police department told The Fix via email. Additional queries to the police department were not returned.
Currently, there is an effort by lawmakers in 14 states to push for bills that would allow concealed carry on college campuses, with numerous other states already allowing the practice. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill in 2015 giving Texans the right to carry concealed handguns on campuses. And earlier this year, Georgia enacted a law permitting limited concealed carry on campus. The state of Colorado, meanwhile, has allowed campus carry since 2003.
MORE: Legal Experts: Campus Gun Bans Flawed, Unconstitutional
MORE: In victory for gun rights activists, district court tosses anti-campus carry lawsuit
IMAGE: Shutterstock
Read More
Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on TwitterTry as it may, the Israeli government will never be able to detach Palestinian human rights from its own security situation.
This week marks exactly one and a half years since the last Gaza war, although most of the time the tiny strip of land barely exists in the Israeli public consciousness. Now that the possibility of another round of fighting has emerged, Gaza is back in the headlines.
Related stories
Recent weeks have seen multiple reports by the Israeli military on Hamas’s attempts to re-build its tunnel infrastructure, with some tunnels already projected to have been dug into Israeli territory. Israeli satirical comedy show Eretz Nehederet recently poked fun at the situation with a sketch featuring an Israeli resident of a Gaza border town who complains about the insufferable noise caused by the drilling below her kitchen. A Hamas militant then pokes his head up from under the dirt, asking the Israeli why she hasn’t yet offered him a cup of coffee. Business as usual.
As if the tunnels weren’t enough to remind us that the 2014 Gaza offensive failed to provide Israelis with security — and that’s without even getting into its lasting effect on the Palestinians — the head of Israeli Military Intelligence, Herzl Halevi, told a closed-door meeting by the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Tuesday that Gaza is on the brink of economic collapse. Despite Hamas’s genuine efforts to restrain violence, Halevi said, the situation in Gaza is so bad that it could lead to more violence. In other words: Israel’s blockade policy is not working.
Various Israeli proposals to build a seaport in Gaza, a Hamas demand during ceasefire negotiations, are now resurfacing as a way to try and avoid another conflict. The idea is to provide some form of life raft to stave off the Strip’s total collapse. The IDF and several Knesset members openly support such measures, claiming it will provide jobs and incentives for Hamas to maintain “quiet.” Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ya’alon are firmly against the construction of a port due to “security concerns.” Any outsourcing of security, they claim, still runs the risk of weapons smuggling.
However, it is clear that Gaza appears in Israeli public discourse solely when there is a fear of violence. For mainstream Israel, Palestinian suffering exists only when it is attached to some kind of threat. Israelis generally don’t care about the humanitarian situation in Gaza unless it affects them. That same logic applies to the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Palestinian citizens of Israel. This is the crux of the issue: the Israeli government will never be able to detach Palestinian human rights from its own security situation.
Israel excels at putting Palestinians living under its control in intolerable conditions that perpetually verge on humanitarian catastrophe. As Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir wrote in their book “The One State Condition: Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine” (originally published in Hebrew in 2008):
The ruling apparatus takes the liberty to enter and even sabotage the activity of these groups [welfare bodies, UN agencies, local charities and humanitarian groups] whenever it spots a threat to security, familiarly a sweeping consideration, while explicitly encouraging their activity whenever it fears an approaching humanitarian crisis…. …Abandoning the Palestinians to disaster conditions — especially in the Gaza Strip, where economic conditions had always been worse than in the West Bank and further deteriorate following the disengagement — is a result of the decision to control and dominate them without actually ruling them, and certainly without governing them. More accurately, abandoning the Gaza Strip and pushing its population to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe has become a mode of governance specifically designated for this region.
Every time the Strip reaches the brink, a group of military experts, former generals and Knesset members offer all kinds of diplomatic solutions for dealing with Gaza. But “dealing” only proves that Israel still controls Gaza — and that is a significant part of the obstacle to any solution.Almost 200 people tested positive, many of whom are receiving treatment for latent infection, with situation now under control
Nearly 200 people have tested positive for a tuberculosis infection following an outbreak at a school in Devon.
Public Health England, which released the results on Wednesday of screening that took place over the summer term at Teign school, an 11-18 academy in Kingsteignton near Newton Abbot, said the majority of transmissions occurred during the 2013/14 school year.
Many of those who tested positive are receiving treatment for latent TB infection to prevent the development of the disease in the future. Health authorities stressed they do not have the disease and are not infectious.
Dr Sarah Harrison, deputy director of health protection for Public Health England South-West, said: “The situation is under control and the risk of further infection within the school is now no greater than that in the general public.”
She said that the year groups primarily affected were those of two students with infectious TB, adding: “Of those screened as school contacts, fewer than 10 people are being treated for active TB. These were all diagnosed in the early stages of disease. There have been no further infectious cases at the school.
“Consequently, we do not anticipate the need for any further screening at the school and it can continue to operate as normal.”
Mark Woodlock, headteacher of Teign school, added: “As a school, we are greatly relieved that this process is drawing to a close and that there is unlikely to be a need for further testing of students.
“It has been a very difficult time for many individuals – students, teachers and their families. They have had to cope with the demands of a positive test, whilst continuing to try live as normal a life as possible. For many, that involved taking examinations and it is testament to their strength that their results have been so strong.
“The school is very grateful to Public Health England for the time they have devoted to working with the school. We are also grateful to the wider community for their continued support. For those still undergoing treatment of some description, they continue to have our best wishes.”Using data from the Ralph spectral composition mapper that flew aboard NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, planetary researchers have detected water ice deposits exposed on the surface of the dwarf planet Pluto.
“Understanding why water appears exactly where it does, and not in other places, is a challenge that we are digging into,” said New Horizons team member Dr Jason Cook, of the Southwest Research Institute.
According to the scientists, large expanses of the planet don’t show exposed water ice, because it’s masked by other, exotic ices across most of Pluto.
A curious aspect of the discovery is that the regions showing strong water ice spectral signatures correspond to regions that are bright red in the enhanced-color images of the dwarf planet.
“I’m surprised that this water ice is so red. We don’t yet understand the relationship between water ice and the reddish tholin colorants on Pluto’s surface,” said team member Dr Silvia Protopapa of the University of Maryland.
In the New Horizons image above, regions with exposed water ice are highlighted in reddish color.
The strongest signatures of water ice occur along Virgil Fossa, just west of Elliot crater on the left side of the image, and also in Viking Terra near the top.
A major outcrop also occurs in Bare Montes towards the right of the image, along with numerous much smaller outcrops, mostly associated with impact craters and valleys between mountains.
New Horizons is currently 3.13 billion miles (5.04 billion km) from our planet and 65.1 million miles (104.8 million km) beyond Pluto, with all systems healthy and operating normally.Part 3
At this point you’re technically done, but you’re not a pro yet. Let’s handle some common things you might wanna do.
5. REDIRECTS (onBeforeChange)
Here we detect if the state.location.kind is a redirect, and if so, return false.
In server/render.js bundled by webpack, simply short-circuit if you don’t receive a store:
We can do that because doesRedirect already handled the redirect on the express side with res.redirect(302, pathNameReceivedFromRFR).
How do you create redirects in the first place?
options.js — redirect is simple action creator built into RFR
In the options provided to connectRoutes(), you can specify an onBeforeChange handler that is called before every route change. Its signature is basically that of a thunk.
NOTE: you must use the third argument which is a pending action since it won’t exist in state yet, and it might never if you redirect. isAllowed is basically a redux Selector, except we preemptively pass the current location’s type.
If you dispatch a redirect here, the Redux-First Router middleware will short-circuit the action that triggered this and immediately start handling the new route, in this case, LOGIN.
We determine that we should redirect via the isAllowed function which takes the current type (aka route) as well as all the current state. isAllowed could do anything.
What you should focus on is how it takes the entire state as an argument. Within that state you can have information about your user to determine if they are in the correct role to view the current type/route.
The idea here in universal rendering is that we use Redux state in an identical way to the client for maximum code re-use. We’ll cover below how to pre-populate your store with user state soon.
6. REDIRECTS (route-level)
You can also specify redirects at the thunk level like this:
Notice we detect that the same data received previously is empty, so we redirect to the same route with a different payload ( category: ‘all’ ) which is guaranteed to always have data and therefore not redirect.
There’s all sorts of reasons to use redirects at the route level. Just know you can use redirect in your thunks to achieve it.
Lastly, for completeness, you also want to short-circuit your thunks if Redux already has the data you need:
This will only occur on the client as a result of the user navigating back to a route already visited. Perhaps you have a fast-paced app and the data may have changed, in which case you don’t want to do that — what you do here is up to you.
7. REDIRECTS (OPTIMIZE)
If you’re using both route level and global onBeforeChange redirects, you likely want to check for redirects before and after your thunk. This way you don’t unnecessarily wait on data (bef0re) and address any route-level redirects (after).
The first redirect will be caused by onBeforeChange, for example detecting the user is not allowed. The second redirect will be detected as a result of the thunk resolving.
Your logic may be such that the corresponding thunk in fact makes no asynchronous requests, and quickly determines it should redirect. So don’t assume reaching this stage means more than one tick needs to have gone by. This can all happen very fast.
The primary difference between onBeforeChange is that you moved the redirect detection logic to just the route that has these unique needs.
8. FETCH APP-WIDE DATA
Sometimes you want to fetch app-wide data just as you would without Redux-First Router. Here’s where you do it:
You can do it before or after await thunk(store), depending on whether the app-wide thunks depend on the data received from the route thunk. Or you can put all 3 in the same Promise.all if they neither are dependent on each other’s triggered state. Here are the considerations:
If the route thunk depends on the app-wide thunks, put the route thunk after if the app-wide thunk depends on the route thunk, put the app-wide thunk after if neither are dependent on each other, wrap em in a single Promise.all
9. JSON Web Token in preLoaded state
If you’re using JSON Web Tokens, you can pre-populate your store’s state with one to obtain all your user state so that onBeforeChange filters the user’s request.
Then in your onBeforeChange handler you get the user from state, using the jwToken which will convert to a user object:
If there is no user, you redirect to the LOGIN route
, you redirect to the route if there is a user, but there wasn’t one until now (which will always be the case on the server), dispatch an action to populate the store with the discovered user. Keep in mind this will happen before any route actions are dispatched, which means they will be able to make use of this user data.
Here’s what your user reducer looks like:
src/reducers/user.js
How do we actually get the user from the JSON Web Token?
We use a library such as jsonwebtoken which allows us to synchronously transform the JWT into a user object.
It must be synchronous since this is happening in the Redux middleware, which only operates synchronously. Make sure you pick a library that offers sync.
arbitrary key/val on route object
We’re doing a bit more than usual here, but the idea is that this is the isAllowed function/selector from earlier. Just a more advanced one that verifies your JWT. It checks for a role attached to a route in your routesMap. You can put any arbitrary key/val on your routes for later filtering.
The filtering functions, isAllowed or userFromState, would be in your selectors directory because they also double as a more straightforward selector on the the client when you simply want to retrieve the user from state while simultaneously determining if the user has access to the given route.
So what we’re doing here is:
get the user on either the server or client
get any required roles for the current route
if there is no role, return the user whose truthy value will indicate the user has permission to view the route
whose truthy value will indicate the user has permission to view the route If there’s no user, return null
if there is a role for the route, return the user if the user has that role
If you aren’t familiar with JSON Web Tokens, the idea is you can store small amounts of data cryptographically in a “token” (i.e. long hash string) that can be decoded into the essential data about your user on the server without having to make additional async requests to databases to get it. Perf wins! To facilitate that, you’re essentially storing all your user info secretly in the browser. But only you have the ability to transform it to a user object on the server via your secret key. Strategies without SSR will store the JWT in localstorage instead of a cookie and pass the JWT in ajax request headers. Cookies are required for SSR because unlike with ajax requests, you can’t set headers when users visit your site directly. In short, localStorage is for SPAs (which are dead) and cookies for Universal apps (what you want for all that Google traffic).
To bring this full circle, the idea is
createStore(rootReducer, preloadedState, enhancers) will start out with just the JWT via preloadedState and end up /w a user object before your route thunks have a chance to resolve, allowing them to determine what to fetch + what state to trigger OR the user will be redirected to the LOGIN route ⛩
10. TRADITIONAL USER COOKIE STRATEGY
You can also do the traditional user cookie strategy where you use the cookie to fetch the complete user object from the database.
Performance wise it’s not as good, because it means requests to the database are needed on every authenticated route.
What you’re seeing here is 2 things:
we are using a non-RFR thunk fetchUser to get the user’s info and store it in Redux state based on the sessionId cookie we are delaying the initial dispatch until after we potentially have the user in state, so that proper filtering (global or route level) can occur.
The rest you’ve seen before.
Finally, to make this actually work we must consider that RFR by default automatically dispatches the initial action when you call connectRoutes. There’s an option to delay it so you can |
video, Young points out that the man she interviewed — who was sitting outside of the home drinking a beer — appeared to have burned hair and burns on his face.
Later, the same man can be seen in the video sitting on the front porch of another home and he appears to be in hand cuffs, according to Young.
The fire led to the arrest of 35-year-old Donald William Stricker III, who was charged with the burning of an occupied dwelling. He is currently being held at the city jail without bond.
Worley confirmed that the NFD was called to the scene around 3:18 p.m. Firefighters put the blaze out by 4:44 p.m., and no one was injured; however, a family of four were displaced.
A Southside Daily reporter has attempted to contact Young and will update the story with her comments as soon as possible.
Send news tips to adrienne.m@southsidedaily.com.It’s an almost immutable fact: Regardless of what country you live in, and what stage of life you might be at, having kids makes you significantly less happy compared to people who don’t have kids. It’s called the parenting happiness gap.
New research to be published in the American Journal of Sociology shows that American parents are especially miserable on this front, posting the largest gap (13%) in a group of 22 developed countries.
But the research also shows that it doesn’t have to be this way. Every other country had smaller gaps, and some, including Russia, France, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Spain, Hungary, and Portugal, actually showed happiness gains for parents.
The researchers, led by Jennifer Glass at the University of Texas, looked at what impact policies such as paid sick and vacation leave and subsidized child care have on closing that gap. It was 100%.
“As social scientists we rarely completely explain anything, but in this case we completely explain the parental happiness gap,” said Glass. In countries with the strongest family-friendly policy packages, “the parental deficit in happiness was completely eliminated, accomplished by raising parent’s happiness rather than lowering nonparents’ happiness,” the authors wrote.
It’s not just one policy, like paid parental leave, that makes the difference. It’s the magic of a package of policies spanning over a lifetime, that allow people to care for children, support them financially, and even enjoy them every once in awhile on a holiday.
The study looked at 22 European and English-speaking countries using surveys from prior to the recession, including the International Social Surveys of 2007 and 2008 and the European Social Surveys of 2006 and 2008. The group created a a three-item policy index including combined paid leave available to mothers, paid vacation and sick leave, and work flexibility, and then looked at the effect of the basket of policies, as well as the impact of each individual one, on closing the happiness gap.
They found that in countries high on the comprehensive policy index, there was no gap, or, parents were even happier than non-parents. Countries low on that index were less happy.
All policies are not created equal. Paid sick and vacation leave and subsidized child care showed the largest impact on improving the happiness of non-parents as well as parents, Glass said. This is important, because policies that spend tax money to help parents at the expense of non-parents tend to be less popular.
Studies like this present some obvious challenges. For one, people in the US are actually a weirdly happy lot overall. On a scale from 1-10, they log in around the 8-10 range. People in France rate their happiness in the middle of the scale, from 5-7. “We aren’t sure if this means the French are truly less happy than Americans, or just don’t think it is appropriate to use the extremes of any scale,” Glass wrote.
To allow for these cultural differences, the research focused on the differences between parents and non-parents in the same country. They asked: “What factors are associated with parents being less happy than nonparents, given their country’s overall average level of happiness?” The key is association (or correlation), and not causation, which is impossible to prove in studies like this.
It’s no big surprise that parents in Sweden, with its dreamy parental leave policies, are happier (compared to their non-parent peers) than parents in the US, where there is no paid leave for anything—having a baby, much less raising it. But the research helps point to which policies could help most.
Glass says it’s not that parents are unhappy. They often find parenting fulfilling, and wouldn’t have it any other way. But their stress levels tend to be high, which can overshadow any happiness to be gained from shepherding another human being through life.
And why should we even care about whether parents are happy? “Parental happiness does in fact determine our fertility rates, it does determine the types of bills we get for stress-related diseases,” Glass said. “When you have a system that is not very efficient in supporting parents, you can expect to have problems motivating people to have children and care for them.”
Conversely, she said, “People want to have more children when you make it possible for them to be effective parents and effective workers.”(CNN) It's not a good time for Netflix and Asian-adapted projects.
On the heels of the streaming giant facing charges of "whitewashing" by casting a white actor to play a martial arts expert in "Iron Fist," a new controversy has emerged.
"Death Note," a Netflix film based on a Japanese manga series, quickly drew social media backlash when its trailer debuted Wednesday.
Starring "The Fault in Our Stars" actor Nat Wolff and "Atlanta" actor Lakeith Stanfield, "Death Note" tells the story of a Japanese high school student who discovers a supernatural notebook.
Wolff is white and Stanfield is African American, causing some to question why Asian actors were not cast in the lead roles.
Most Anime fans reactions after seeing Netflix's #DeathNote Teaser Trailer pic.twitter.com/w8pTjsbkpR — BGM (@BGMcast) March 22, 2017
If you love the manga/anime, you would want to see a better representation of the characters, played by Japanese actors. #DeathNote #Netflix — Lu Nakamura (@PinnyLuu) March 23, 2017
There's a widespread lack of Asian representation in Hollywood projects.
Asian actors made up just 5.1% of speaking or named characters across film, television and digital series in 2014, according to a University of Southern California study released last year.
Constance Wu, who stars in the ABC comedy "Fresh Off The Boat," wrote about the value of Asian representation onscreen when Matt Damon was cast to as the lead in the film "The Great Wall."
"Our heroes don't look like Matt Damon. They look like Malala. Ghandi. Mandela. Your big sister when she stood up for you to those bullies that one time," wrote Wu.
In 2016's "Doctor Strange," Marvel was slammed for having Tilda Swinton play the Ancient One, a mystical Tibetan character.
"Marvel has a very strong record of diversity in its casting of films and regularly departs from stereotypes and source material to bring its MCU to life," a statement from Marvel read at the time. "The Ancient One is a title that is not exclusively held by any one character, but rather a moniker passed down through time, and in this particular film the embodiment is Celtic."
More recently, there has been debate over Scarlett Johansson's casting as a Japanese character in the forthcoming film "Ghost in the Shell."
But Mamoru Oshii, who directed the 1995 anime classic the new film is based on, told IGN on Tuesday "there is no basis for saying that an Asian actress must portray her."
"What issue could there possibly be with casting her?" Oshii told the publication. "The Major is a cyborg and her physical form is an entirely assumed one."
The casting controversies come as more Asians are going to the movies.
A study published this week by the Motion Picture Association of America found "the Asian/Other category overrepresented the most of any group in share of movie tickets purchased (14%) relative to their share of the population (8%)."
Some have defended the casting in "Death Note" by pointing to the film's Seattle, Washington setting, while still others reject that argument given that "American" doesn't exclude actors of Asian descent.
This is suppose to be an American version of the story but why does American= white? #DeathNope https://t.co/YGVJcH2LgU — Nerdy & Boujee (@XaremiCharm) March 22, 2017
In a statement to Collider last summer, "Death Note" producers Roy Lee and Dan Lin said they view the project as inclusive.
"The talent and diversity represented in our cast, writing, and producing teams reflect our belief in staying true to the story's concept of moral relevance -- a universal theme that knows no racial boundaries."BY: Follow @BillGertz
Intelligence compromises over the past five years, including the transfer of top-secret data on Hillary Clinton’s private email server, inflicted serious damage on U.S. national security, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee said Wednesday.
Rep. Mac Thornberry (R., Tex.), who has headed the committee since January, said the combined effect of disclosures to the anti-secrecy website Wikileaks, the theft of over a million National Security Agency secret documents by the renegade NSA contractor Edward Snowden, and now the potential loss of secrets from Clinton’s use of a private email system is helping American adversaries such as China, Russia, and the Islamic State.
"It has certainly helped our primary adversaries," Thornberry said during a wide-ranging interview in his office at the Rayburn building.
The chairman said he believes the compromise of intelligence information over the past five years is "probably the most damaging thing that’s happened to U.S. national security."
"Whether it was Wikileaks or Snowden or now the Hillary emails, we have done more to hurt ourselves than the Russians, the Chinese, the terrorists, or anybody else that you want to name."
"This is serious business when you have top secret emails on a private server, and then you think it all goes away by saying ‘I’m sorry.’ It’s just… The damage to the country is just enormous when you put these compromises together."
In the interview, Thornberry also said Congress is close to finishing work on a House-Senate conference on the fiscal 2016 defense authorization bill that will provide some relief for Pentagon budget woes by allowing the use of funds slated for overseas operations.
The White House has threatened to veto the bill over the provisions, though the legislation funds the president’s budget request of $561 billion.
On other issues, Thornberry said:
• Legislation is being considered that would partially undo Budget Control Act limits on spending in ways that will not increase the federal deficit.
• The Iran nuclear deal lacks adequate verification provisions and will not resolve issues of past nuclear arms work. Also, the president’s assertion that rejecting the Iran nuclear deal would lead to war is a "straw man" argument meant to defend a bad agreement. The agreement "strengthens" the Islamist regime in Tehran and makes Iran less likely to moderate its behavior over the next 15 years.
"The president made a fundamental miscalculation" about Iran’s future, he said, noting that Iran’s Quds forces will be strengthened by the pact and the release of billions in frozen funds.
• Congress will be briefed this week on Iran’s continuing covert support to terrorists and insurgents in Yemen, Lebanon, and Afghanistan, as well as on Iran’s missile programs, which will be "unconstrained completely" after embargoed funds are released.
• The administration will undermine significant gains made by the U.S. military against insurgents in Afghanistan by pulling out all U.S. troops. At least 10,000 troops should remain to support Afghan security forces as they are strengthened.
• Terrorism is resurgent in Afghanistan as the Islamic State (IS, also known as ISIS or ISIL) grows, and the Taliban is becoming more violent as a result of a split within its ranks.
• The U.S. military has been severely restricted in the current bombing campaign in Syria and Iraq, raising questions about the administration’s stated commitment to destroy and degrade IS.
"It raises questions about whether the United States is serious about degrading ISIS," Thornberry said.
• Russia’s nuclear and conventional military buildup, as well as China’s modernization and Iran’s nuclear ambitions, should lead to a major reassessment of U.S. nuclear strategy and a reinvigoration of strategic nuclear modernization.
"[Russia’s] economy may be in trouble but they are making key investments in a number of weapons systems that cause us a lot of problems. And the Chinese are as well."
• The Pentagon has become "alarmed" at some of China’s advanced military capabilities that appear designed for use in a conflict with the United States and to prevent the American military from operating in the Pacific.
On the damage caused by intelligence compromises, the Russian and Chinese governments and Islamic terrorists benefitted from NSA leaks, Thornberry said.
"The terrorists adapted their tactics with all the Snowden leaks," he said. "They saw what we do, and how we do it and changed accordingly."
Thornberry also said that Russia and China were "informed" by the NSA disclosures. He did not elaborate.
"And so we are helping our adversaries and hurting ourselves by not being as careful as we should have been with this information."
Former NSA Deputy Director Chris Inglis and former NSA Director Michael Hayden told the Washington Times last year that the Islamic State learned from leaked NSA documents how to avoid NSA surveillance.
The Clinton email scandal surfaced last month when the U.S. intelligence community inspector general disclosed that top-secret information was placed on Clinton’s private email server that she used while serving as secretary of state.
The top-secret classified data included intelligence information derived from satellites and electronic communications.
Clinton at first denied any classified information was stored on some 60,000 emails on the private server. Later she revised her stance to say that no "marked" classified information was contained in the emails.
This week the Democratic presidential contender said she was sorry for using the server. The apology followed a second U.S. government security review that uncovered additional classified data.
Clinton aides have sought to downplay the security compromises by asserting that it involves a dispute over classification between the State Department and intelligence agencies.
The FBI is investigating the compromise of top-secret information that was discovered last month in a sample of some 60,000 emails exchanged by Clinton and her aides while she was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.
About 30,000 emails were provided to the FBI and investigators are attempting to recover an estimated 32,000 emails that Clinton said were "personal" and unrelated to her work.
Earlier damaging intelligence breaches included the electronic theft of hundreds of thousands of classified military and diplomatic documents by Army Sgt. Bradley Manning that were given to Wikileaks in 2010. Manning was convicted of espionage, theft, and fraud in July 2013 and is serving a 35-year prison term.
Months later, Snowden, who has said that he believes the NSA is conspiring to usurp American democracy through illicit electronic surveillance, used his access to top-secret documents while working as an NSA computer administrator to download an estimated 1.7 million classified documents. Those documents were provided to several journalists.
Snowden fled to Hong Kong and later Russia, where he is currently under Russian government protection. He faces prosecution from the Justice Department in America.
Thornberry declined to say which Republican presidential candidate he will support.
"There is a big field," he said. "I am most interested in who is going to be the best commander-in-chief to clean up the mess that’s going to be left on his or her desk on day one. I don’t know who that is but that’s sure what I’m listening for."By Doug Vitaly
Following an attack on a trans person earlier last week, Capitol Hill’s LGBTQ community quickly sprang into action. Some 300 people joined a march, from 10 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. starting on Saturday, June 13, which met in Cal Anderson park and marched south on 10th avenue to hold a candlelight vigil to honor all of the trans victims slaughtered by ruthless transphobic bigots.
The march stopped in front of the Odd Fellows restaurant, the scene of the latest attack. Purportedly, some 20 people witnessed the attack but failed to come to the aid of the victim.
This march occurs following an ever-increasing trend of anti-LGBTQ hate crimes in Capitol Hill. One man this month stated he was attacked and pushed to the ground in broad daylight while walking on Broadway, Capitol Hill’s busiest street. The increase in queer-bashing is correlated with the gentrification of the historically gay Seattle neighborhood.
The march continued on going east on Pike, stopping at several bustling bars, some of which cater to the new, predominantly straight gentrifiers, or are traditionally gay bars now being overrun with homophobic patrons who harass the queer clientele. Protesters chanted: “We’re here, We’re queer, get used to it,” “2,4,6,8 now is time to stop the hate,” and “If you don’t like a gay neighborhood why did you move to one?”
The march took several laps around Pike and Pine Streets, Seattle’s most active scene for night life. At the very end of the protest, demonstrators took the whole lane on 10th and Pike and held a dance party where people chanted “Queer neighborhood, this is our Queer neighborhood!” The event was well received and made a strong impact on the community.How can you run a full range of current applications on older
computers, netbooks, thin clients, and mobile devices? One way is to
install a lightweight Linux like Puppy, Lubuntu, or Vector Light.
Select the distro with the apps that meets your needs while matching
your computer’s resources.
Puppy is worthy of your attention because it’s pushed its way into Distrowatch‘s
top ten most popular operating systems by merit alone. It doesn’t
have a corporate sponsor or advertising budget. This article describes Puppy. Screenshots follow the article.
What’s Unique About Puppy
Puppy runs on many limited-resource computers. This includes Pentium
IV’s, III’s, M’s, D’s, Atom and Celeron netbooks, and even Pentium
II’s. I’ve used it in
refurbishing computers donated to charity yet I also run it on my
state-of-the-art computers. What makes it appealing is
how it combines three characteristics that normally force a trade-off:
1. A full range of applications 2. Ease of use 3. Good performance on limited hardware
Puppy supplies all the
applications most users need while running
on low-resource computers. It does this
while retaining ease-of-use. So you can install it for
consumers on low-end or older equipment.
Puppy combines high
functionality with minimal
hardware. These
two goals force a direct trade-off — typically you get one or the
other, but
not both. Puppy employs specific techniques to circumvent the
trade-off and combine these two goals. Among them:
Bundled applications are selected for high
functionality and minimal
resource consumption.
Puppy excludes all but the mandatory Linux functions, code,
services, and
daemons.
The OS and bundled apps automatically load and run from memory on
any
computer having 256 M or more. This executes code at in-memory
speeds and eliminates slow hard disk and optical
disc access. It yields good performance even on older computers with slow devices.
Graphical user interfaces are the most resource-consumptive
component of modern operating systems. Puppy dodges the GUI performance bullet with the
lightweight JWM as
its default interface,
based on X-server with either Xorg or the more limited but efficient XVesa.
Puppy’s frugal install
option copies the Live CD code into any Windows or
Linux disk partition and boots from there. This yields hard disk boot
speed without requiring disk re-partitioning.
Puppy doesn’t require the anti-malware software
that
overwhelms older Windows systems. You can take a Windows ME/98/95
system, replace Windows with
Puppy, and
have a secure, performant system running current software. Puppy is a prime candidate for reusing these old systems.
Flexibility
Flexibility is essential when working with low-end computers. You need
software that runs on the system you have, rather than requiring you to
upgrade, change, or fix hardware. Puppy doesn’t impose hardware requirements.
For example, Puppy installs and boots from any
bootable device and saves your work to any
writeable device. No hard disk, optical drive, or USB?
No problem. Want to use your old SCSI drive, floppy, Zip
drive, LS-120/240 Superdisk, or compact flash memory? Puppy does it.
It’s great to see a distro that leverages whatever odd old devices your system has.
Puppy can even use write-once
CDs or DVDs for persistent storage. It will
prompt you to insert a new disc when needed. It then carries all your
work forward onto the newly inserted CD or DVD.
Puppy gives you a choice of Linux kernels. It comes with the
latest one for
current equipment and older “retro” kernels for aging machines. So it
runs on computers most other lightweight Linuxes no longer support.
Puppy complements Windows. You can install and load
it from
within a Windows disk partition. Or install on its own partition using
Linux filesystems like ext2, ext3, ext4, or reiserfs. Puppy’s
boot manager, GRUB, recognizes all existing Windows install(s) and
generates a boot-time menu that asks you which OS you want to run. So
you can install Puppy on a computer that already runs Windows or
Linux without worry.
All this flexibility makes Puppy better suited for revitalizing mature computers than many competing lightweight distributions.
Apps Are the Name of the Game
I’ve described how Puppy achieves good performance on minimal hardware.
But what can you do with it?
Puppy bundles the applications to perform the same tasks as much larger
distros. I can comfortably use it for everything I do instead of Ubuntu. With Puppy you can —
Perform home and office tasks with word processors, file and HTML
editors, PDF viewers, spreadsheets, and HomeBank
finance manager. Puppy bundles GNOME Office.
Surf the Internet with your choice of browsers, and read, write, send and manage email with Sylpheed
Play, record, mix, rip and manage music
Scan in documents and pictures, read or scan photographs,
alter and manage images and graphics with image and vector editors
Write your personal blog with PPLOG and the Hiawatha web
server, or create your own wiki with DidiWiki
Telephone, chat, or message via Voice Over IP with Psip, and instant
message and chat with Ayttm
Manage your address book, personal contacts, and daily calendar
with Osmo daily
organizer
Read, write, and burn CD’s, DVD’s, and Blu-ray discs
Log in to remote computers with telnet and send & receive
files
Manage your files and data with file managers, a file finder,
and tools for backup
Manage your computer and its performance with a full set of
utilities for setup, configuration, and performance monitoring and
management
Here’s
a full list of Puppy’s bundled apps and their version
numbers. Of course, like any mainstream distro Puppy makes it easy to download and install addtional apps with its package GUI.
For smooth video, you need a machine running at perhaps 800 ghz or faster. In my experience Puppy runs video fluently
with a slightly slower processor than larger distros like Ubuntu, where
you need at least 1 ghz.
Where Puppy Plays
The current Puppy release — Puppy 5 or “Lucid Puppy” — boots in 128 M
ram and runs entirely from memory on
systems with 256 M or more. The CD download is 130 M.
(Older
Puppy releases are about 100 M
downloads and prior to version 4 Puppy boots in only 64 M).
Puppy is a performant system for Pentium IV’s, III’s, M’s, D’s, and Atom and Celeron netbooks. Pentium II’s
work well with many Puppy releases if you can maximize their memory to
256 M, which allows Puppy
to
run entirely from memory and perform optimally. You can actually use a
P-II for serious work! One important limitation is that
P-II’s
can’t run web video because the P-II line topped out at 450mhz. This is a processor limitation rather than a Puppy shortcoming.
If you have a really old computer in your basement or attic, Puppy
can help you revitalize it. Puppy also runs on P-II’s with less than
256 M and P-I’s. But here you forgo the speed advantage that comes
with
running the system solely from memory.
For my purposes — refurbishing older computers with software that
is user-friendly enough for end users — Puppy presents the right
balance of
usability with minimal hardware requirements. As long as you install
and configure Puppy, end users will be quite happy using it on Pentium IV’s, III’s, and even II’s.
I don’t want to leave the impression that Puppy is only
suitable for
low-end hardware. I install it as one of several operating systems on my state-of-the-art
computers. It’s a fun alternative to some of the full-sized distros like Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, or Fedora.
Puppy makes a handy
portable “rescue disk” on CD, DVD, or bootable USB pen drive. Just last
month my friend
corrupted his disk’s master boot record on a Windows computer. With a
Live Puppy CD, we fixed this fatal error in minutes. Puppy scanned the disk and regenerated
the master boot record for us. (My
friend could also have used the Windows recovery console with commands like fixmbr
and fixboot but he didn’t
know how).
I recently used Puppy to save data from a DOS FAT32 partition on a
failing disk. I booted Live Puppy CD, then used its tools to
rebuild the DOS partition’s corrupted file allocation table. After verifying the FAT structure was
good, I carefully copied files from the failing disk to a good one,
concentrating on the highest priority files first. Eventually we saved
all data from the bad disk partition except for two files that had damaged
sectors. Then we replaced the bad disk.
Puppy’s Profile
Puppy makes a nice match for computer
consumers — assuming a knowledgeable person installs and configures it
for them. It brings old equipment back to life. But it may not be the best fit for
corporate users who require software that changes little from
release to release, or for companies that need a distro with corporate backing. Puppy is:
Community-developed and supported
— Puppy originated with one individual, Barry Kauler. A small inner circle adds
to his
efforts. No corporation underwrites or directs Puppy. Free support includes videos, wikis,
how-to’s, online documentation, tutorials, web sites, and active
forums. With one or two exceptions it does not offer corporate support contracts. — Puppy originated with one individual, Barry Kauler. A small inner circle addsto hisefforts. No corporation underwrites or directs Puppy. Free support includes videos, wikis,how-to’s, online documentation, tutorials, web sites, and activeforums. With one or two exceptions it does not offer corporate support contracts. No “road map” — This is an
evolving distro. Every
version differs. There is no
long term “road map” for future development or set schedule for planned
future
releases and upgrades. The community develops Puppy as consensus evolves. Version upgrades only — Updates are traditionally
through point releases. Puppy
5 adds a push-button for downloadable software fixes like Ubuntu or
Windows. Root user id — Puppy runs as a
single-user system and this drives its development. The Puppy user
runs as the Linux root user id.
In theory this could be a problem — but in practice it presents
no downside. I’ve never heard of a single Puppy user suffering
a
problem due to this. If this concerns you, see the discussions
that explore all angles of this topic
in this
forum thread and this
one.
How to Run Puppy
In Puppy version 5.2, the Live CD download file is
127 M. Once you’ve downloaded the product, burn it to a “boot CD” and
you’re
ready to run.
Given its small size and quick boot time,
many run Puppy as a Live CD or DVD without ever
installing it. Puppy allows you to save your session work by asking if
you want
to create a Save File the first time you request a shut down. Place the
Save File
on any writeable device
(disk, USB, writeable CD or DVD, whatever). Next time you boot the
Live CD
or DVD Puppy finds the Save File to start your session. Ever after Puppy automatically saves your session work in the Save
File
without asking.
You can install Puppy to any
bootable device — disk (SATA, PATA/IDE or SCSI), writeable CD or DVD,
Superdisk, USB devices, Zip drive, or whatever will boot your
computer. You have two options here: a full install and the frugal
install.
The full install is a
traditional Linux install. You need to create a
disk partition for Puppy’s use. Puppy helps you do this with its bundled GParted
partition manager. Puppy also comes with GRUB for setting up an OS selection menu at startup. A Puppy partition need only be
500 M, though if you install additional apps, I’ve found 1 G to be a spacious
round number.
The frugal install simply
copies the Live CD files to
disk. Place these files in a single directory within
any
existing partition. This partition can be Windows NTFS or FAT32, or any
of the
common Linux partition types, such as ext2, ext3, ext4, or reiserfs.
The benefits to the frugal install are:
Puppy can reside in any existing partition (assuming sufficient
space) No need to shrink the Windows partition or create a new Linux
partition Easy to upgrade — just replace the older version files with the
ones from a newer version
These advantages make frugal installs more popular with Puppy than
full disk installs. USB boots are also quite popular. Puppy fits on any 512 M USB memory stick with space leftover for your data.
New in Version 5
Puppy 5.x presents some
big enhancements over previous versions. It was created from Ubuntu
packages through a
new tool inventor Barry Kauler calls Woof. Woof
builds Puppy from the package repositories of various Linux distros.
Right now the supported distros include Ubuntu, Debian,
Slackware, Arch, T2 SDE, and Puppy.
The result is that Puppy 5 runs any Ubuntu or *.deb package! This opens
up the whole word of Ubuntu and Debian applications to Puppy. Prior to
version 5, you could only install apps from Puppy’s own repository.
While this repository contains
hundreds
of common Linux applications, enough for most people, it does not
compare to the thousands of free apps now available in the
Ubuntu/Debian repositories.
Puppy 5 tweaks the user interface. It boots directly into a
pre-configured desktop for quick startup. It gives users the
ability to easily customize the desktop with choices for
common
applications such as the browser. The new QuickPet tool makes
one-click
installation easy. Wireless and internet configuration are also much
improved. Barry Kauler’s blog and the
Version 5 Release
Notes give full details on everything that’s new in Puppy 5.
You can customize Puppy into your own distro with either Woof or the Puppy re-mastering tool. These are
so easy to use that they have resulted in an explosion of Puplets,
customized Puppy-based distros. Puplets address all sorts of special
interests, including multi-user
Puppy, Puppeee
for the eeePC notebook, UbuntuStudio
Puppy, and many more
designed for gaming, scientific disciplines, religious interests,
international languages, etc. If you’re interested in
customizing your own
Linux version, Puppy is an especially good choice.
Time to Adopt Puppy?
Puppy Linux combines a full range of applications and performance
in an
easy-to-use
system. Given its light resource requirements, it works well on older computers, netbooks, mobile devices, and other
limited-resource systems. It’s a great hobbyist system for revitalizing an older computer. You can make an old Windows ME/98/95
box useful again with Puppy.
I like Puppy because it’s the lightest Linux
distro I’ve found that is still suitable for end users. Install it on
an old P-III or P-IV computer and your family or friends will use it
just as effectively for common tasks as any expensive new
machine.
At OS News, we’re all computer enthusiasts, so it may be hard to believe.
But many people see absolutely no reason to pay for
a new computer
every few years if their old one suffices. Puppy is a godsend for
these folks.
I’ve run Puppy for five years with few problems. Forum support
is outstanding. And Puppy really flies — when the entire system runs from
memory, even an
older computer is responsive. A P-III with adequate memory runs Puppy
as fast as my dual-core e5200 runs Windows.
Without advertisements or corporate backing, Puppy has risen to become one of the world’s
dozen most popular distros. If you’re looking for a lightweight distro you should
give it a try.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Howard Fosdick (President, FCI) is an independent consultant who
specializes in
databases and operating systems. His hobby is computer refurbishing as
a form of social work and environmental contribution. You can reach him
at contactfci at the domain
name of sbcglobal (period) net.
Puppy Links
Previous Articles in
This Series
Puppy Linux Screenshots
The Main Screen
The icons in the upper-left side of the screen
are the main
applications. The optional row of disk icons at the lower left-side of
the screen shows the mount status of disk partitions. I’ve changed the
background wallpaper here from version 5’s default to that of an
earlier Puppy release —
Bundled Graphics Tools
This screenshot shows Puppy’s bundled graphics tools. Just right-click
at any open position in the screen to see JWM’s pop-up application
menus —
Using Puppy
I wrote this article on several of old P-IV and P-III computers with Puppy.
Here’s a screenshot where I’m researching and writing using tools like the KompoZer HTML Editor, Firefox, the ROX-Filer
File Manager, and the System Tools menu. I snapped and resized the screenshot with
mtPaint —
The Package Manager
Puppy 5 now installs and runs applications from the
Ubuntu as well as Puppy repositories. You can install any *.deb package —
Quickpet
This easy tool allows for one-click app installation and is an
easy-to-use addition
to the Package Manager —
Network Connectivity Tools
Puppy Version 5 enhances Puppy’s network connectivity
tools. Wireless and modem configuration are much improved —Cape Town – Enjoy them while – though an altogether more critical word on current form is “if” – you can.
The games against Italy and out-of-Test-window Wales, which will have relatively little purpose as good yardsticks now anyway, almost certainly represent Allister Coetzee’s final fling as Springbok head coach … or, at least, with the affable but regrettably exposed “Toetie” as the personality in proper charge of the national team.
If there is any green-and-gold future at all for him, it seems increasingly obvious it will be with hugely clipped wings, and you would like to think that his professional pride might well preclude him for continuing under such circumstances.
He still has something to offer the first-class game at other levels, with a track record good enough to confirm as much, regardless of the more vehement, strident sentiment expressed about him in his too often troubled, grossly under-delivering tenure with the Boks since 2016.
Here are half a dozen of the most pivotal reasons, I believe, for the sands of time running out (surely?) on Coetzee after the tour-closing Cardiff fixture on December 2:
1 Undeniably poor statistical track record
For a brief period this year, a new dawn flickered fairly promisingly, as the Springboks showed welcome zest and zip in drubbing France in a home series (though we were again reminded much more recently of that country’s own palpable limitations) and then comfortably winning games one and two of the Rugby Championship against Argentina … albeit the Pumas another faded force.
But since then, Coetzee has slipped back into victory-lacking habits much too akin to his collectively hideous 2016 campaign.
It is a cold fact that, even if he earns successive wins against Italy and Wales, he will only shift from a total win percentage in charge of 48 percent (from present 43) across two seasons.
That is simply not good enough for a supposedly top-tier nation like South Africa, and this year has also seen a continuation of the trend under his command of some especially violent reverses that arguably reveal much more than any industrial, ground-out triumphs do.
2 Lack of clarity over Bok game plan, and fast-receding standards of entertainment value
The European tour, at least thus far, has only served ongoing notice that the Boks are trapped in a largely featureless, swirling array of currents, gameplan-wise.
Give Coetzee a bit of credit: the Bok pack remains a very useful unit. Indeed, the forwards must wonder sometimes what more they, specifically, need to do to make the team as a whole more competitive in matches where they are eventually beaten, or in those where victory should really be secured with far greater comfort than is managed on the scoreboard.
So that “traditional strength” up front has not been too meaningfully diluted in the current coaching regime.
Yet the Boks remain, gallingly, little short of clueless for attacking formula and execution, an area where your backline naturally is expected to play a major role.
Even the most basic of skill levels leave so much to be desired, and remember that Coetzee himself was once |
all so the file keeps getting sent down for no reason.
When I joined Google I realised that we could help out here. What if we hosted these files? Everyone would see some instant benefits:
Caching can be done correctly, and once, by us… and developers have to do nothing
Gzip works
We can serve minified versions
The files are hosted by Google which has a distributed CDN at various points around the world, so the files are “close” to the user
The servers are fast
By using the same URLs, if a critical mass of applications use the Google infrastructure, when someone comes to your application the file may already be loaded!
A subtle performance (and security) issue revolves around the headers that you send up and down. Since you are using a special domain (NOTE: not google.com!), no cookies or other verbose headers will be sent up, saving precious bytes.
This is why we have released the AJAX Libraries API. We sat down with a few of the popular open source frameworks and they were all excited about the idea, so we got to work with them, and now you have access to their great work from our servers.
Details of what we are launching
You can access the libraries in two ways, and either way we take the pain out of hosting the libraries, correctly setting cache headers, staying up to date with the most recent bug fixes, etc.
The first way to access the scripts is simply be using a standard <script src=”..”> tag that points to the correct place.
For example, to load Prototype version 1.6.0.2 you would place the following in your HTML:
< View plain text > HTML
< script src = "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/prototype/1.6.0.2/prototype.js" >< / script >
The second way to access the scripts is via the Google AJAX API Loader’s google.load() method.
Here is an example using that technique to load and use jQuery for a simple search mashup:
< View plain text > HTML
< script src = "http://www.google.com/jsapi" >< / script > < script > // Load jQuery google.load("jquery", "1"); // on page load complete, fire off a jQuery json-p query // against Google web search google.setOnLoadCallback(function() { &; v=1.0 &; callback=?", $.getJSON("http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/ services /search/web?q=googlev=1.0callback=?", // on search completion, process the results function (data) { if (data.responseDate.results && data.responseDate.results.length>0) { renderResults(data.responseDate.results); } }); }); < / script >
You will notice that the version used was just “1”. This is a smart versioning feature that allows your application to specify a desired version with as much precision as it needs. By dropping version fields, you end up wild carding a field. For instance, consider a set of versions: 1.9.1, 1.8.4, 1.8.2.
Specifying a version of “1.8.2” will select the obvious version. This is because a fully specified version was used. Specifying a version of “1.8” would select version 1.8.4 since this is the highest versioned release in the 1.8 branch. For much the same reason, a request for “1” will end up loading version 1.9.1.
Note, these versioning semantics work the same way when using google.load and when using direct script urls.
By default, the JavaScript that gets sent back by the loader will be minified, if there is a version supported. Thus, for the example above we would return the minified version of jQuery. If you specifically want the raw JavaScript itself, you can add the “uncompressed” parameter like so:
Today we are starting with the current versions of the library, but moving forward we will be archiving all versions from now onwards so you can be sure they are available.
For a full listing of the currently supported libraries, see the documentation.
Here I am, talking about what we are doing in two short slides:
The Future
This is just the beginning. We obviously want to add more libraries as you find them useful. Also, if you squint a little you can see how this can extend even further.
If we see good usage, we can work with browser vendors to automatically ship these libraries. Then, if they see the URLs that we use, they could auto load the libraries, even special JIT’d ones, from their local system. Thus, no network hit at all! Also, the browser could have the IP addresses for this service available, so they don’t have the hit of a DNS lookup. Longer lived special browser caches for JavaScript libraries could also use these URLs.
The bottom line, and what I am really excited about, is what this could all mean for Web developers if this happens. We could be removed of the constant burden of having to re-download our standard libraries all the time. What other platform makes you do this?! Imagine if you had to download the JRE everytime you ran a Java app! If we can remove this burden, we can spend more time flushing out functionality that we need, and less time worrying about the actual download bits. I am all for lean, but there is more to life.
Acknowledgements
I want to acknowledge the other work that has been done here. Some libraries such as jQuery and Dean Edwards Base were already kind of doing this by hot linking to their Google Code project hosting repository. We thought this was great, but we wanted to make it more official, and open it up to libraries that don’t use our project hosting facilities.
Also, AOL does a great job of hosting Dojo already. We recommend using them for your Dojo needs, but are proud to also offer the library. Choice is good. Finally, Yahoo! placed the YUI files on their own CDN for all to use.Pen Hadow Gives Up- Blocked By Sea Ice!
By Paul Homewood
http://www.arcticmission.com/arctic-mission-reaches-furthest-north/
Pen Hadow’s attempt to sail to the North Pole has been rather embarrassingly brought to an abrupt halt by sea ice!
The furthest North they got was 80 degrees 10 minutes, and after being moored to an ice floe for a day, the decision was made to turn tail and head south.
http://www.arcticmission.com/follow-arctic-mission/
The Arctic Mission website tries to put the best spin on it:
Arctic Mission’s furthest North was 80 degrees 10 minutes North, 148 degrees 51 minutes West, reached at 22:04:12 (Alaskan Time, GMT-9hours) on 29 August 2017 by yachts, Bagheera and Snow Dragon II.
Arctic Mission moored its yachts to an ice floe on 29 August to conduct one of its 24-hour marine science surveys, while drifting with the sea ice. The strategy for any future northward progress had been to monitor the sea surface currents, sea ice, and weather conditions (both observed from the yachts and through satellites imagery downloaded onto our computers), and decide how to proceed as we approached the end of the 24-hour survey.
A meeting of the four skippers was held led by Erik de Jong, with Pen Hadow present, and it was agreed further northward progress would increase considerably the risks to the expedition, with very limited scientific reward. The decision to head south, back to an area of less concentrated sea ice in the vicinity of 79 degrees 30 minutes North, was made at 18.30 (Alaskan time).
Arctic Mission has demonstrated that commercial fishing and shipping vessels can now access and exploit a new, unexplored and vulnerable ocean region on the planet, the Central Arctic Ocean, due to the melting of its sea-ice cover. Approximately 1 million square kilometres of the Central Arctic Ocean is likely to have been ice-free this summer, having had year-round ice cover throughout human history until the 1980s, and likely has had for many tens of thousands of years.
The commercial activities made possible by this loss of summer sea ice puts at risk the extraordinary wildlife that has evolved to survive in this extreme environment. Polar bears, whales, seals, fishes, seabirds, invertebrates and microbes all contribute to a unique and special ecosystem which is unlike any other on earth.
Arctic Mission has undertaken an extensive oceanographic, wildlife and ecosystem research programme during the voyage, led by Tim Gordon of the University of Exeter (UK). This has included work on acoustic ecology, copepod distributions and physiology, microplastic pollution surveying, inorganic carbon chemistry, seabird range expansion and microbial DNA sequencing. Scientific findings will be released following comprehensive data analysis and formal publication in peer-reviewed journals in 2018/19.
It is believed Arctic Mission has sailed further north from the coastlines surrounding the Arctic Ocean than any vessel in history without icebreaker support.
Its vessels were the first to reach the international waters surrounding the North Pole (aka the Central Arctic Ocean), without icebreaker support and without freezing in.
Its vessels have set the first furthest north within the Central Arctic Ocean without icebreaker support.
Arctic Mission’s northernmost position was 590 nautical miles (678.5 statute miles) from the North Pole.”
http://www.arcticmission.com/arctic-mission-reaches-furthest-north/
Much of what they claim is sheer drivel. There is absolutely no evidence that this part of the ocean has not been ice free many times in recent human history. We do know that the Arctic was been much warmer in the Middle Ages, for instance.
They also claim that they have sailed further north without ice breaker support than anybody else. But I am not aware of anyone who has actually tried to. And certainly not in boats specially built to sail in waters with sea ice.
Despite repeated claims of ice free seas, the writing has been on the wall for the expedition for several days, during which they have been meandering around the same area of ocean, presumably trying to find a way through the ice.
2-Hourly Plots from 26th August
They are now retreating to 79 degrees 30 minutes North, and it is possible they may make another attempt if the ice miraculously disappears. However, there is no sign of this, and NORSEX even show the sea ice extent increasing in recent days, and well above last year’s levels.
http://web.nersc.no/WebData/arctic-roos.org/observation/ssmi_ice_ext.png
The ice to the north of them is very thick:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icethickness/thk.uk.php
And Arctic temperatures are well below zero:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/weather/arcticweather_imagecontainer.php
Hadow will doubtlessly return home to be feted by the BBC, where he will claim that the objective was never to reach the North Pole, but only to do scientific research.
But let’s not forget what the headlines on their own website say:
http://www.arcticmission.com/
Just one more abysmal failure, which will join the list of all the other failed attempts to walk, row and sail to the North Pole.
AdvertisementsIntroduction
A Trident II, D-5 missile is launched from the submerged submarine USS Tennessee in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida. AP
The Obama administration’s plan for maintaining and upgrading the U.S. nuclear arsenal will likely cost around 66 percent more over the next decade than senior Pentagon officials have predicted, according to a new assessment by the independent Congressional Budget Office.
Under the administration’s plan, operating, maintaining and upgrading the nuclear stockpile will cost a total of $355 billion from 2014 through 2023, said the CBO report, published just before the holidays and shortly after Congress finished action on a 2014 budget bill that restored some planned Pentagon spending cuts.
James Miller, the Pentagon’s outgoing policy chief, had said in 2011 congressional testimony that the 10-year tab would be around $214 billion, or an average of $21 billion a year, an amount he pegged at around 3 percent of the Pentagon’s likely overall budget for that period.
His boss at the time, Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, cited an even lower yearly total when he told a security conference in Colorado last summer that nuclear weapons are “just not that expensive.”
Carter’s remarks ignited substantial controversy, including criticism from anti-nuclear activists as well as challenges from military budget experts. The squabble stemmed in part from the fact that the federal budget has no consolidated nuclear weapons spending category, and instead lists discrete tallies for related programs in the energy and defense departments.
Congress requested the budget office report to help settle the squabble, and the office’s analysts began by hunting down all the discrete listings. They also projected spending into the future, using Pentagon estimates wherever possible, and studied historical cost growth data to predict how much the total spending might grow beyond current estimates.
The $355 billion estimate is thus based not only on a higher calculation of what the government is spending now but also on a projection that unforeseen technical problems or mismanagement will cause costs to grow by an extra $59 billion.
The $355 billion tally, moreover, still does not reflect the full panoply of costs associated with having a robust nuclear arsenal, according to the CBO. It projected that “other nuclear-related costs” — a category not mentioned by Pentagon officials that includes environmental cleanup efforts, arms control-related work, and a system of defenses against nuclear attack — will likely cost the government an additional $215 billion over the next decade.
That makes a grand total of $570 billion. All of these programs are meant to persist for more than 10 years, of course, which means that nuclear weapons-related spending during the next 30 years or so could easily approach $1 trillion.
“Nuclear weapons aren’t cheap as some high-ranking Pentagon officials have suggested,” said Kingston Reif, Director of Nuclear Non-Proliferation at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, an advocacy group in Washington. He said that unless the Obama administration scales back its plans in line with current budget realities, the result will be “nuclear disarmament by financial default” instead of a more careful reshaping of the U.S. nuclear posture.
Of the $241 billion needed solely for nuclear delivery systems — such as missiles and bombers — and warheads, the CBO said that $152 billion will be spent to maintain existing systems. Under the administration’s ambitious modernization plans, another $89 billion will be needed to replace them.
Although the overall federal budget is shrinking, these plans would require annual nuclear weapons-related spending to increase by as much as 60 percent over the period, the report said.
The lion’s share of the costs over the next decade — $82 billion — will be borne by the U.S. ballistic missile submarine program, which is about to undergo a costly modernization. Strategic bombers, which also are slated for an upgrade, will cost $40 billion.
Keeping the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons-related laboratories humming over this period will cost $77 billion. Programs related to nuclear weapons command and early warning will cost $56 billion. None of these individual tallies includes the cost growth that CBO analysts projected.
The CBO report cautioned that eliminating some of the programs, or even a category of nuclear weapons, would not produce savings equivalent to what’s now being spent, since compensatory measures would likely have to be taken. It made no specific recommendations, but noted that simply deferring some of the nuclear weapons modernization efforts — to fit current budget limits — instead of cancelling them outright will likely make them more costly in the long run.
When Miller, who is slated to retire in January, was asked at the Nov. 2011 House Armed Services committee hearing about claims that nuclear weapons-related spending over the next decade could be as high as $600 billion, he said, “suffice it to say there was double counting and some rather curious arithmetic involved.”
But that’s pretty much where the CBO came out.State and local officials were left wondering what exactly went wrong in the wake of a 58,000 gallon oil spill in San Francisco Bay - the largest such spill since 1988 - this past Wednesday. The Cosco Busan, a South Korea-bound container ship, struck one of the Bay Bridge's steel and concrete buttresses Wednesday morning as it was being guided out; the impact gouged the hull, precipitating the massive spill.
The U.S. Coast Guard has come under heavy criticism for initially underestimating the size of the spill, describing it early on as a 140 gallon fuel leak; the estimate was quickly revised on Thursday morning to a hefty 60,000 gallons. Officials are now worried about the impact the fuel slick will have on surrounding beaches and the local wildlife, including shorebirds, seals and other marine organisms. "The effects of the oil spill could persist for months and possibly years," said Tina Swanson, a fish biologist affiliated with the Bay Institute. According to the latest estimates, hundreds of birds have already been caught by the spreading slick, with thousands more likely to come as it continues moving out to sea - some oil having already been sighted 15 miles north of San Francisco.
Though Coast Guard officials have so far been able to collect close to 10,000 gallons of the spilled oil, they fear the slicks could yet reach more sites. It has already soiled at least nine beaches and parks in the area. "This is a significant event. This is one we're very concerned about," said Steve Edinger, assistant chief for the California Department of Fish and Game.
Via ::San Francisco Chronicle: Oil oozes in San Francisco Bay after ship hits bridge (newspaper), ::Associated Press: Experts: Oil Spill Is Threat to Wildlife (news website)
See also: ::Touring an Oil Spill Twice the Size of Exxon Valdez — in Brooklyn, ::Unintended Side Effects for CoralsConcrete ships are built of steel and ferrocement (reinforced concrete) instead of more traditional materials, such as steel or wood. The advantage of ferrocement construction is that materials are cheap and readily available, while the disadvantages are that construction labor costs are high, as are operating costs. (Ferrocement ships require thick hulls, resulting in a comparatively large cross-sectional area to push through the water, or less space for cargo.) During the late 19th century, there were concrete river barges in Europe, and during both World War I and World War II, steel shortages led the US military to order the construction of small fleets of ocean-going concrete ships, the largest of which was the SS Selma.[1] Few concrete ships were completed in time to see wartime service during World War I, but during 1944 and 1945, concrete ships and barges were used to support U.S. and British invasions in Europe and the Pacific. Since the late 1930s, there have also been ferrocement pleasure boats.
History [ edit ]
Blueprints for a concrete boat
Concrete boat constructed by Walter Dowsey hauled out in Chicago
The oldest known ferrocement watercraft was a dinghy built by Joseph-Louis Lambot in Southern France in 1848. Lambot's boat was featured in the Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1855.
Beginning in the 1860s, ferrocement barges were built in Europe for use on canals, and around 1896, an Italian engineer, Carlo Gabellini, began building small ships out of ferrocement. The most famous of his ships was the Liguria.[2]
Between 1908 and 1914, larger ferrocement barges began to be made in Germany, United Kingdom,[3] the Netherlands, Norway, and California.[4] The remains of a British ship of this type, the auxiliary coaster Violette (built 1919), can be seen at Hoo, Kent, England.[5]
On August 2, 1917, Nicolay Fougner of Norway launched the first self-propelled ferrocement ship intended for ocean travel. This was an 84-foot (26 m) vessel of 400 tons named Namsenfjord. With the success of this ship, additional ferrocement vessels were ordered, and in October 1917, the U.S. government invited Fougner to head a study into the feasibility of building ferrocement ships in the United States.[6][7] The Fougner Concrete Shipbuilding Company, Flushing Bay, New York, reported calculated cost was of $290 per deadweight ton for the Cape Fear (List of shipwrecks in 1920 "10.21 30 October") and the Sapona which they presumably built.[2]
About the same time, the California businessman W. Leslie Comyn took the initiative to build ferrocement ships on his own. He formed the San Francisco Ship Building Company (in Oakland, California), and hired Alan Macdonald and Victor Poss to design the first American ferrocement ship, a 6,125-ton steamer named the SS Faith. Faith was launched March 18, 1918. She cost $750,000 to build. She was used to carry bulk cargo for trade until 1921, when she was sold and scrapped as a breakwater in Cuba.[2]
Palo Alto, originally meant for merchant service in the first World War, but completed in 1919. (Naval History and Heritage Command - Photo NH 799) The American concrete oil tanker, originally meant for merchant service in the first World War, but completed in 1919. (Naval History and Heritage Command - Photo NH 799)
On April 12, 1918, President Woodrow Wilson approved the Emergency Fleet Corporation program which oversaw the construction of 24 ferrocement ships for the war. However, when the war ended in November 1918, only 12 ferrocement ships were under construction and none of them had been completed. These 12 ships were eventually completed, but soon sold to private companies who used them for light-trading, storage, and scrap.[2]
Other countries that looked into ferrocement ship construction during this period included Canada, Denmark, Italy, Spain, Sweden[4] and the United Kingdom.
Between the world wars, there was little commercial or military interest in concrete ship construction. The reason was that other shipbuilding methods were cheaper and less labor-intensive, and other kinds of ships were cheaper to operate. However, in 1942, after the U.S. entered World War II, the U.S. military found that its contractors had steel shortages. Consequently, the U.S. government contracted McCloskey & Company[8] of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to build 24 self-propelled concrete ships. Construction started in July 1943. The shipyard was at Hookers Point in Tampa, Florida, and at its peak, it employed 6,000 workers.[9] The U.S. government also contracted with two companies in California for the construction of concrete barge ships.[9] Barge ships were large vessels that lacked engines to propel them. Instead, they were towed by tugs.
In Europe, ferro cement barges (FCBs) played a crucial role in World War II operations, particularly in the D-Day Normandy landings, where they were used as part of the Mulberry harbour defenses, for fuel and munitions transportation, as blockships,[10] and as floating pontoons. Some were fitted with engines and used as mobile canteens and troop carriers. Some of these vessels survive as abandoned wrecks in the Thames Estuary; two remain in civil use as moorings at Westminster. One notable wartime FCB, previously beached at Canvey Island, was destroyed by vandals on May 22, 2003.[11]
In 1944 a concrete firm in California proposed a submarine shaped freighter which they claimed could achieve speeds of 75 knots. The war ended any more research into the project. In retrospect many believe the claims were greatly overstated.[12]
Concrete barges also served in the Pacific during 1944 and 1945.[13] From the Charleroi, Pennsylvania, Mail, February 5, 1945:
Largest unit of the Army's fleet is a BRL, (Barge, Refrigerated, Large) which is going to the South Pacific to serve fresh frozen foods — even ice cream — to troops weary of dry rations. The vessel can keep 64 carloads of frozen meats and 500 tons of fresh produce indefinitely at 12°F. Equipment on board includes an ice machine of five-ton daily capacity and a freezer that turns out more than a gallon of ice cream a minute. Three of the floating warehouses, designed for tropical warfare, have been built of concrete at National City, Calif., and cost $1,120,000 each. In the crew of the 265-ft. barges are 23 Army men.
One concrete barge under tow by Jicarilla (ATF-104) was lost off Saipan during a typhoon, and another barge damaged the Moreton Bay Pile Light in Brisbane,[14] but the rest served admirably.[15]
Today [ edit ]
Modern hobbyists also build ferrocement boats (ferroboats),[16] as their construction methods do not require special tools, and the materials are comparatively cheap. A pioneer in this movement is Hartley Boats, which has been selling plans for concrete boats since 1938.[17] Meanwhile, since the 1960s, the American Society of Civil Engineers has sponsored the National Concrete Canoe Competition.[18]
In Europe, especially the Netherlands, concrete is still used to build some of the barges on which houseboats are built.[19]
Remaining wartime ships [ edit ]
Surviving wartime concrete ships are no longer in use as ships. Several live on in various forms, mostly as museums or breakwaters.
Americas [ edit ]
The largest collection is at Powell River, British Columbia, where a lumber mill uses ten floating ferrocement ships as a breakwater.[20]
The Kiptopeke Breakwater in Chesapeake Bay, Virginia is formed by nine sunken concrete ships built in World War II.[21]
San Pasqual, a former oil tanker, lies off the coast of Cayo Las Brujas, Cuba, where it served as a hotel, then as a base for divers. Currently, the San Pasqual is abandoned.[22]
The wreckage of SS Atlantus (commissioned in 1919, sunk in 1926), is visible off Sunset Beach near Cape May, New Jersey. [22]
The tanker SS Selma is located northwest of the fishing pier at Seawolf Park in Galveston.. The ship was launched the same day Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles, ending the war, so it never saw wartime duty and instead was used as an oil tanker in the Gulf of Mexico.[1]
The SS Palo Alto, a concrete tanker that was launched May 29, 1919, was purchased and turned into an amusement pier, and is still visible at Seacliff State Beach, near Aptos, California. [22] It broke up during a January 2017 storm.[23]
The SS McKittrick, launched in 1921 in Wilmington, N.C. later became the SS Monte Carlo, a gaming ship off Coronado, California that ran aground on December 31, 1936. The wreck is periodically exposed by strong storm tides.[24]
The vessel aground in the surf at Shipwreck Beach on the north shore of Lanai, Hawaii is ex-YOGN 42, a concrete gasoline barge built for the US Navy in 1942 and placed in service in 1943. The wreck is often misidentified as a Liberty ship.[25]
The remains of the Col. J. E. Sawyer can be seen near the USS Yorktown in Charleston Harbor, SC.[26]
The wreckage of the SS Sapona is visible slightly south of Bimini Island in the Bahamas,. It is a popular snorkeling site and boating landmark in the area.
Europe [ edit ]
One of the few ships used in World War I, the SS Creteboom, lies abandoned in the River Moy, just outside the town of Ballina, County Mayo, Ireland and is considered of much interest to the area's many tourists.
A concrete barge, the Cretetree is beached in the harbour of the Isle of Scalpay near Tarbert, Harris, Scotland. She was built by Aberdeen Concrete Ships, and completed in 1919.[27]
The collection of vessels intentionally beached at Purton during the first half of the twentieth century - as a method to prevent coastal erosion - includes eight ferro-concrete barges. [28]
A large collection of abandoned concrete barges are seen at River Thames in Rainham, London.
SS Creteboom
At Purton
At Rainham
During the German occupation of Greece (1942–1944) during World War II, the German Army built 24 concrete cargo vessels for transporting goods to various Greek islands, including Crete. These were constructed in the Perama shipbuilding area of Piraeus. After the war, many of the vessels were used as piers (e.g. in Rafina and breakwaters (e.g. in Agios Georgios, Methana ).
Due to the need to deliver necessary raw materials (such as oil, weapons, ammunition, food and drugs) through mined river currents, Adolf Hitler ordered the production of 50 concrete ships for different purposes. Most were concrete barges made for oil transportation from Romania, and needed raw materials that were driven to the Baltic front. A smaller number of ships was intended for transporting food (specializing in cold storages). The most valuable ships were the specialized ship-hospitals, which evacuate seriously wounded and "important" soldiers in to the German hospitals along river flows.
Other [ edit ]
Several concrete ships were aground on the west beach of Iwo To (Iwo Jima) in Japan to make a breakwater by the US forces in 1945.[29] Most of them were broken by typhoon but one was used as a pier. [30]
Japan built four concrete ships named Takechi Maru No. 1 to 4 (武智丸) during World War II. After the war, two of them turned into a breakwater in Kure, Hiroshima.
At Iwo To
Takechi Maru No.2
See also [ edit ]Yesterday, we relayed an article in this month’s edition of Le10 Sport, which stated that José Mourinho had phoned Zlatan Ibrahimovic ahead of a possible move to Manchester United next season, such was the Special One’s confidence that he would get the job.
Making it quite clear that it was probably nonsense, we were somewhat surprised to see an article in the Manchester Evening News on Tuesday morning quoting Le10 Sport as saying Zlatan Ibrahimovic ‘is so certain he’ll be heading to Old Trafford at the end of the season that he is already planning for life in the Premier League.'
Now, let’s make things very clear: that isn’t the case.
Just to reiterate what we wrote yesterday, Le10 Sport simply write that Mourinho is already planning transfers for Manchester United and has added Zlatan Ibrahimovic on his shortlist to strengthen the club’s attack, who would like to give the Premier League a try before retiring.
Nowhere does it say that Zlatan is preparing for life in England, or anything vaguely similar to that.
The problem with such stories is that they are picked very easily, and spread like wildfire, to such an extent that in the space of four hours, the MEN’s version of the story is already in the Netherlands, Ireland and in The Mirror.
Despite being 35 in October, Zlatan feels he still has a couple of years left in him at the top level, and with 30 goals and 14 assists in 37 games for Paris Saint-Germain this season, you can’t blame him for thinking that.
His contract with the French club comes to an end in the summer.
Tom Coast.
TweetThere are tentative signs that the heart-rending tragedy in Connecticut is starting to change America’s conversation about guns.
These are early glimmers, and it may or may not lead to legislation in a Congress that has been staunchly opposed to gun control for nearly two decades. But some in that camp are rethinking their positions.
Sen. Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat endorsed by the NRA, said on Morning Joe on Monday that “everything should be on the table.”
Manchin said that NRA officials should be part of the conversation and “it’s time to move beyond rhetoric. We need to sit down and have a common sense discussion and move in a reasonable way.”
Noting that he had just returned with his family from a deer hunting trip, the senator said: “I don’t know anyone in the hunting or sporting arena that goes out with an assault rifle. I don’t know anybody that needs 30 rounds in the clip to go hunting. I mean, these are things that need to be talked about.”
Host Joe Scarborough, a former Florida congressman, also announced on the MSNBC show that he is reexamining his position in light of the Newtown school massacre.
“I am a conservative Republican who received the NRA’s highest ratings over four terms in Congress,” Scarborough said. “I come to you this morning with a heavy heart and no easy answers. Still, I’ve spent the past few days grasping for solutions and struggling for answers — while daring to question my own long-held belief on these subjects.”
He added: “I knew that day that the ideologies of my past career were no longer relevant to the future that I want, that I demand for my children. Friday changed everything. It must change everything.”
Scarborough accused entertainment moguls of glorifying murder, and said:
“Our Bill of Rights does not guarantee gun manufacturers the absolute right to sell military-style, high-caliber, semi-automatic combat assault rifles with high-capacity magazines to whoever the hell they want.”
It's not easy for people in politics, or media, to change their minds and walk away from past positions. Needless to say, many lawmakers still remain staunchly opposed to tightening gun restrictions. But with President Obama vowing to take the lead, the tenor of the debate might be changing.
And how has the NRA responded? The gun lobby, which has made no comment on Newtown, has deactivated its Facebook page, where it recently boasted of having attracted 1.7 million fans. After the movie theater shooting in Aurora last summer, the group shut down a key Twitter account. So the NRA, at least for now, is fleeing the social media arena.Satoru Iwata is adamant that Nintendo not publish its first-party franchises to other consoles because the move would be detrimental to Nintendo's long-term plans and core values, the Nintendo boss said in a recent interview with CVG.
Iwata said he would never consider putting the company's "precious resources" on other platforms, as games like those in the Mario and Pikmin franchises are vital to Nintendo's future. Publishing its games to other consoles would only be a short-term financial solution, he said.
"If I was to take responsibility for the company for just the next one or two years, and if I was not concerned about the long-term future of Nintendo at all, it might make sense for us to provide our important franchises for other platforms, and then we might be able to gain some short-term profit," he said.
"However, I'm really responsible for the long-term future of Nintendo as well, so I would never think about providing our precious resources for other platforms at all," he added.
Iwata added that publishing to other consoles would go against Nintendo's values of introducing new software and hardware together.
"What I believe is that Nintendo is a very unique company, because it does its business by designing and introducing people to hardware and software — by integrating them, we can be unique," he said. "And because we have hardware and software developers in the same building, they stimulate each other.
"And those kinds of conditions have enabled us to create something that no other companies can create," he added. "Those kinds of backgrounds are there behind the fact that such a number of great Nintendo franchises exist, and those great franchises always shine for people around the world."As the first customer cars are being prepared for delivery, Audi releases a fresh batch of R8 V10 Plus photos, showing the German halo car in all of its glory.
Whether you like it or not, Audi has chosen its usual path of developing the original design of the R8 instead of coming up with something entirely new, but under its familiar shape, the German company has applied a lot of its tricks in order for the R8 to remain among the best in its class.
Up to 50kg lighter than its predecessor, the new R8 V10 Plus is one of the last naturally aspirated options a buyer has in the segment as Audi kept the sonorous 5.2-litre V10 unit for its pride and joy. Audi has updated the engine for better performance and fuel efficiency with the numbers reading 610PS (602hp) and 560Nm (413lb.ft) of torque, which are good enough for a 0-62mph (0-100km/h) in 3.2 seconds and a top speed of a 205mph (330km/h).
Audi says that the power increase came from an additional indirect injection system which also helps the R8 score better fuel economy figures with a Cylinder-On-Demand system also on board. Audi claims the new R8 uses up to 10 per cent less fuel, with the figures for the Plus model to be 12.4 lt/100km (19.0 US mpg) and 289gr/km of CO2 emissions.
The Audi Drive Select System gives the driver the choice between four different modes (comfort, auto, dynamic and individual) while the virtual cockpit we saw in the Lamborghini Huracan and the Audi TT offers different levels of information at the flick of a button.
The range-topping Plus model is priced from €187,400 in Germany and £134,500 in the United Kingdom, entering a special segment where the competition is expected to explode, with cars like the AMG GT S, the 911 Turbo and the upcoming baby McLarens, the 540C and 570S.
PHOTO GALLERYCrime rising in Sonoma County
Nearly every day in 2014, someone broke into a Santa Rosa residence.
Petaluma police investigated about 20 shoplifting reports each month. Every five days, a vehicle was stolen in Rohnert Park and Windsor police investigated an aggravated assault.
Statistics released by the state Attorney General’s Office last week offer a snapshot of criminal activity in Sonoma County, where crime rose slightly in 2014 following a notable drop the preceding year.
There were 8,583 property crimes reported across Sonoma County last year, an increase of 4.4 percent from 2013. Violent crimes increased 2.2 percent, to 1,821 incidents, despite a decline in some cities like Windsor and Rohnert Park.
Statewide, nearly all serious crimes dropped in both number and rate |
and free markets are necessary for economic success. Liberty, not money, is the key to prosperity.Veteran wildlife presenter to film three hour-long nature documentaries for BBC1 to be broadcast next year
Sir David Attenborough is returning to the Great Barrier Reef for a new BBC series, almost six decades after he first filmed there.
The veteran wildlife presenter will front three hour-long films from the natural wonder off the coast of Australia, using sophisticated techniques to examine the array of creatures in new ways.
The landmark BBC1 series, to be called David Attenborough’s Great Barrier Reef, is being made by the team behind the award-winning First Life and is expected to be screened late next year.
They will use techniques such as satellite scanning to examine the 1,429-mile reef as well as macro lenses on the cameras that will enable viewers to close in on tiny and normally unseen creatures.
Attenborough first filmed on the reef for the series Zoo Quest in 1957, and has retained his passion for the location.
He said: “People say to me, ‘what was the most magical thing you ever saw in your life?’, and I always say without a word of exaggeration ‘the first time I was lucky enough to scuba dive on the Great Barrier Reef’.
“As I entered the water I remember suddenly seeing these amazing multi-coloured species living in communities – just astounding and unforgettable beauty. So I’m very excited to be returning to the reef with all the latest technology and science to see one of the most important places on the planet in a whole new way”.
BBC1 controller Charlotte Moore said: “With the combination of David Attenborough’s personal connection with the reef, his masterful storytelling and the very latest cutting-edge technology, viewers will see the Great Barrier Reef as we’ve never seen it before – a really exciting visual treat for BBC1.”
The series was commissioned by Charlotte Moore and Tom McDonald, head of commissioning, science and natural history, and will be produced by Anthony Geffen.
“David said that the Great Barrier Reef was the place he most wanted to return to. I’m so pleased that we will be going there for this, our tenth project together,” Geffen, of Atlantic Productions, said.Ever since the new season of Game of Thrones started, I've gathered with a group of friends each Sunday night to play video games for a few hours before the new episode airs. We sometimes call it pre-gaming Game of Thrones, because we're huge dorks.
This past Sunday was different, however. We began planning for it several days in advance. When I stepped into the massive, dimly lit space of my friend Jake's apartment that still looks more like the factory it once was than a space people actually live in, I noticed that he'd shuffled the couches so one was directly in front of the other, both facing the huge swath of wall that would soon be lit up by a projector.
"Stadium seating," I chuckled, taking a picture.
This Sunday was a major event, and not because of anything that went down in Game of Thrones. This Sunday, we had Mario Kart 8 for the first time.
Advertisement
We were excited. We had emailed each other earnestly to figure out who was bringing how many controllers and when so we'd have a full roster. Jake created a Facebook conversation titled "Mario Kart Party" and messaged us all the day before to ask if we could get to his house by 4 so we'd have a solid five hours of gaming before Game of Thrones started. We settled on 6. Then Nick, the one who had an early copy of Mario Kart, taunted us with the fact that he'd been playing the game the entire weekend already so he knew he was going to crush us. It felt like we were ten years old again, crowding around a TV in the basement to race each other in Mario Kart 64.
Nick did crush us on pretty much every single track and cup series we played through. But that didn't make it any less fun. By the time the third lap came around in every race, I'd lean forward, gritting my teeth in intense concentration just to get ahead of whomever was directly in front of me. When I finally did, I threw my arms up in triumph.
As we wound our way towards hour three of our Mario Kart binge, we decided to start racing individual tracks so we could cover more ground with the little time we had left. I was confused why we were deciding to cut the game off abruptly when we were still having a blast, so I tried to suggest that we just keep playing instead of watching Game of Thrones. That didn't go over so well.
Advertisement
"I'm just…really into this game," I said, watching Shy Guy (my driver of choice) zoom through another gorgeous track. I was genuinely surprised by how much I was enjoying it, because while I admire Mario Kart's beauty, it's never really been my go-to Nintendo series.
Advertisement
"I think I might actually buy one now," Jake said of the Wii U a moment later as we were placing the controllers back into our respective bags. Fresh off the thrill of playing Mario Kart for three solid hours, I found myself feeling weirdly hopeful that I could take this off-hand remark at face value.
Growing up on PC and PlayStation games, I never had the same level of feverish enthusiasm for Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros. that many of my friends did. Jake didn't grow up on an all-Nintendo diet either, but he's also one of those people who lives in an apartment that still has a GameCube plugged into the TV.
The Wii U is the first Nintendo console I've ever owned, for a point of comparison. This has been a bittersweet introduction to a universe many of my peers fell for 18 years ago when the N64 first launched, or even earlier.
Advertisement
They've all moved on in one way or another, or simply remained content to dust off the older consoles whenever they want their Mario or Zelda fix. I, on the other hand, am falling deeper and deeper in love with Nintendo games for the first time at a uniquely precarious point in the company's history.
There's an urgency behind this newfound obsession, therefore—one driven by the overarching fear that something might happen soon that will alter the very core of Nintendo. Something that would make my first Nintendo generation my last.
This has turned me into an odd sort of evangelist. After one of the recent Sundays, I offered to let Jake hold onto the Wii U until I came back the following week—on the condition that he learn how to play Pikmin 3 so we could play the cooperative levels the following week. He focused on Donkey Kong Counter: Tropical Freeze instead, texting me at one point just to relate how much fun he was having with it.
Advertisement
Even before our pre-Game of Thrones gaming ritual started, I was already making the hour-plus trek from my apartment in Washington Heights to Williamsburg more often than I wanted to on Saturday or Sunday mornings weighed down with a messenger bag filled with console paraphernalia and stack of games.
I've also hand-delivered it to a friend in Bushwick to let him play with while I was away in California. Hell, I would have brought it with me to California if I didn't have to pay for the extra luggage.
Advertisement
One day this past winter, I crossed over to Queens with the console in tow and got caught in a vicious snowstorm. I showed up at my friend's apartment in Astoria soggy and completely covered in snow except for one spot on my chest where I'd been clutching the bag with the fierceness of a protective parent. Immediately after shaking myself off and before I'd said my proper greetings, I darted straight for his table to open the bag and make sure that it was ok.
"You know, you didn't need to do that," he said, sounding puzzled as I pulled each of the pieces of machinery out of my bag and turned them over in my hands. "You know I already have a Wii U, right?"
Ok, so maybe that time I was being a tad unreasonable. But I wanted to save my Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze progress. What else was a newly minted Nintendo fan to do?
Advertisement
With the exception of the one who already owns a Wii U, all my other friends have responded to my visits with the same childlike giddiness we felt when planning and then playing Mario Kart 8. The first time I brought Super Mario 3D World to Jake's apartment, his roommate and our mutual friend Anthony was so excited he even managed to pull himself away from his League of Legends addiction temporarily to play with us.
"Beautiful!" he kept gasping at the beginning of levels. At one point, we happened upon a particularly tricky series of platforms that moved in different directions depending on where we were standing. Anthony and I didn't make it that far, plunging to our deaths shortly after stepping on one of the first platforms. With no lives left, it was all up to Jake.
Advertisement
"DO IT, JAKE, YOU CAN DO IT," we kept shouting. He held out for a few more seconds.
"I can't…I can't do it," he said, hunching over and shaking his head back and forth suddenly and quaking with laughter. When he looked up a moment later, there were tears in his eyes.
"This game just actually blew my mind," he said a moment later after we'd retreated to an easier level. That was on a Sunday. The following Saturday, I got a text from Jake at 11 that night saying that he was sorry for the short notice but he wanted to let me know that he was heading over to another friend's house to play it again.
Advertisement
Mind-blowing is a good way to describe Super Mario 3D World. But it was only mind-blowing enough for Jake to keep asking me to bring the Wii U over again, or go visit someone who lives closer by his neighborhood.
I asked Jake this morning how serious he was about buying a Wii U after playing the new game.
"Not very," he responded.
My heart sank once again.
So if there's already a game that brings you to tears, another that makes you want to turn your apartment into a day long arena, and one that's just plain fun, how many more reasons do you need to buy a Wii U?
Advertisement
"Zelda may be the only franchise that would convince me it's actually worth owning a Wii U," he said, though he's also considering picking up a 3DS.
I'm going to pester him again once the new Zelda finally shows up. Until then, I'll keep making my Wii U pilgrimage across the city.U.S. equities rose sharply on Tuesday as solid quarterly reports from several large-cap companies rolled through.
The Nasdaq composite jumped about 0.7 percent, sending the index above 6,000 for this first time ever.
"It's certainly a psychological factor," said Jeff Carbone, managing partner of Cornerstone Financial Partners. "It took us many years to get back above 5,000 and now we're at 6,000. But you've got to be careful."
He noted that about 40 percent of the index is being driven by five companies: Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, Alphabet and Apple. "If we see a downturn in those names," the index could be in trouble.
The Dow Jones industrial average rose about 230 points, with Caterpillar and McDonald's contributing the most gains and briefly broke above 21,000. The S&P 500 advanced 0.6 percent, with materials rising more than 1 percent to lead advancers.
"I think we've come to believe that Q1 is soft because of some reason that economists or market analysts haven't been able to pinpoint," said Kim Forrest, senior equity analyst at Fort Pitt Capital. "That doesn't seem to be happening now."
Here are some of the firms that posted quarterly results before the bell:
"Earnings thus far have been good," said Peter Cardillo, chief market economist at First Standard Financial. "That's a good sign that Corporate America is on a renewed path toward growth."
More than 190 S&P components are expected to have reported by the end of the week. Other big names scheduled to release quarterly results this week include Boeing, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and General Motors.
The major U.S. stock indexes soared on Monday after the first round of the French presidential election went as most investors expected. Centrist Emmanuel Macron advanced to the runoff against far-right candidate Marine Le Pen. The runoff is scheduled for May 7.This is part of my guide “The Developer’s Guide to Productive Daily Planning”. Get it here.
Kanban is a great planning method to visualize simple productivity processes. And it’s not just for teams, it’s also extremely useful as a personal board for any kind of project.
To get started you can use free tools like Trello or even a whiteboard with sticky notes. If you have multiple projects you are working on, I recommend to create multiple boards. One for each project. As an exception smaller projects could be summarized into a single board. It really depends on a number of todos and information you have to deal with. You get the best use out of Kanban when you don’t fill it up with too many things – as with most tools.
Let’s start! Create multiple lists or columns from left to right:
Inbox (or backlog) = collect here every idea, feature request, bugs or all the unprocessed “stuff”. Means you don’t have to prioritize or put it into a specific category. It’s just a place to dump whatever is coming your way for later review. So you don’t have to deal with it now. This list could contain an unlimited amount of items. But you should review and purge regularly everything you don’t really need anymore.
Next Up = All the things which you want to do next. This is a kind of general action list. Put here the stuff, which is important in near term for you and which you have “validated” as something worth doing. You can pull items from “Inbox” into this list. This list should have a limit of 5-10 items.
Doing Now = The name says it. Keep things here, which you are working on right now. You will pull cards from “Next Up” into this list when you are done with what you were doing last. Keep a very tight limit here of 1-3 cards. That’s like a focused Action List.
Done = Once the task is finished, you can pull and park the task here. This is just a temporary place for the next review. Once you do your review, you can archive all the cards inside this list.
Trash = This is a place for all the cards which became irrelevant. Since you note down almost everything into your inbox, many things might not be considered as something worth doing. You can park those items here until the next review. Just like the done list purge this list also regularly. Avoid keeping around cards with little information and low impact outcome. They create noise in your system and make it harder to manage. If it turns out to be important in the future, it will come up again. Then you can dig out of your archive or create a new card.
Bigger Projects
If you have bigger projects, you might add more lists, like I did above for developing NotePlan. Instead of “Next Up”, I have made two lists: “Later” (limit = 20), “Soon” (limit = 10).
Instead of using “Later” and “Soon” this could be also split up into a rough estimate, such as “This Month”, “This Quarter”, “This Year”, “Some Day”, etc. It depends on how many cards you have and how many you really want to manage. It also depends, if you have a team, which works on the cards. Kanban is very flexible. You can add a new list anytime and fine-tune your workflow.
For example: If you test a software release before uploading it to the public, you can add a list “Test” before moving cards to “Done”. Or “Code Review” or just a general “Review”, if it’s not a software project.
If you are using Trello, I recommend the chrome extension WIP to create a card limit for your lists.
Some important points to keep things working
Limit the number of cards for each list (like 10-20). Also called “Work in Progress” Limit.
Limit the length of the card’s title (like max. ~140 characters)
Add any extra information inside the card’s description or as a comment, if the software you are using supports that.
Review your cards regularly (more on that later).
For “Product People”: Capturing Feedback
If you work on any kind of product, you will have feedback from your customers. Copy this feedback in its raw form and paste it into a card as a reference (for example into the comments section).
This will help you in multiple ways:
You will have an overview of who and how many people are speaking about a certain part of your product – feature, bug or more general problems. This gives you an idea how important a feature for example is and where you should focus on. It helps your development team (or yourself, if you are the developer) to find the best solution and reading the raw feedback makes it easier to understand the pain. Furthermore, it’s more motivating to read feedback, which came directly from a real customer instead of receiving something processed. The raw, unbiased version is very useful to uncover simple solutions to complicated sounding problems (once you figure out what the actual problem is).
Tagging
Use colored tagging to create categories of tasks. Such as “Bugs”, “Marketing”, “Design” or “Support”.
This helps you prioritizing cards on-the-fly and important things won’t get drowned so easily between the less important cards. Above I have tagged critical features, bugs and marketing activities. I don’t tag every card, only the significant ones.
Reviews
Like in any other productivity system, it’s important to review cards and clean up the system to keep an overview. Here every 1-2 weeks all cards should be reviewed, re-prioritized, purged and updated. If you don’t review and clean up, you will end up with a dozen old cards, which will never be finished or which are not really actionable and actually belong somewhere else. They create noise and make it harder to keep an eye on the things, which are critical for you. Eventually, you will probably stop using the system altogether, because it will confuse you more than help. Hence review all cards to keep your boards healthy.
List Based Systems And Kanban
Compared to a purely list-based system (taggable lists with todos), Kanban can visualize a workflow much better. In this example the Kanban board replaces the project related notes for the development part. But Kanban boards are really bad for storing reference material like long pieces of text, spread-sheets, checklists, specs, etc. Basically anything with a lot of content or anything which creates a lot of cards, which are not very actionable. If the new information doesn’t fit into your Kanban workflow, it doesn’t fit into your Kanban system. Hence it makes sense to keep a list based system for storing non-actionable items and a Kanban board to visualize your workflow.
I personally moved managing the development of NotePlan from a simple text-based list to Trello, because I needed something more dynamic, where I can move around blocks of text (or cards) much easier. It’s also hard to visualize your workflow inside lists.Thank you for supporting the journalism that our community needs!
For unlimited access to the best local, national, and international news and much more, try an All Access Digital subscription:
We hope you have enjoyed your trial! To continue reading, we recommend our Read Now Pay Later membership. Simply add a form of payment and pay only 27¢ per article.
*Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99/month begins after first year.
*Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99/month begins after first year.
*Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99/month begins after first year.
*Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99/month begins after first year.
Thank you for supporting the journalism that our community needs!
For unlimited access to the best local, national, and international news and much more, try an All Access Digital subscription:
We hope you have enjoyed your trial! To continue reading, we recommend our Read Now Pay Later membership. Simply add a form of payment and pay only 27¢ per article.
Thank you for supporting the journalism that our community needs!
For unlimited access to the best local, national, and international news and much more, try an All Access Digital subscription:
We hope you have enjoyed your trial! To continue reading, we recommend our Read Now Pay Later membership. Simply add a form of payment and pay only 27¢ per article.
With all due respect to the downtown dwellers, the freakout is premature. Obtaining a variance for a project this ambitious is just the first and easiest step in a process that will only become way more difficult from here on in.
Opponents of the proposal -- chiefly, existing Waterfront Drive, Exchange District and South Point Douglas residents -- condemned the decision as being out of whack with the character of the area.
Earlier this week, city council's downtown committee upheld a zoning variance that would let a tower rise on the site of the historic James Avenue Pumping Station and incorporate the heritage structure's 107-year-old gears and engines into a "machine garden" at its base.
No matter where you stand on the proposal to build a 24-storey apartment tower on Waterfront Drive, it's time to stop worrying and start chilling out.
Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 10/1/2014 (1873 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/1/2014 (1873 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
No matter where you stand on the proposal to build a 24-storey apartment tower on Waterfront Drive, it's time to stop worrying and start chilling out.
Earlier this week, city council's downtown committee upheld a zoning variance that would let a tower rise on the site of the historic James Avenue Pumping Station and incorporate the heritage structure's 107-year-old gears and engines into a "machine garden" at its base.
The proposed SkyCity Centre. (Artist's rendering)
Opponents of the proposal — chiefly, existing Waterfront Drive, Exchange District and South Point Douglas residents — condemned the decision as being out of whack with the character of the area.
With all due respect to the downtown dwellers, the freakout is premature. Obtaining a variance for a project this ambitious is just the first and easiest step in a process that will only become way more difficult from here on in.
And with all due respect to the tower's proponents, this project doesn't appear financially feasible. And that's just a very nice way of saying it has about as much chance of ever happening as Latvia's hockey team winning Olympic gold in Sochi.
Five years ago this month, city council's downtown committee upheld a zoning variance for another audacious proposal: a 16-storey, ultra-modern tower that would have risen on Assiniboine Avenue land once occupied by Restaurant Dubrovnik.
At the time, residents of existing Broadway-Assiniboine apartments complained the proposed tower was out of scale with the neighbourhood. But four members of council unanimously rejected their appeal.
The proposed building, envisioned by the late architect Ernie Walter, would have had 300 trees within a glass-enclosed courtyard, geothermal heating, a sushi bar, a plastic-surgery clinic, retail stores, an underground parking system capable of "self-storing" 168 cars and a vendor-friendly riverfront plaza, accessible to the public.
When asked why they approved such an ambitious plan, one of the downtown-committee councillors confided there was no actual risk, because "this thing will never happen."
Crystal Developers' Heritage Landing is being built on Assiniboine Avenue. (Artist's rendering)
The councillor's point: A zoning variance is just a zoning variance. The truly difficult aspects of building a tower come later.
They include coming up with a design that actually works, a business plan that guarantees a profit, a development plan the city can live with and most of all, finding money to actually make it all happen.
The Walter-designed Assiniboine proposal evaporated only months after the variance was approved. A subsequent plan to build a taller but more conventional tower — D Condos — is going ahead in its place. Developer Karampaul Sandhu has just applied for the permits to begin construction.
Casting a skeptical eye toward the James Avenue Pumping Station, it will be very difficult for proponents Sotirios Kotoulas and Peter Anadranistakis to obtain the $70 million they need to build a tower on the site, let alone convince downtown development agency CentreVenture to part with a Grade II heritage structure in the first place.
Want to get a head start on your day? Get the day’s breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every morning.
Before CentreVenture signs off on the plan, the proponents must hammer out a development agreement that would spell out precisely how the unique engines in the station would be preserved within the "machine garden," confirm the presence of a grocery store and show how all this makes financial sense.
WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Longboat Development Corporation's Alt hotel across from the MTS Centre is under construction. (Artist's rendering)
The project doesn't sound feasible if rents really are only going to be $1,300 a month for a one-bedroom apartment. Rents might have to wind up in the $2,000-a-month range to generate the return required to justify a $70-million construction budget, even if the city contributes millions in heritage-restoration funds and a financier is willing to back the project.
That, too, seems unlikely. The James Avenue proposal appears even more complicated than a stalled Creswin Properties plan to build a tower near Portage and Main. If a developer as experienced as David Asper couldn't find a way to build a 27-storey hotel-and-condo tower on a vacant plot of land near the heart of the city's financial district, how can less experienced developers be expected to finance a similar-sized tower that incorporates a heritage museum into its base?
It's not impossible to build towers in downtown Winnipeg. As you read these words, Crystal Developers' Heritage Landing is going up on Assiniboine Avenue, Longboat Development's Alt hotel is under construction on Donald Street and both D Condos on Assiniboine and Longboat's Glasshouse on Hargrave Street are not far behind.
Even if Kotoulas and Anadranistakis are successful on James Avenue, it will take several years and plenty of scrutiny before they can proceed. Until then, haters and proponents of the pumping station proposal ought to take a deep breath and relax.
bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca
More ImagesAs the first screens and videos were released of the upcoming EA Sports NHL title, I obviously started to pay attention to the ice graphics to see how realistic they were. Given that the arena's so far have looked amazingly accurate, I imagined that the center ice designs would be equally authentic. It's early on and some photos/videos could be earlier builds but often these early issues end up in final product. It is not my intent to run down EA or their game in this article, but simply bring attention to these inaccuracies so that perhaps they will notice and correct them so that we end up with as many authentic ices as possible. Lets get started.- Looks great!- Looks great!So far it is hard to see much but from the screen shot EA released, I cannot see any problems.This is a bit odd... The Oilers have no arena name on ice, yet the Rexall Arena logos are under the scoreboard and on the left wall. Last year the arena sponsor, Rexall, got a new logo. My only thought is that the wordmark around center ice is going to change and Rexall requested that they do not put the text in. At any rate, such an authentic arena having no text at center ice is quite a bummer, but lets hope this gets fixed somehow!- Looks great!The red line has been updated. All this ice needs is the proper Bell Centre font.Looks great!- Looks great!- Looks great!Another solid red line where it shouldn't be, but isn't it nice to see an actual arena name on the ice at San Jose?Still need to work on the arena wordmark a bit. 'Scottrade' should be in purple and 'Center' in gray.I will update this page as we see more center ice designs from the game.EXCLUSIVE:
Republican Party officials say they will try next month to pass a resolution accusing President Bush and congressional Republican leaders of embracing “socialism,” underscoring deep dissension within the party at the end of Mr. Bush’s administration.
Those pushing the resolution, which will come before the Republican National Committee at its January meeting, say elected leaders need to be reminded of core principles. They said the RNC must take the dramatic step of wading into policy debates, which traditionally have been left to lawmakers.
“We can’t be a party of small government, free markets and low taxes while supporting bailouts and nationalizing industries, which lead to big government, socialism and high taxes at the expense of individual liberty and freedoms,” said Solomon Yue, an Oregon member and co-sponsor of a resolution that criticizes the U.S. government bailouts of the financial and auto industries. Republican National Committee Vice Chairman James Bopp Jr. wrote the resolution and asked the rest of the 168 voting members to sign it.
“The resolution also opposes President-elect Obama’s proposed public works program and supports conservative alternatives,” while encouraging the RNC “to engage in vigorous public policy debates consistent with our party platform,” said Mr. Bopp, a leading attorney for pro-life groups who has also challenged the campaign finance legislation that Mr. Bush signed.
See related story: Jeb Bush Senate bid a GOP remedy?
If enacted, the resolution would put the party on record opposing the $700 billion bailout of the financial sector, which passed Congress with Republican support and was signed by Mr. Bush, and opposing the bailout of the auto industry. The auto bailout bill was blocked by Senate Republicans, but Mr. Bush then reversed course and announced that he would use financial bailout money to aid the auto manufacturers.
The RNC usually plays a policy role only every four years when it frames the national party platform, which typically is forgotten quickly.
In 2006, some party members presented a resolution challenging Mr. Bush’s plan to legalize illegal immigrants and enact a guest-worker program. Mr. Bush’s lieutenants fought back, arguing that the party should not tie the president’s hands on a policy issue, and the RNC capitulated, passing an alternate White House-backed resolution instead.
This time, the backers of the new resolution say they will not be deterred by a fight, and say they have the numbers to pull off this rebellion.
“We have enough co-sponsors to take this to the RNC floor” at the party’s Jan. 28-31 annual winter meeting in Washington, Mr. Bopp said. “I will take it to the Resolutions Committee, but I intend to press this issue to the floor for decision.”
North Dakota Republican Party Chairman Gary Emineth said it’s time for the RNC to end the disconnect between what the party platform says and what elected Republicans do.
“It is time the party gets involved in policy issues and forces candidates to respond to the platform,” Mr. Emineth said. “Frankly the way we view the platform is a joke. We work hard to drive our principles into the platform, then candidates ignore it.”
“If the party doesn’t move in this direction, we will continue to be irrelevant. Whoever has the larger star power will continue to win, and what they stand for and believe will become less relevant,” Mr. Emineth said.
House Minority Leader John A. Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, both of whom voted for the financial bailout but opposed the auto bailout, declined to comment.
White House spokesman Tony Fratto defended the Bush administration’s actions, saying, “We understand the opposition to using tax dollars to support private businesses we also oppose using tax dollars to support private businesses. But this was the necessary and responsible thing to do to prevent a collapse of the American economy.”
Several RNC members including some of Mr. Bopp’s fellow conservatives are not pleased with the idea of having it make policy instead of simply minding the campaign fundraising store.
Ron Nehring, chairman of the California Republican Party, said the party also can’t be seen endorsing a do-nothing approach.
“We have to be careful not to confuse passing resolutions for action, or creating a situation where people interpret the lack of some resolution as an excuse for inaction on an important issue,” he said.
The resolution says: “WHEREAS, the Bank Bailout Bill effectively nationalized the Nation’s banking system, giving the United States non-voting warrants from participating financial institutions, and moving our free market based economy another dangerous step closer toward socialism; and WHEREAS, what was needed, and is still needed, to fix the banking industry is not a bailout, but rather a commitment to fiscal responsibility.”
The financial sector bailout passed the House by a vote of 263-171 with 91 Republicans backing it, and passed the Senate by a 74-25 vote with 34 Republicans in favor. The auto bailout passed the House by a 237-170 vote with 32 Republicans supporting it, but was blocked by a Republican-led filibuster in the Senate, with just 10 Republicans voting to advance the bill.
The RNC’s sole job historically has been to raise money for candidates and to pass the party line down the food chain to state and local leaders. Policy has been set by the party’s congressional leaders and, when a Republican sits in the White House, by the president.
The same has been true for the Democratic National Committee.
The Bopp-Yue vanguard say they are determined to change that.
“For the past eight years, the RNC has been the political outreach of the White House,” said Arizona Republican Party Chairman Randy Pullen, another resolution co-sponsor who led the 2006 immigration fight and who opposed Mr. Bush’s “economic policies promoting the ‘ownership society’ because they would eventually lead to the financial meltdown we are currently experiencing.”
“It is now time for the RNC to assert itself in terms of ideas and political philosophy,” Mr. Pullen added. “If we don’t do it now, when will we?”
Mr. Bopp, a social conservative who has served as counsel to pro-life groups, said, “We must stand for and publicly advocate our conservative principles as a party 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days of the year.”
The RNC revolutionaries leave no doubt they mean to turn the committee into policy-producing and enforcing machine.
“In the long run, we want to see this committee play an active philosophical-policy leadership role for the national GOP,” Mr. Yue said.
But it remains unclear whether the rules or the machinery exist for enforcing such a resolution on Republican elected officials.
Jon Ward contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.A “buck wild” exterior didn’t stop neighbors on the streets from seeing Eddie “Tennessee” Tate as a helpful, industrious neighbor. Tate was one of two people killed in a shooting Sunday night on 16th and Shotwell streets. He was 51 years old.
Tate had lived on the streets of the city for decades and was well known for his compassion and big heart, according to his friends. They described him as a fast talker with a southern drawl, a country boy with a city twist. He had big front teeth with a gap in the middle, and rode around on a tiny motorized bike.
“He was always working on stuff,” said Alex Richardson, the so-called mayor of the 16th Street encampment where nearly a dozen tents and boxes have been set up for around six months. “He was a hard worker.”
He would repair things – bikes, flashlights – and help people build little box homes made of wood and other street scores.
Tate’s own box stood out in the mix. It was covered in wall paper printed to look like a brick wall, a Cubist collage of sorts.
Another street neighbor, Ana, said she was supposed to be getting help from Tate on Sunday night to build herself a box like his. Instead, she said, she cried herself to sleep and then woke up to someone asking her if news of his death were true.
“[He was a] knight in shining armor who rode around on a little bike,” Ana said. “It is scary to think that there is someone out there who is so heartless they could kill someone with such a big heart.”
Tate’s ‘brick’ box was gone as of Monday morning. All that remained were blood stains and some left over clutter.
A plywood board leaned against a fence with Tate’s nickname “Tennessee” written on it. Below his name, someone had written “5150” – shorthand for an involuntary psychiatric hold, and also a reference to the chaos of life on the streets.
“He was like the Duke. Like John Wayne,” said one neighbor Markael Raybon, who goes by Kaels.
Wesley, an older man with a pale face and yellow wispy hair who lives around the corner in a tent on Harrison Street, said he has known Tate since the 1980s.
One time Wesley saw Tate fight nine guys in a brawl that lasted 25 minutes. It started at the salad bar in Carl’s Jr at the Civic Center and ended at the General Assistance office on 9th and Mission streets. Tate emerged as the victor, said Wesley.
“He said what he meant and did what he said,” said Wesley. “And he had no qualms about beating your ass if you didn’t believe him.”
ET, a woman with blond hair |
cheating. The idea that voluntarily purchasing a product at the offered price could constitute theft and cheating is simply bizarre.
Cultural Benefits
When scalpers buy up Christmas toys and fail to resell them, there are additional benefits which extend beyond economics and into culture. There is an enormous opportunity cost involved with the holiday shopping season, as people spend money they do not have on items they do not need, then spend even more money on getting out of debt. One way of preventing this is for attempted scalpers to raise prices and thus reduce demand. This will cause people who are on the margin of shopping versus not shopping to reconsider in favor of the latter. Those who make one reconsideration are more likely to make other, related reconsiderations, so people who cease engaging in holiday consumerism may come to some deeper personal or spiritual understanding, or at least develop more concerns beyond immediate gratification. Although a few grinch bots may play a minmal role in the grand scheme, any lowering of time preference coupled with greater focus on the virtues embodied in Christmas traditions would be a cultural improvement.
Conclusion
The attacks on the grinch bots are understandable; they are an obvious target for the economically illiterate, and going after them makes excellent political hay for a senator looking to expand the state’s regulatory powers. Which of these best describes Schumer is debatable, but the above analysis clearly demonstrates that scalpers in general and these computer programs in particular should be praised rather than denounced.
Support The Zeroth Position on Patreon!
Like this: Like Loading...DANI ALVES will fly in for his Manchester City medical early next week and go straight into pre-season training.
The former Barcelona full-back, 34, has agreed a two-year deal at the Etihad which will reunite him with boss Pep Guardiola after a short spell with Italian champions Juventus.
Getty Images 6 Dani Alves is set to become a Manchester City player next week
PA:Press Association 6 The right-back is available on a free transfer after leaving Juventus
The completion of the move was put on hold to allow Brazilian Alves to attend the wedding of pal Lionel Messi and have a holiday.
City report back on Monday and begin a tour of America a week later.
Alves spent four years working alongside Guardiola at Barcelona and the pair enjoyed plenty of success together.
The veteran won three La Ligas and two Champions Leagues under the Spaniard’s guidance.
And Alves has been unable to resist the lure of working with Guardiola for the second time in his career.
City have already made two signings in playmaker Bernardo Silva and goalkeeper Ederson.
AP:Associated Press 6 The chance to work with Pep Guardiola was too good to turn down
Getty Images 6 The pair won plenty of trophies together at Barcelona
But Alves’ arrival is expected to herald a new wave of faces, with reports in Chile claiming Alexis Sanchez has decided to leave Arsenal for the Etihad.
Talks are still ongoing for Tottenham ace Kyle Walker, while Monaco favourite Benjamin Mendy is set to arrive to strengthen the left-back position.
Reuters 6 Kyle Walker is still expected to join from TottenhamHouse 2018: Less Than a Year Out, Race for Control Is a Coin Flip
25 ratings changes, mostly in Democrats’ favor
Kyle Kondik, Managing Editor, Sabato's Crystal Ball
In the aftermath of the 2014 midterm election, when the party that didn’t hold the White House (the Republicans) gained ground in the House for the 36th time in 39 midterms since the Civil War, I wrote the following in the Center for Politics’ postmortem on the election, The Surge:
Practically speaking, though, House Democrats might have to root for the other party in the 2016 presidential race. Why? Because given what we know about midterm elections almost always going against the president’s party in the House, perhaps the next best chance for the Democrats to win the House will be in 2018 — if a Republican is in the White House.
We didn’t see many House Democrats rooting for Donald Trump to win the general election in 2016, but the simple fact of his election made a Democratic House takeover much more likely in the 2018 midterm just because of the longstanding trend for the presidential party to lose ground in the House. The electorate often uses the midterm to put a check on the executive, particularly if that executive is unpopular. “The midterm election pattern,” writes Andrew Busch in his study of midterm elections, Horses in Midstream, “virtually guarantees that the president’s party will be hurt at regular intervals. The extent of that damage may vary considerably, but the fact of it rarely does.”
We know we’ve been a broken record on the point of the presidential party midterm penalty, but it is so well-established that it merits frequent mention. Obviously, the world changed considerably when President Trump won the White House, and the political burden of holding the presidency shifted from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party when that happened.
We’re a little bit past the halfway point between the last national election, in 2016, and the next national election, in 2018. In that time, the Democrats’ chances of winning the House have only seemed to rise, based on a number of indicators. Those are:
— The president’s approval rating is consistently at or under 40%, which is historically weak for a new president and typically is quite important in midterm outcomes, with a lower number meaning bigger trouble for the president’s party. Yes, there is time for Trump’s approval to improve. However, since a brief inauguration “honeymoon,” the president has shown little ability to push his approval much higher than the low 40s.
— Generic ballot polls asking voters which party they plan to support in their local House race (or which party they want to win control of the House next year) have consistently shown healthy Democratic leads, and polling averages place the Democratic advantage at around seven to 10 points. That’s around where Alan Abramowitz’s House projection model suggests Democrats need to be around Labor Day next year to feel good about a House takeover. Yes, there is time for the Republicans to improve on their deficit, but there are a couple of reasons to be skeptical that the GOP can cut into this Democratic lead significantly. The first is that, according to research by FiveThirtyEight’s Harry Enten, early generic ballot polling can be quite predictive, and the second is that, according to the Weekly Standard’s David Byler, the president’s low approval rating may impose something of a cap on the GOP standing in the House generic ballot.
— Special election results so far, along with the state elections in New Jersey and Virginia last month, generally (though not universally) point to the kind of Democratic overperformance one might expect in a world with an unpopular Republican president.
— While Democrats do not have quality challengers in every contestable seat, they do have an impressively large number of candidates covering many competitive districts (as well as some districts that are not competitive on paper but could become so in a wave environment).
— Although there has not yet been a mass exodus from Republican swing seats, several incumbents in vulnerable seats are calling it quits: Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R, FL-27), Dave Trott (R, MI-11), Frank LoBiondo (R, NJ-2), Charlie Dent (R, PA-15), and Dave Reichert (R, WA-8) are all retiring, and their retirements have made their seats much more vulnerable to Democratic takeover. Additionally, Rep. Martha McSally (R, AZ-2) appears very likely to run for Senate, removing another quality incumbent from a vulnerable swing seat. Democrats are already clear favorites to win FL-27, the most Democratic seat held by any Republican House member, and they just snagged a strong recruit in NJ-2 in state Sen. Jeff Van Drew (D), someone Democrats have wanted to run for years. That race is still a Toss-up but immediately becomes one of the top Democratic pickup opportunities in the country.
Put it all together, and the battle for control of the House looks something like a coin flip, with Democrats having a very real chance to net the 24 seats they need to win a majority. In fact, the big-picture indicators might suggest the Democrats should be favored to win the House. But we’re not willing to go that far, at least at the moment, for a few reasons:
— The first is a usual but important caveat: The election is more than 11 months away and there’s time for things to change, even though one can just as easily imagine things getting worse for the GOP as opposed to better. Republicans hope that the tax plan working its way through Congress will inspire their base and improve their prospects for next year. The plan is unpopular at the moment, although when and if it passes, it could see a bump in favorability. Perhaps unsurprisingly, operatives on both sides of the House battle believe a tax bill could be litigated in the public sphere in their side’s favor. So this is still a question mark, although it may be that any tax bill with Trump’s signature is unpopular simply because he is unpopular.
— Even in a bad environment, the party losing seats overall almost always wins at least a seat or two from the other side (Democrats in 2006 were an exception, though). So history suggests Democrats probably will have to win more than just 24 Republican-held seats to capture the House next year, although likely just a few more given the small number of true Republican targets. Still, three of the 12 Democratic-held seats won by President Trump last year — MN-1, NH-1, and NV-3 — are open, giving the Republicans some opportunities to play offense, and they may be able to make a credible run at a few Democratic incumbents (more on that below). In a House battle that could go right down to the wire, a GOP pickup or two could save the majority.
— The economy seems to be doing decently. Midterms are not always about the economy (2006 and 2014 weren’t, for instance), but a bad economy is a common wave-maker, historically, and the economy is not bad, at least at the moment. Republicans may not benefit from a good economy in a midterm — a presidential election is a different story, but that’s something for a 2020 discussion — but if there’s not a downturn, Republicans at least wouldn’t have to deal with that on top of their other problems.
— Beneath the surface of the Democrats’ very impressive showing in Virginia earlier this month was that their gains in the state House of Delegates were almost exclusively limited to Hillary Clinton-won seats held by Republicans. But winning the vast majority of Clinton-won, GOP-held House seats won’t be enough (there are just 23 of them). The Democrats will almost certainly have to win several Trump-won seats to win the House; they certainly could, but we wouldn’t take the Virginia results as an indicator that they will (some of the special elections since Trump’s win last November provide more positive signs for Democrats in Trump-won districts, but turnout in those races can be far below even a midterm level).
— Some Democrats have been arguing for years that the House map is so bad for them thanks to GOP gerrymanders in many key states that it will be hard for them to win it until the next congressional map is drawn after the 2020 census. Maybe they’re right.
— Despite the aforementioned retirements, Republicans have some of their best incumbents digging in to defend some of their most vulnerable districts: Reps. Mike Coffman (R, CO-6), Carlos Curbelo (R, FL-26), Barbara Comstock (R, VA-10), and others. If the wave is big enough, there may be nothing these members could do to survive, but they all should run strong, well-funded races and won’t be easy for Democrats to defeat.
So the trend is undeniably Democratic in nature, but its scope cannot be determined with any precision now. In the meantime, we have 25 ratings changes to announce this week. The lion’s share of them move races in a more Democratic direction.
Table 1: Crystal Ball House ratings changes
Table 2: Crystal Ball House ratings
There are a lot of changes, so let’s address them briefly by category:
Leans Republican to Toss-up (2): Reps. John Faso (R, NY-19) and Claudia Tenney (R, NY-22)
First-term members Faso and Tenney represent swing territory in upstate New York that moved in favor of President Trump in 2016, but both should have credible opposition: Assemblyman Anthony Brindisi (D) is Tenney’s very likely opponent, while a huge field is angling for the right to take on Faso. Here’s a good test for Democrats on terrain that, at least at the presidential level, was not favorable last year. Still, Democrats held versions of these districts prior to the 2010 GOP wave.
When we say Democrats need to win some Trump-won seats to capture the House, these are some of the ones we’re talking about. GOP holds in both seats would be a lousy sign for Democratic prospects in both 2018 and moving forward.
Likely Republican to Leans Republican (8): Reps. Ed Royce (R, CA-39), Mimi Walters (R, CA-45), Mike Bost (R, IL-12), Peter Roskam (R, IL-6), John Culberson (R, TX-7), Mia Love (R, UT-4), and Scott Taylor (R, VA-2), as well as KS-2, an open seat held by retiring Rep. Lynn Jenkins (R)
Royce, Walters, Roskam, and Culberson are all incumbents in districts Clinton won, and Democrats are lining up to run against them. The first three are taking their races quite seriously and are raising a lot of money; the fourth, Culberson, is not raising much money at all, although Republican sources indicate he is coming around to the fact that he is a target after holding down a very safe seat for a long time: No Republican wants to be the next John Mica, the long-serving Republican who lost FL-7 last year after mid-decade redistricting caught him off guard, and Republicans are using his example as a way to try to whip some members into shape.
These members did not face a surprise remap, but the ground underneath them shifted left last year and may continue to do so with Trump in the White House. All of these districts are in suburban areas that are similar to the places in Virginia that swung hard against Trump in 2016 and then swung even harder to Gov.-elect Ralph Northam (D) in the recent gubernatorial race, and the environment might make things difficult for them next year almost no matter what they do.
Trump carried a fifth district listed here, Taylor’s Hampton Roads-based VA-2, but Northam flipped it earlier this month and it is perpetual swing territory. Democrats have struggled with recruiting in this district the past couple of cycles, but they hope Elaine Luria (D), a retired naval commander, can run a good race in this military-heavy district (Taylor, a retired Navy SEAL, has military bona fides as well and defeated incumbent Randy Forbes in a redistricting-driven GOP primary last year). Our ratings change here is more about the environment and trends in Virginia than about Luria’s likely candidacy specifically; as with all recent entrants into these races, we’ll have to wait and see how she performs.
The other three seats listed here are on redder turf, but they move because of potentially promising Democratic candidacies.
Bost holds a traditionally Democratic southern Illinois district that swung hard to Trump in 2016: The president carried the district by about 15 points after Barack Obama narrowly won it in 2012. Democrats are hopeful that St. Clair County State’s Attorney Brendan Kelly (D), who like the aforementioned Brindisi (NY-22) and Van Drew (NJ-2) had resisted national Democratic entreaties to run for Congress in previous cycles, might put this seat back in play after Bost beat a one-term Democratic incumbent by a bigger-than-expected margin in 2014. Paul Davis (D) ran a strong gubernatorial campaign but lost to unpopular Gov. Sam Brownback (R-KS) in 2014, so now he’s trying to win a House seat in KS-2, a Republican district he carried in his gubernatorial bid (but that Trump easily won by nearly 20 points in 2016). Democrats briefly held a prior version of this seat from 2007-2009 after former Rep. Nancy Boyda (D) won it in a 2006 fluke, but the now-retiring Rep. Jenkins beat Boyda in a rare Republican bright spot in 2008.
Finally, Love lost and then won close races in 2012 and 2014, respectively, and she improved her showing in 2016 despite the GOP district’s antipathy for Trump. Democrats are hopeful that Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams (D), a relatively recent entrant, can push Love in a place where a GOP electorate might be open to the argument that Trump could use a check in Congress. Former longtime Rep. Jim Matheson (D) represented this district before retiring in advance of the 2014 election.
Safe Republican to Likely Republican (7): Reps. Ted Budd (R, NC-13), George Holding (R, NC-2), Robert Pittenger (R, NC-9), Dan Donovan (R, NY-11), Dave Brat (R, VA-7), and Glenn Grothman (R, WI-6), as well as the open TX-21, held by retiring Rep. Lamar Smith (R)
Even after a court-ordered remap that hypothetically could have eaten into the 10-3 Republican margin in North Carolina’s congressional delegation, Democrats made up no ground in 2016 as the Republican state legislature employed another skillful gerrymander. But Democrats argue that they may have a shot at several Tar Heel State seats this cycle, and there is some potential for them to compete there.
Of the three seats we’re now listing, Pittenger is probably most vulnerable, because he faces both a credible primary challenger — former pastor Mark Harris, who lost to Pittenger by just 134 votes last year — and because Marine veteran Dan McCready (D) is raising a lot of money for a general election (he more than doubled Pittenger’s total in the third quarter). But keep an eye on Holding and Budd as well. Trump won all three of these districts by around 10 points last year, although Gov. Roy Cooper (D) did almost carry Budd’s district in his narrow statewide victory in 2016.
On Staten Island, Donovan faces the annoyance of having to face ex-con, ex-Rep. Michael Grimm (R) in a primary as well as a Democratic opponent; the national forces like Max Rose (D), who like so many other Democratic recruits this cycle is a veteran.
Grothman is worried about how vulnerable he might be, and he is being outraised by a member of Wisconsin’s wealthy Kohl family, though Grothman’s district is very Republican and he might be just trying to get his donors interested. But we’ll take him at his word for now and add him to our list. Brat could face a credible opponent and his district is relatively affluent and possesses high levels of educational attainment, two telling indicators of Trump antipathy. Finally, among several open seats in Texas, one is somewhat intriguing: TX-21, which links suburbs of Austin and San Antonio and where Smith is retiring. Joseph Kopser (D), another Democratic veteran, was raising decent money there even before Smith retired, and like several other Texas districts, Trump’s 2016 margin (10 points) in TX-21 was considerably worse than Mitt Romney’s in 2012 (22 points). Open seats held by the presidential party always merit a little extra attention, although the other open Texas Republican seats are even redder than this one and don’t merit a move from Safe Republican.
There are now 25 seats in the Likely Republican column. Most of these seats won’t turn into truly competitive general election contests unless there’s a Democratic tsunami next year. But to just win the House with a narrow majority, Democrats probably don’t need to win more than a few of these seats. Let’s watch and see how many of these races eventually end up in more competitive categories, and how many never really activate for the general election.
Arguably, the long Likely Republican column could still get longer. There are about a dozen additional Republican-held seats we considered adding to this list in addition to the ones we’ve listed already. That includes a few senior members whose names readers would recognize. But we need to see more before truly entertaining the idea that those districts even belong on our competitive board.
Likely Republican to Safe Republican (2): Reps. Don Young (R, AK-AL) and Mario Diaz-Balart (R, FL-25)
As we cycle more races onto the competitive board from Safe to Likely Republican, it makes some sense to cycle out a couple of Republican-held seats with long-time incumbents where there’s not much going on at the moment. Both of these seats qualify.
Leans Democratic to Toss-up (1): Rep. Rick Nolan (D, MN-8)
Nolan, who won two very narrow victories over Stewart Mills (R) in 2014 and 2016, is a cagey incumbent, but Minnesota’s Iron Range is trending Republican, and the GOP believes it has a strong challenger in St. Louis County Commissioner Pete Stauber, who may be a better fit for the district than the wealthy Mills even though he will have less money to spend. Nolan, who himself is not a dynamic fundraiser, is probably the most vulnerable Democratic incumbent in the country although knocking him out will still be no easy task.
Safe Democratic to Likely Democratic (1): AZ-9 Open, held by Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, a Senate candidate
Democrats should not have that much trouble holding AZ-9, which is now an open seat after Sinema decided to run statewide for the open Arizona Senate seat held by retiring Sen. Jeff Flake (R). A swing seat when drawn after the 2010 census, the district is trending blue (Clinton won it by 16 after Obama carried it by only four in 2012), but Republicans are holding out hope that their preferred candidate, retired Navy doctor Steve Ferrara (R), can put it in play. Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton (D) is the likely Democratic nominee; he should be able to hold the seat in what is very likely to be a Democratic-leaning midterm, but the fact that the seat is open adds a little bit of uncertainty.
Likely Democratic to Safe Democratic (2): Reps. Jim Costa (D, CA-16) and Brad Schneider (D, IL-10)
Costa holds a very Democratic district where turnout sometimes is weak enough to put him in danger (he almost lost in what would have been a shocking 2014 upset), but his seat isn’t on either party’s radar and with Trump as president, he should be fine. The same goes for Schneider, who won his rubber match with former Rep. Robert Dold (R) last year (Schneider beat Dold in 2012 and 2016, and Dold beat Schneider in 2014). We just don’t think a district Clinton won by nearly 30 points last year is gettable for Republicans with Trump in the White House.
Leans Democratic to Likely Democratic (2): Reps. Charlie Crist (D, FL-13) and Josh Gottheimer (D, NJ-5)
Both Crist and Gottheimer represent swingy districts, but these freshmen members are also raising boatloads of cash and benefit from the environment. Crist does not have a viable challenger at the moment; frequent candidate Steve Lonegan (R), a former U.S. Senate nominee, could push Gottheimer but his timing might be off in a GOP-leaning district that nonetheless seems to be inching left in the Trump era. Primarily, though, we’re moving these seats because of Trump; they’d be more like Toss-ups if Clinton were president.
Conclusion
There’s still a long way to go, and some future members of Congress may not even be announced candidates yet. Additionally, there are going to be more retirements, potentially many more, which can drastically change race ratings in a flash. It’s clear that we are in the midst of an important cultural moment with the growing flood of credible sexual misconduct charges against powerful men. A safe bet is that there will be more shoes to drop in Congress, and fresh allegations could damage incumbents or force their retirements or resignations. Finally, there’s also the possibility that the actual congressional maps could change in some states: for instance, Pennsylvania’s Republican gerrymander is being challenged in both state and federal court.
Overall, our ratings list 224 seats safe, likely, or leaning to the Republicans, 191 seats safe, likely, or leaning to the Democrats, and 20 Toss-ups. For the sake of argument, let’s say the Democrats can win about two-thirds of the Toss-ups (13 of 20), and otherwise let’s assume all the other seats go to the party they currently at least lean to. That would net the Democrats 10 seats, close to halfway to the 24 seats they need to get the majority. So Democrats need to push more seats into the more competitive categories, but as our ratings changes indicate, the playing field is growing.The Stanford Woods Institute has awarded millions of dollars in Environmental Venture Projects (EVP) seed grants to interdisciplinary faculty research teams from all seven of Stanford’s schools and 34 of its departments. These innovative research projects focus on finding solutions to challenges ranging from the protection of endangered species in California to the delivery of clean drinking water in Africa. EVPs have led to development of natural resources valuation software and biodegradable building materials.
The Environmental Venture Projects (EVP) program is now OPEN for Applications for 2019 grants.
2019 EVP Program Priorities, Guidelines, LOI Instructions and Budget Guide.
The Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment (Stanford Woods) EVP program provides seed grants, from $5,000 up to $200,000 over two years, for interdisciplinary research projects that seek to identify solutions to pressing problems of the environment and sustainability. Projects are evaluated for their intellectual merit, potential to solve environmental problems, the interdisciplinary strength of the team and the project's potential to secure additional funding in the future.
**NEW** SMALL GRANTS FROM $5,000 TO $50,000 ARE AVAILABLE
The EVP Program will consider applications in two categories:
EVP Small Grants with support from $5,000 up to $50,000 for discrete research needs and efforts to define and scope research projects at preliminary stages of development, in line with the EVP program priorities and guidelines below. *Note: Requests may be for less than $50,000, and PIs are encouraged to be judicious in their requests for EVP Small Grant funds. These EVP Small Grants are treated as department research grants, rather than sponsored research. PIs who receive an EVP Small Grant to develop a project remain eligible to apply in a future round for an EVP Grant for that project.
with support from $5,000 up to $50,000 for discrete research needs and efforts to define and scope research projects at preliminary stages of development, in line with the EVP program priorities and guidelines below. *Note: Requests may be for less than $50,000, and PIs are encouraged to be judicious in their requests for EVP Small Grant funds. These EVP Small Grants are treated as department research grants, rather than sponsored research. PIs who receive an EVP Small Grant to develop a project remain eligible to apply in a future round for an EVP Grant for that project.
EVP Grants with support from $10,000 up to $200,000 over two years for research projects per the EVP priorities and guidelines below. *Note: Requests may be for less than 200,000 and need not be for two years. PIs are encouraged to be judicious in their requests for EVP Grant funds. EVP Grants are treated as sponsored research.
Faculty members may only be Lead PI on one EVP application at a time, either for one EVP Small Grant or one EVP Grant, and not both. Likewise a faculty member may not apply for a Woods Institute EVP grant and an REIP grant in the same application cycle. Faculty members are also restricted from being the Lead PI on more than one active grant from the EVP Program or REIP Program. However, faculty may be the Lead PI on consecutive grants from the EVP program and/or REIP program. In the case of a consecutive award, a Lead PI applying for a new award in 2019 will need to have any existing, open grant award from either EVP or REIP set to close in 2019 and have the required financial and narrative reports of the current award submitted before the new award can begin.
PROGRAM PRIORITIES
The EVP program seeks projects that:
Are high-risk, transformative projects that have the potential to produce solutions to major global environmental challenges;
Represent new interdisciplinary collaborations among faculty who have not previously worked together, with a preference for scholarly communities that have not been active in the Stanford Woods Institute to date; and
Address cross-cutting issues that are relevant to the environment in general and/or address challenges within one or more of the Stanford Woods’ seven focal areas.
Examples of cross-cutting issues include: environmental ethics, cultural and humanistic influences, effective economic and incentive systems, environmental justice, political ecology, stewardship, risk perception and analysis, communication, mitigation and adaptation, responses to global changes, valuation, and interdisciplinary modeling.
Stanford Woods focal areas include: oceans, ecosystem services and conservation, public health, freshwater, climate, food security, and sustainable development.
PROGRAM GUIDELINES
Proposed projects should:
Represent one or more of the above program priorities;
Contribute towards a solution to a major global environmental challenge;
Demonstrate a clear strategy and pathway for connecting your research to an actual solution;
Involve PIs at Stanford from at least two separate disciplines (For assistance identifying possible co-investigators, please visit the Stanford Woods Institute’s faculty and researchers directory);
Document how the collaborative effort will be stronger than the sum of disciplinary parts; and
Have the potential for obtaining future support.
Full program guidelines and specific application instructions are available below.Brian Chilson
PECKERWOLF: Arkansas Times Musicians Showcase 2014 round one winners.
I'm a curmudgeon, who, after years of seeing shows constantly, pretty much quit four years ago. Like everyone who's retired from the scene, I have to fight thinking that everything was better back in the day. So it was with more than a little dread that I approached covering the opening night of the 2014 Arkansas Times Musicians Showcase (Will Stephenson, our newly hired Arts and Entertainment editor who penned the preview of this week's round, will begin shepherding coverage on Thursday).
As you can probably predict, I'm a dummy. All's well in Arkansas live music if the four bands that opened the Showcase are any indication. All played a variety of rock 'n' roll. All had at least one member with a beard. And all were engaging.
Opener The Fable and the Fury, from Searcy, did a brand of what judge Bryan Frazier called "indie mountaintop." In other words, mildly raucous riffage, martial drums and lots of harmonies. Just Stephen Neeper appreciated the spare use of a trombone. "Nice use of the horn," he said. "Not overplayed."
Several judges likened Fayetteville's Basement Brew to Ben Folds Five, but to my ears, they sounded more rambunctious, Southern version of Real Estate. Or like The Feelies covering The Band. "There's some magic here," guest judge Bill Solleder said of the self-described canoe rockers.
There were no Casio tones in The People's Republic of Casio Tones' set; just goofball lyrics ("Party in My Pants") set to tasty slabs of Southern grunge-pop. "This is the People's Republic of I dig the fuck out of these guys!" judge Neeper said. The bassist, in particular, drew praise from judges Stacie Mack ("The bass player has moves like Jagger") and John Miller ("I love the bass player's stage presence and 'funk face' ").
But in the end, the night belonged to hard-rock bruisers Peckerwolf, who were near unanimous winners with our judges. Queens of the Stone Age was a touchstone several judges mentioned, but Bryan Frazier said the Peckerwolf musicians didn't immediately remind him of anyone else, "but sound familiar." Neeper loved the "guitar riffs." As did Miller: "The right mix of riffs, beards and asscracks." Mack didn't like the band's name, but loved their energy and said lead singer and guitarist Ryker James Horn was "who Jack Black wants to be when he grows up." LM
Next up, performing at 9 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 6 at Stickyz:
The Fox Blossom Venture
The Fox Blossom Venture call Batesville home, though they're from all sorts of places — not only Arkansas (singer Aaron Farris and guitarist Jacob Lackey), but Maine (singer Emily Byrne), Texas (violinist Aaron Walton), Tennessee (bassist James Spahr), and Athens, Ga. (drummer Ethan Lindblom). It was in Batesville, though, that they first started playing together at a weekly chapel service at Lyon College, making good-natured country-folk with a barn-dance stomp and interludes for banjo, harmonica, and tasteful male-female vocal duets. Since leaving the church (literally, if not figuratively), they've toured the state and put a record together, "Autumn Leaves."
John Willis
Little Rock's John Willis dresses impeccably and makes baroque pop with lush, lounge-y harmonies and arrangements. He lists George Gershwin and Stevie Wonder as primary influences, though the result sounds more in line with someone like Randy Newman (or, OK, let's say Ben Folds): upbeat piano rock from a persona that is literate, coy, and casually self-deprecating. "I guess I'm an acquired taste," he sings, though on a song called "King of the Cocktail Party" (also his album's title). On songs like "The Ladder," he lures you in with easygoing, Tin Pan Alley moves and shocks with a vulnerable and a physically impressive falsetto.
Dead End Drive
Then things take a turn for the dark and tempestuous with alt-rock group Dead End Drive, the members of which have excellent movie-villain names like Rayzr Skinner and Rex Furry. Here you'll find downcast, Drop D riffs and post-grunge vocal rasp, shot through with anger and lines like "Tonight I'm gonna lose my mind." It's true, this is music to lose your mind to, or do awesome BMX tricks to — one or the other, or both. There's a video online of the group playing live on Fox 16's "Good Day Arkansas" last November. "We pretty much grew up together," they tell the host, and they look dazed, obviously nervous to be on TV. The host asks, "What drives you?" and front man Steven Zimmerebner shrugs and says, "I don't show emotion well." The host just lets that one go.
Bombay Harambee
Last on the bill is the best-named group of the night, Bombay Harambee, four Arkansas natives who met in college in Conway and have translated some of that city's bleak, forbidding desolation (I know it well) into austere and articulate post-punk in the vein of bands like Wire or Mission of Burma. Adherents of the sharp, one-note guitar solo and the well-timed, darkly ironic utterance (e.g. "I love you so much that I don't even know your address"), these guys will close out the night on a cold and raucous note. WS.From Software and Namco Bandai revealed new information about the player covenants coming to Dark Souls 2, explaining how players will invade and be summoned to each other's worlds for cooperative and competitive multiplayer.
Previously, Namco revealed the Way of Blue and Blue Sentinels, covenants that intertwine to send helpful blue phantoms to players — known as blue apostles — who have been invaded by dark spirits. Players who align themselves with the Blue Sentinels will automatically be summoned to the world of a Way of Blue player when they're in danger.
Today, the publisher detailed the Brotherhood of Blood, a covenant of "immortals haunted by blood." The Brotherhood's purpose is to sacrifice blood for the god Nahr Alma by invading the worlds of others. They appear as red phantoms in the game. It also announced the Heirs to the Sun, Dark Souls 2's version of the Warrior of the Sunlight covenant. The golden Heirs to the Sun are summoned to help those in need.
Finally, there's the Bell Keepers, said to be eternal guardians of twin bells that "symbolize the bond between two lovers who could never be united." They're represented by black spirits.
Screenshots of those covenants and players in their spirit forms can be seen in the gallery above.
On Facebook, Namco Bandai says there are "many other covenants" players can discover in Dark Souls 2. From Software's game is slated to come to PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on March 11, 2014, with a Windows PC version to follow.March 24, 7:30 | $15
Annex Theatre is proud to present the 2012 edition of THE ALL HOLIDAY PARTY!
Join us in celebrating 19 different holidays throughout the course of one preposterous evening of hilarity and debauchery at Annex Theatre! SEE! Punxsutawney Phil roam freely, spotting shadows everywhere he can! THRILL! to Cupid’s arrow and the wonders of Valentine’s Day speed weddings! WITNESS! the mad revels of the Maypole! CACKLE! with crazed wickedness as you enter the Halloween costume contest! SIT! on Santa’s lap and see what presents Santa’s little helpers bring you this year! TOAST! a brave new year at midnight! Cancel that major surgery, reschedule your wedding, and make sure that YOU are present for THE ALL HOLIDAY PARTY 2012!
From 7:30-12pm on March 24, we’ll celebrate 19 holidays in rapid succession! Bring costumes, props, and an attitude of general silliness as we cram a year’s worth of holiday celebration into one action packed evening!The controversial Bang With Friends app has returned to the App Store after a name makeover.
On iOS, Bang With Friends is now known as Down, and is described as an "anonymous, simple, fun way to find friends who are interested in you." To see if |
it together and started getting more into how the game dynamics impacted a season.
If you need further proof of how difficult the game can be, look no further than some of the players that have been medevac-ed in the past. Michael Skupin fell into the fire in Survivor: the Australian Outback. Russell Swan and Caleb Reynolds both got uncomfortably close to dying in their respective seasons. Those were two of the most terrifying, and realest, moments that Survivor has ever aired.
Just recently, Australian Survivor’s most recent winner, Jericho Malabonga, posted a before and after photo from his time on the island. The difference is drastic.
Granted, they play for 55 days on the Australian version, which is crazy by itself, but the amount of muscle and weight Jericho managed to lose is incredible. Jericho isn’t the only person to go through such a physical change.
Take Big Tom for example. In Survivor: Africa, Tom lasted almost the entirety of the game and lost nearly 80 pounds. It’s almost unthinkable that somebody could lose that much weight in less than 40 days. While Tom was certainly no stick, dropping in weight so quickly had to mess him up internally and make him feel incredibly weak. Africa was particularly harsh to all of the players because of the limited choices the players had for their diet.
We lived on a [wildlife] reserve, and there was no hunting. We had to eat just what we carried — and what we carried was a little bit of mush. It was terrible. [Coming back with the weight loss] everybody said, ‘Boy, you look nice!’ But I never felt good.
Going back for Survivor: All-Stars, Tom had managed to put back on most of the weight he had lost in Africa but he made another deep run into the game. It was less dramatic than the first time around but Big Tom managed to drop another 42 pounds his second time through the game, with slightly better living conditions.
Likewise, Rupert Boneham lost 45 and 50 pounds in Survivor: Pearl Islands, and All-Stars respectively. Big men tend to get the worst of it, but they aren’t the only people who’s body can change dramatically and dangerously. In Survivor: Marquesas, Kathy Vavrick-O’Brien lost 34 pounds in 38 days. She returned for All-Stars and lost another 36. As she claims herself, it left her stomach feeling terrible anytime she ate food that had any sort of fat. It took doctors and nutritionists to get her body feeling right again. Even Kelley Wentworth, an already petite woman, went through severe weight loss after Survivor: Cambodia.
While some players might have been happy with the weight loss, former Survivor doctor-in-residence, Adrian Cohen would not want people to go through this in real life and yet, the Survivor players go through it every season.
The Survivor diet is not one I’d recommend. It’s extreme, the food groups are poorly represented, and it doesn’t provide enough fiber. Players receive about a cup of rice or corn a day and as much fish and local produce as they can gather — which usually isn’t much. It’s about 1,000 calories a day. Because it’s TV, players ‘have a feeling of ‘they’re not going to let us starve, are they?’ Your metabolism takes a beating — it’s not a healthy way. If it were, I’d publish a book.
It isn’t simply the weight loss that castaways must watch out for, the elements provide danger too. Back when Survivor: the Amazon was airing, People had an interview with Cohen. He elaborated on the many things the players had to be on high alert for during their time in the jungle.
The biggest threat is from snake bites. There are a lot of them there, like the Bushmaster. We make it our practice to have antivenom on location and at the local city intensive care units. Also, the anacondas aren’t quite as animated as in the film [1997’s ”Anaconda”], which was shot in the same area, but they are to be feared nonetheless. Fleas, ticks, and flies are always a problem, particularly the mosquito, which carries malaria, Dengue fever, and yellow fever. And scorpions, centipedes, bees, and wasps are always wherever we put our contestants. All I can say is, check your shoes and your bed!
On some seasons, the downpour of rain can be a hazard. It can accelerate the dehydration process if a player spends too much time standing there, soaked from head to toe. It’s exactly what happened to Russell Swan on Survivor: Samoa when he collapsed during a challenge and came way too close to dying. Fortunately, that hasn’t happened to anybody in the American version but internationally, we can’t say the same.
The 13th season of Koh-Lanta, the French version of Survivor, had to be cancelled in 2013 after Gerald Babin died of cardiac arrest during the first day of filming. Babin was only 25 years old and in good physical condition. In Survivor: Conquering Asia-Philippines, the fourth season of Bulgaria’s Survivor franchise, Noncho Vodenicharov died of a heart attack on day 14. Get this… they didn’t even cancel the season and proceeded to later crown a winner! That’s unfathomable to me.
Even after the show, the contestants are from done with their physical issues. Putting on the weight that they have lost is necessary to regain some muscle. That can be hard when the body isn’t used to eating full meals, multiples time per day. It can cause some serious intestinal issues. Then, once that weight has been put on, it can become difficult to stop yourself from gorging on the bad foods you’ve been eating to regain some weight.
After Survivor: San Juan del Sur, winner Natalie Anderson went on a Krispy Kreme and Chik-Fil-A diet to put on some weight. She has said that she needed some help to eventually curve those habits and start eating some healthier foods again. The same can be said of both Josh Canfield and Reed Kelly who put on an additional 10 pounds from their starting weight. If they aren’t careful, Survivor players can easily tread into dangerous waters with weight issues.
On top of that, numerous players have discussed their issues with sleeping. Going multiple weeks sleeping on some bamboo on a beach can do a number to your body. Most players only get a handful of hours rest every night and come home extremely sleep deprived. They get into weird sleeping patterns and generally find it hard to get a good night’s rest.
In fact, many former contestants have reported that coming back home initially, they couldn’t even sleep in their bed. Most recently, Rick Nelson of Survivor: South Pacific, discussed this very issue with the panel at Rob Cesternino’s RHAP-con. He said that coming back home from his season, he asked his wife if they could sleep on the ground. He hadn’t experienced the comfort of a bed in so long (he was in a tent at Pondoresa), that it felt unnatural to him. These are the kind of issues, physically speaking, that we don’t get to see back at home.
That’s all we have to remember when watching at home. Survivor is a tough game. Both mentally and physically. We are so quick to judge these players on their every move, I do it myself every season, but it would be important to keep in mind the strain they are under. Some people make dumb decisions under far less intense circumstances so maybe some time, we should cut these people at least a bit of slack.
Despite 17 years on television, I will still encounter people who tell me that the show is fake. That these players all get catered meals three times a day and are whisked off to a hotel to sleep at night. To those people, I simply show them a picture of Russell Hantz on day one of Survivor: Samoa side-by-side with a picture of Russell Hantz at the end of Survivor: Heroes vs Villains.
If that isn’t enough to make them change their minds, they are unsalvageable.Dear Bernie,
Because I, more than anyone, understand the constant stress that comes with a modern political campaign, I wanted to reach out with some helpful tips. First, and this might be most important, to emerge as your party’s leader and then to defeat the Republicans, you'll have to listen to the people. Not a revelatory concept, I know, but you'd be amazed at how few politicians actually do it. I've learned that just listening can make all the difference.
Next, and this word is crucial: empathy. If you listen, but can't empathize—well, you're going to have a hard time implementing positive change. Now, while you're listening, and being empathetic, if someone wants to take a photo with you, so that they can post it online, maybe with a caption about your very symmetrical face, I say suck it up and go for it. All campaigns are full of surprises, and to come out on top you'll have to roll with the punches.
Expect anything! You might be fully prepared to talk about a proposed tax increase on the wealthiest, but instead find yourself asked to parse your "implausible good looks." You just never really know what questions will be lobbed at you by your constituents, or why.
Which leads me to another point: policy. You have to listen, of course, and you have to be empathetic and prepared for surprises, but, at the end of the day, you still need to have a firm grasp on domestic and foreign policy.
Contention can arise from an issue as innocuous as, say, un-airbrushed shirtless photos floating around the Internet that show off your chiselled body to millions of people. I'm not here to make any insane allegations, like that these photos aren't accurate representations of reality, because, yes, they absolutely are. There are no filters, no tricks of the camera. That's just me. With my shirt off. That's literally what I look like, not just in photographs.
But don't forget, I also pledged a ton of money to infrastructure, and before people were liking those photos on Facebook, I'd already outlined my strategy in plain English. That's the point. I can't stress this enough: avoid political jargon. Don't needlessly inflate your vocabulary or dumb it down too much.
The next tip should be self-explanatory. You need a thick skin. That's why so many people just aren't cut out for public life. To have to endure, day after day, week after week, month after month, mobs of reporters; to put up with articles and essays and think pieces, not just from your own country but from all over the world, proclaiming how "sexy" you are—although accurate, it's all quite wearisome.
Consider it from my perspective: you spend years preparing for a federal election, you defeat the once powerful Conservatives, and then, instead of getting to defend your voting record in Parliament, or explain why modest government spending isn't the worst evil, all you read and hear about is how you're the best-looking world leader, probably in history.
Essentially, what I want you to understand is that you're not going to have complete control over the narrative that gets written about you and your administration.
Remarking on my height and calling my hair "lush" and "gorgeous," as some have repeatedly done, is flattering, sure, and not incorrect. But I've also really, really worked on my empathy. I'm the elected leader of a G8 country! Canada is one of the wealthiest nations in the world! There has to be more to a leader of this stature than genuinely stunning physical characteristics.
But listen: at this point, even if an interviewer wants to spend a few minutes, or longer, pointing out, interpreting, and panegyrizing my undeniable physical appeal, I'm not going to sulk or storm away. Earmark this: leadership requires patience.
Take the high road, is what I'm getting at, Bernie. This is 2016, and personal questions, even superficial ones, are fair game. Be willing to talk about the environment and pipelines, but don't freak out when the conversation inevitably takes a turn to one of those discouraging but sincere questions you're bound to face, on the topic of your uncommon beauty.
For better or worse, this is modern politics, and it's the life we've signed up for.
Your northern neighbor,
Justin TrudeauAuthorities could ask whether would-be immigrants have sent their children to school, minister says
Peter Dutton has signalled a new, tougher citizenship test could consider behaviour including whether or not parents sent their children to school in the country they lived in before they applied for permanent residency in Australia.
In an interview on Sky News on Thursday, the immigration minister said a tougher citizenship test, which remains in gestation inside the government, could consider questions beyond whether or not the person had a criminal record.
Religious groups could have Australian visas cancelled under proposed powers for Dutton Read more
“It could go beyond that,” Dutton said. “We could look at whether or not somebody has been involved in an outlaw motorcycle gang, we could look at whether somebody has been involved, for example, in domestic violence, we could look at whether or not somebody had children that were of school age, but had not attended school for extended periods over that preceding three or four years.”
Dutton said there were 65 million people in the world who “would set up in Australia tomorrow, and I don’t think we should be embarrassed to say that we want the best of those people”.
He said finding out whether or not children had been to school “could be part of a bigger picture that you could paint to say if your kids are breaking the law, if they’re involved in gang violence, if members of your family have been involved in distributing drugs.
“I mean, it’s a complete picture that we need to look at and I don’t think we should be ashamed … in this country to say that we are a great country, we are built on migration, people for generations have come here, worked hard and the vast majority do the right thing.”
Asked whether or not command of English was also in the mix for a revised test, Dutton said “there are people that would suggest” language proficiency went to the question of whether someone was integrating or not.
“Well, I think there are people that would suggest that over a period of time if your English language doesn’t improve, that that goes to the question of integration or the ability to work or to work with your community or with your school or whatever the case might be,” Dutton said.
The minister said the government was continuing to work through the detail of any change to the current system.
Australia is paying for Malcolm Fraser's immigration mistakes, says Peter Dutton Read more
“We’ve obviously got a security intelligence aspect to it as well, so we’re having a look at the practical way that it might work and then if it’s something we decide to proceed with we’ll make an announcement,” he said.
Dutton said he was considering moving away from the current question-and-answer test “to something which is more objective”. That would involve looking at conduct in the years before residency in Australia was sought.
In the broad, Dutton said the test was about ensuring people wanted to share Australian values.
“If you want to live in this country you need to abide by the law and if you’re not going to abide by the law, or you’re not going to work if you’ve got a capacity to work, if you’re going to spend your time on welfare, or your kids are involved in Apex gangs in Victoria, for instance, then really we need to question whether that person is the best possible citizen.”Larry Sanders, the older brother of Democrat politician Bernie Sanders, is hoping to emulate his sibling’s success by standing for the Green party in David Cameron’s Oxfordshire seat.
Bernie Sanders gave Hillary Clinton an unexpectedly tough fight in the Democratic presidential primaries, riding a wave of idealism among a predominantly young voter base.
Now his brother Larry, 82, a retired social worker and former Green party councillor, plans to attempt a similar feat for the Greens in the byelection for the rock-solid Conservative constituency of Witney.
It will be a tall order. “It hasn’t always been the richest turf for the Green party,” a party spokesman said. To become MP for Witney, he would have to overturn Cameron’s 22,700-vote majority in a seat where the last Green candidate won just 5.1% of the vote.
But as Sanders points out, he has branding on his side. “Because of Bernard, I’ve become famous, and I will get more attention from the media, and that’s to be used to get the Green party’s policies across,” he told the Guardian.
Sanders has lived in Oxford since 1968, having moved to Britain after falling in love with “a beautiful Englishwoman”, Margaret, to whom he was married until she died in 1983.
He studied social work at Oxford University and worked as a social worker and adviser to people with disabilities and their carers. He also has a law degree from Harvard.
Sanders has been the Green party’s health spokesman since last year, and says the NHS and social care are the issues “closest to my heart”. On a local level, he has campaigned in support of Witney and Horton hospitals, but also wants to highlight the pressure that social care is under nationally, and opposes the privatisation of social care and the NHS.
He will also echo his brother’s campaign’s emphasis on social inequality. “In Britain, as in the US, we have had an increase in inequality in the last 30 years, and that’s having all sorts of consequences,” he said. “Many people can’t afford houses who you would have expected to not long ago.”
Neoliberalism, he says, has “shuddered to a close”, and he blames resentment for that for the Brexit vote.
The same tides in the US are what propelled his brother’s campaign, he said. “Bernard’s campaign in America was a very successful shifting point.”
Sanders will face barrister Robert Courts as the Conservative candidate, local councillor Liz Leffman for the Liberal Democrats, and Duncan Enright as the Labour candidate.
The Greens point out that Enright has called for Corbyn to stand down, creating the scope for Sanders to pick up support among Corbyn-backing voters. Caroline Lucas, the party’s MP and co-leader, will campaign in the constituency on Saturday.
Larry Sanders campaigned for his brother as a member of Democrats Abroad and was filmed telling the Democratic convention through tears that their parents would be “immensely proud”.
Bernie Sanders will not be officially endorsing Larry, because of the convention against foreign politicians intervening in domestic elections.
But in last year’s general election, when Larry Sanders ran for the Greens in the neighbouring constituency of Oxford West and Abingdon, Bernie spoke via Skype at a meeting of Larry’s supporters. Larry Sanders will not rule out a similar intervention in the byelection.
“Our similarities in terms of policies are astonishing, partly because we talk all the time,” Larry Sanders said.
He cannot think of a policy where they have major differences, he added. “We both have maintained a kind of naiveté, where we look around and say, why does a rich country have poor people?”WASHINGTON, D.C. -- President Barack Obama and Ohio Democrats will hold their big pre-election day rally at Cleveland State University's Wolstein Center on Oct. 31.
Doors for the Halloween afternoon event will open at noon, and no tickets are required, said Democratic National Committee spokesman Brad Woodhouse.
Look for Obama to be joined on stage by the statewide Democratic ticket, topped by Gov. Ted Strickland. Woodhouse says this is expected to be the president's last large event before the Nov. 2 election, capping a round of get-out-the-vote rallies across the country.
A similar Obama rally at Ohio State University last Sunday drew a crowd estimated at 35,000.
Obama and fellow Democrats are working to pump up enthusiasm for voting in this election, which will determine which party rules both chambers of Congress and numerous state capitals. A loss of control of Congress could be a setback for Obama's domestic agenda and help set the tone for his 2012 reelection race.
A loss of the Ohio governor's mansion would also be a setback for the national party, not only because of Strickland's relationship with the White House but also because it could potentially weaken the political infrastructure that Strickland built, which helped elect Obama in 2008.
Cleveland is a contender to host the 2012 Democratic National Convention, at which Obama would presumably be renominated. No date for a decision on the convention city has been set.
Political analysts say the House of Representatives is likely to go back to Republican control with the November election, and several House races in Ohio would play a role in such a flip. Democrats are fighting for what would probably be a slim Senate majority if they can hold onto that chamber, and polls in key states have been tight. Those polling trends are not favorable toward Ohio's Democratic Senate candidate, Lee Fisher, who is running against Republican Rob Portman for the opening created by Republican Sen. George Voinovich's coming retirement.
Whatever happens, the nation may have to wait to know the final outcome in several states. The parties and their attorneys are ready for what some think will be a round of recounts.ABERDEEN, Md. (WJZ) — The Aberdeen IronBirds are wearing new patches this season to honor fallen deputies Patrick Daily and Mark Logsdon.
The IronBirds’ opening night will be June 22. There will be a moment of silence and two empty reserved seats in honor of Daily and Logsdon. Family members will throw out the first pitch.
“This is a powerful opportunity to honor and pay tribute to the local deputies who gave their lives while serving the citizens of Harford County,” said Glenn Valis, senior vice president of Ripken Baseball. “As a former law enforcement officer, and father of two who currently serve, it is incredibly important that we continue to honor only those who have passed in the line of duty, as well as those who continue to keep our communities safe every day, locally and throughout the country.”
“Ever since the stadium first opened, and the IronBirds moved to Aberdeen, they have been a constant contributor and supporter of the communities here in Harford County. This outward showing of support and dedication to the members of the Harford County Sheriff’s Office and recognizing the sacrifice made by Pat and Mark, is truly inspiring and a testament to the character of the IronBirds organization,” added Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler.
Their badge numbers will also be painted on Leidos Field and displayed all season.
Daily and Logsdon were killed in the line of duty in February.
The IronBirds will also host a Harford County Sheriff’s Office appreciation night later this season.Handcuffed Prisoner in Jail (Shutterstock)
This story first appeared at Moyers & Company.
In July, we told you about the nightmarish experience that Michigan officials had after they turned over prison food services to a private company, Aramark Correctional Services.
The private prison industry had paid for a bogus “study” suggesting that states which privatized their prisons would reap huge benefits — with better services delivered at lower costs — but Michigan found that the contract with Aramark, which pays its employees an average of $11 per hour in compensation, was dogged by incidents of its workers smuggling in contraband, having sex with prisoners, serving rancid food that sickened inmates and running out of food (which leads to unrest and is considered a serious security issue in a correctional facility).
The private prison company had been plagued with problems in other states as well. Alan Pyke reported for ThinkProgress that Aramark’s “poor handling of a food contract was blamed for causing riots in a Kentucky prison in 2009, and issues similar to the ones Michigan officials report have cropped up in Aramark-run prison kitchens in Florida, Ohio and Indiana.
Our July post relied in part on some intrepid reporting by Paul Egan of the Detroit Free-Press. And last week, Egan followed up with another eye-opening story about Aramark’s disastrous track record…
First it was drug smuggling and sex acts with inmates.
Now it’s murder for hire. An Aramark Correctional Services food service worker at Kinross Correctional Facility in the eastern Upper Peninsula is suspected of approaching an inmate there about arranging to have another inmate killed, a Michigan State Police official confirmed Wednesday. Det.-Sgt. Michael Schroeder of the Michigan State Police Sault Ste. Marie post told the Free Press Wednesday police have sent a warrant request to the Chippewa County Prosecutor’s Office following a lengthy investigation and are awaiting a response. An inmate complained in July that a food service worker approached him about arranging to kill an inmate held at another facility, in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, Schroeder said. The worker was placed on a Corrections Department “stop order” — banning him from prison property — but has not been arrested pending the conclusion of the investigation, Schroeder said. He declined to release further details, saying “it’s still being investigated.”
Read the rest at The Detroit Free-Press.Callie Rogers who won the U.K lottery at the age of 16 and is the second youngest to win it, got arrested after police raided the property and found thousands of pounds worth of cocaine and a stun gun. It has been five years since she has won the total amount of 1,875,000 pounds. Her life twisted from one drama to another since she won the 2 Million Pound worth lottery.
The twist in the drama came when her new partner, Mr. Ryan Thompson admitted that he was using Ms. Rogers house for dealing cocaine. The pair was arrested right after her boyfriend admitted in dealing with cocaine. They were arrested from Ms. Rogers house in Whitehaven, Cumbria which she had bought from her winning. She was later released after being put behind the bars as no charges were imposed on her but her boyfriend Ryan Thompson could be facing jail after confessing to dealing drugs. Later, before the town's magistrate court she admitted possessing and supplying cocaine and possessing a gun.
The police officers who raided the house found four bags of cocaine, which contained two and a half ounces of the drug. They also found a digital weighing machine, a black book containing names and addresses of debtors and lot of unused plastic bags.
Since winning the lottery, she has posed topless after having her breasts enlarged, repeatedly broken up with another criminal lover who slept with her younger sister and has been accused of a drunken brawl outside a nightclub. She is now 21 and has two children.They've never confronted LeBron James with a roster this talented, this complete, this experienced. Finally, there's no need to hold a prayer session for the Chicago Bulls as they enter a series against The King.
The Bulls, at last, have their best player, their second-best player and what seems to be a healthy starting lineup. The gang's all here. The Bulls aren't coming with a pop-gun offense or a starting 2-guard who can't really score or is halfway to retirement.
Yes, the Cleveland Cavaliers have the best player, which is usually the ticket to success in an NBA playoff series. Even the defending champion Spurs couldn't overcome not having the best player, Chris Paul, in their epic first-round series with the Clippers. The Cavaliers will be the favorites, even with Kevin Love out for the series and J.R. Smith out for the first two games. They'll be the favorites because James isn't out, injured or suspended and because the Cavs have the second-best player in the series, too, in Kyrie Irving.
Just as we knew going in that Clippers versus Spurs was going to be the compelling matchup of the first round, Bulls versus Cavs has every bit of our attention in the second round. The Cavaliers seem vulnerable for the first time since New Year's because Love is done and Smith is out. And the Bulls, with that nuclear effort in Game 6 to eliminate Milwaukee, look like an ensemble cast with the stuff to beat Cleveland.
The Bulls' ensemble cast has all the pieces to beat LeBron James' Cavaliers, but Chicago must stay focused. AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh
That we have so little to go on heightens the intrigue. The Bulls' preferred starting unit of Derrick Rose, Jimmy Butler, Joakim Noah, Pau Gasol and Mike Dunleavy didn't play a single game against Cleveland this season. In fact, one of the reasons so many people around the league think the Bulls can win this series is because the starting unit is finally starting to rack up some minutes, and success, together. The Bucks series was the first time all season that the Bulls' preferred lineup started six consecutive games. And of all the Rose-Noah teams that have gone up against LeBron, there's simply no disputing that this one is the best in terms of talent, depth and versatility.
As one Western Conference player told me this week, "With Love and J.R. Smith both out those first two games, the Bulls have too much firepower for Cleveland. The Bulls aren't a great defensive team anymore, but Cleveland ain't the best defensive team and the Bulls have too many scorers if Rose, Butler, Gasol, Dunleavy are going well.... And [Nikola] Mirotic gives them a different dimension coming off the bench they haven't had against LeBron."
All true. Kyle Korver wasn't a starter then, and wasn't the player he's become with Atlanta. The Bulls were relying on Keith Bogans and Ronnie Brewer, who couldn't give them as much scoring in a series as Butler can in two games.
Without Love, it figures LeBron will play much more power forward, which is where the Bulls are probably as deep as any team in the league. Gasol, Taj Gibson and Mirotic are a diverse enough trio that the Cavaliers won't find any particular advantage by trying to go small or get the Bulls into foul trouble.
And it's not just Love's absence that the Cavaliers must account for. Love and Smith both average more than 30 minutes per game. Who picks up those minutes for Cleveland? Tristan Thompson, who killed the Bulls on the offensive boards in their first regular-season meeting? Not necessarily. Thompson already averages 27 minutes per game. How many more can he handle? Ten?
The Cavaliers are good enough and willing enough shooting the 3, a category in which they lead the playoffs, to put LeBron and Kyrie on the floor and scramble the game with Iman Shumpert, Mike Miller and James Jones, or either of those two and Thompson. But that's not a lineup that figures to intimidate the Bulls who, while no longer great defensively, can and do guard the 3-point line effectively.
While so much speculation centers on what the Cavaliers will do to make up for the absence of Love and Smith, there are also questions about whether the Bulls will doom themselves with their new trademark: dumb turnovers. The Bulls have become impossible to trust game to game, and nobody knows whether we're going to see the team with the highest rate of assists in the playoffs, which the Bulls are, or the team with the highest turnover rate, which they also are.
One player in the Eastern Conference playoffs said, "They rely so much on play calling, it just becomes a case of whether they value the ball or not. If they execute, they can beat Cleveland, yeah. But if they turn the ball over the way they did in a couple of those games against Milwaukee.... LeBron kills teams that make stupid turnovers.... Depends on which Bulls team shows up."
And therein lies the difficulty of forecasting this series. Even players who lean toward taking the Bulls over Cleveland concede that the Bulls' newfound carelessness could undermine any of the team's other advantages in the series.
What seems virtually certain is that to beat Cleveland, the Bulls will have to win one of the first two games in the series -- one of the two games with both Love and Smith out. I'd make the case that the Bulls' best chance at winning the series would be to win Games 1 and 2 in Cleveland because the Cavs, with Smith back in the lineup, would win a game in Chicago even after being down 2-0. So much will be determined not by matchups or strategic advantages, real or perceived, but whether the Bulls can play with the kind of sustained passion and focus which has escaped them much of the season.
Throughout the year, the Bulls have begged and prayed for good health, and relatively speaking, compared to a number of other playoff teams, including the Cavaliers, the Bulls now have that. They start the series in Cleveland with all hands on deck -- stars and support players alike. They know that they're facing the best player in the NBA but are just as good at every spot on the floor and better along the bench from head coach to sixth man.
James has expressed concern about a team with uncertainty facing a Bulls team whose primary members have suffered through playoff trials and tribulations and will come fully engaged to a playoff series they think they can win.
For once, the Bulls' primary prayer, the one for good health, has been answered. The rest is in their control against a short-handed Cavaliers team.In Austin, TX, we may not be quite as famous for our craft beers as, say, Portland, but that hardly means we’re without our own local beer artisans. In fact, there are more than 25 craft breweries in and around the Austin area. Choosing the 10 best breweries was not easy. From the venerable Live Oak brewery to the fresh-faced Hops & Grain, Austin produces a superlative selection of unique local beer.
Here are the top 10 local craft breweries close to Austin, along with their flagship beers:
Map of Austin’s Top 10 Craft Breweries
For a map of the Top 10 Craft Breweries in Austin, visit our Craft Brewery Pinterest board!
Hops & Grain
3301 E 5th St., East Austin, 78702 | Image by Matthew Peoples The top beer here is a pale lager called Zoe. Hops & Grain recommends pairing it “with life” (a clever play on words, as “Zoe” actually means “life” in Greek). Zoe is dry-hopped for a bit of added complexity, but manages to be clean and refreshing nonetheless.3301 E 5th St., East Austin, 78702 | Image by Matthew Peoples
(512)
407 Radam Ln, F200, South Austin, 78745 | Image by John M P Knox A staple of the Austin beer scene, 512’s Pecan Porter is made with local pecans paired with a variety of local and organic malts, including Baird’s chocolate malt. The beer is very nearly black in color and makes for an excellent wintertime treat, though true fans enjoy it year-round without hesitation.407 Radam Ln, F200, South Austin, 78745 | Image by John M P Knox
Thirsty Planet
11160 Circle Dr., Southwest Austin, 78736 | Image by Preston McWithey This brewery has the perfect name for the kind of beer they produce: all eminently drinkable, but none more so than Yellow Armadillo, a wheat ale with a low 4.1% alcohol content that you can down easily and constantly over a summer afternoon, or any other time of year.11160 Circle Dr., Southwest Austin, 78736 | Image by Preston McWithey
Real Ale
231 San Saba Ct., Blanco, TX, 78606 | Image by _JDT0505 The fanatic-creating Hans’ Pils is quite possibly the hoppiest pilsner on this list, hoppier even than most pale ales on the market. The hop used in Hans’ Pils is Tettnang Tettnanger, an herbal and spicy hop that gives Hans’ Pils its unique flavor. It’s hard to not have an opinion on this beer; you either dislike it or you’re a fanatic. There are a lot of fanatics.231 San Saba Ct., Blanco, TX, 78606 | Image by _JDT0505
Austin Beerworks
3009 Industrial Terrace, North Austin, 78758 | Image by AustinPixels Just about the most classic American IPA in Austin, Austin Beerworks’ Fire Eagle mixes Columbus, Centennial, Amarillo, and Summit hops to come up with a bright, hoppy pale ale that is best described as “dangerously drinkable”.3009 Industrial Terrace, North Austin, 78758 | Image by AustinPixels
Jester King
13187 Fitzhugh Rd, Southwest Austin, 78736 | Image by Elliott Blackburn This brewery is known for using native wild yeast and barrel-aging its beers. Its most popular blend, Wytchmaker Farmhouse Rye IPA, is no exception. Unpasteurized, unfiltered, and tasting of grapefruit and pine, the Wytchmaker is a funky drink that you will continually want to have “just one more” of.13187 Fitzhugh Rd, Southwest Austin, 78736 | Image by Elliott Blackburn
Live Oak
3301 E 5th St., East Austin, 78702 | Image by That Other Paper Live Oak’s Hefeweizen obliterates the notion that only newbies drink wheat beer. It’s an Austin classic, making common appearances across the city every time the summer heat needs beating back.3301 E 5th St., East Austin, 78702 | Image by That Other Paper
Independence
3913 Todd Ln #607, Southeast Austin, 78744 | Image by BrewpiesATX.com One of the oldest of the Austin breweries, Independence uses four different hops in their Stash IPA to produce a resinous beer that nevertheless comes off creamy and smooth. If you’re looking for a classic IPA, Stash will find a place in your fridge.3913 Todd Ln #607, Southeast Austin, 78744 | Image by BrewpiesATX.com
Circle
2340 W Braker Ln, North Austin, 78758 | Image by Tyler Malone Circle insists on a mere four ingredients (water, hops, yeast, and malt ) and makes a good variety of very drinkable beers out of them. Their star, however, is rightly called ENVY, an amber that features a perfect balance of hops and malt, fermented at higher-than-typical temperatures to preserve the fruitiness of this perfectly balanced beer.2340 W Braker Ln, North Austin, 78758 | Image by Tyler Malone
Twisted X
This brewery advises you to “always drink upstream from the herd,” and that sense of humor comes through in their beers as well. Señor Viejo, or “Old Man,” schwarzbier has double the alcohol content of most beers and is aged in tequila barrels, adding notes of vanilla, oak, and agave to this powerful black beer. Señor Viejo is a unique treat and is insanely popular all across Austin.
23455 RR 150, Dripping Springs, 78620 | Image by SlowDownAndSavor
Are there other breweries that serve Austin with amazing craft beers? Absolutely! We just didn’t have room for them all on our top 10 list. If you want to find |
akes.
While many online outfits sell real and bogus designer frames, the least expensive frames available online are unapologetically nameless generics: current and classic styles, sans logo. As is true with most consumer products, they’re not necessarily worse than their name-brand counterparts. After a year-plus of daily use, my $44 generics still look new. (That being said, I should have paid a few dollars more for higher-quality polycarbonate lenses and I should have sought bifocals with a wider middle-vision band, but these errors were my own, not the company’s.)
“Very high-priced frames may have somewhat better materials,” Mitchell says, “but from my experience, the no-names have been very well made.” Having owned dozens of generic pairs, he’s experienced “no more issues with them than with the name brands from LensCrafters. I think they’re pretty much on par.”
These days, he notes, “there are a lot more online retailers now than at the end of 2006. There aren’t a whole lot more reputable ones, however. I’ve shopped at over a dozen, and narrowed things down to about three or four that I feel comfortable recommending to others. As this is a fully custom market, mistakes can enter the process anywhere from the initial customer entering prescription information to the production process. I’ve found that a few of the sites do a better job than others at fixing mistakes. Some do better at this than the traditional stores.
“Prices haven’t dropped at all in the traditional brick-and-mortars, but downward price pressure from Wal-Mart will undoubtedly start to make an impact in certain parts of the country. I saw a sign in a
Wal-Mart recently for $38 glasses. The selection was tiny, but we’re starting to see a price intersection.”
The first online eyeglasses company was Houston-based FramesDirect. In 1992, optometrists Dhavid Cooper and Guy Hodgson closed their several Texas brick-and-mortar shops, then pondered their future.
“We knew that we wanted to sell eyewear in all fifty states 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year,” Hodgson says. “We had no idea how to do this.” Renting a small office, they installed computers.
“When you talked about the Internet in those days, no one knew what you meant. Search engines were in their absolute infancy. We thought a 56k modem was blisteringly fast.”
Cooper had won a Surgeon General’s Commendation Award in his native South Africa for creating a program providing the poor with recycled glasses for free. Hodgson specialized in treating the nearly blind. Barely fluent in email, the pair created a basic Web site, offering designer glasses at low prices because, unlike brick-and-mortar opticians, they needed to pay neither storefront rent nor employees’ salaries, nor did they need to keep large quantities of merchandise in stock.
“Everyone around us thought we were completely mad: Eye doctors, giving up their lucrative practices to go into this weird thing,” Hodgson laughs. But once orders started pouring in, “The whole optical industry completely shunned us. They said we were ruining them.”
At eyewear conventions, he and Cooper wore their nametags backward to avoid verbal abuse. Since then, dozens of imitators have emerged, many based overseas and most able to offer even lower prices because they sell generics. Buying prescription eyewear is like buying prescription drugs: It’s cheaper online. It’s cheaper when it comes from outside the U.S. GlassesUnlimited, for instance, can afford to sell hundreds of different stylish frames fitted with prescription lenses for only $9.99 because its entire operation is based in Thailand.
“We don’t have big margins here. That’s how we are serving our clientele. That’s why we’re getting hundreds of orders on a daily basis, 70 percent of which come from the U.S. and Canada,” GU manager Sam Davis tells me. “We have virtually no expenses. We have our own home brand and do our own production. We don’t outsource anything.”
Based in the U.S., FramesDirect still undercuts retail-store prices for guaranteed designer goods.
“What we sell and what the brick-and-mortar stores sell are the exact same products,” Guy Hodgson says. “How can they afford to charge the prices they charge?”With several states set to vote on cannabis related bills in November, support for legalization of cannabis is higher than ever.
The Pew Research Center found that 57 percent of U.S. adults now think that cannabis use should be legal in a study that surveyed 1,201 U.S. adults; 37 percent of American adults responded that cannabis should be illegal. The results released on Wednesday show that American sentiment on cannabis legalization has practically reversed. Ten years ago only 32 percent of U.S. adults supported legalization and 60 percent wanted cannabis to be illegal.
About two dozen states legally permit its citizens to use cannabis in some form. In June, Ohio Governor John Kasich signed House Bill 523 that legalized medical cannabis. Having passed the Ohio Medical cannabis Control Program (MMCP) into law, Ohio has become the 25th state (in addition to the District of Columbia, Guam and Puerto Rico) to allow cannabis use in some form.
Nine states are set to vote on allowing use of cannabis for medical or recreational purposes next month. Voters in Arizona, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada and California will vote on whether recreational use of cannabis will be legalized. Legal medical use of cannabis for certain conditions will be decided in Arkansas, Florida, Montana, and North Dakota.
Overall, political party members differ in opinion on cannabis legalization. The study found that 66 percent of Democrats support cannabis legalization and 30 percent want it to be illegal. Fifty-five percent (55%) of Republicans want cannabis to be illegal, while only 41 percent support legalization.
Wednesday’s study also found that a small majority of Hispanic Americans do not support cannabis legalization. Forty-six (46 percent) of Hispanics favor legalizing cannabis; 49 percent say it should be illegal.
The majority of both white and black people surveyed (59 percent each) support legalizing cannabis.Since the early days when the sport was anything but a mainstream endeavor, the MMA industry has thrived and survived through various websites, forums and, perhaps most importantly, social-media platforms.
Fighters interact with fans, each other and many more through the likes of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, which helps outsiders get a deeper look into the minds of the athletes.
Following Saturday’s UFC 185 event in Dallas, several of the winning and losing fighters, along with their coaches, training partners or family members, took to social media to react to the event or share a message with supporters.
* * * *
The defeated
Congrats to Ryan Benoit I'll take this loss like a man and be back best believe that. Texas thanks for all the love. — Sergio Pettis (@sergiopettis) March 15, 2015
Didn't go our way in Dallas but still wanna give a big shoutout some of the nicest people I've met. Awesome city✊ — Sergio Pettis (@sergiopettis) March 15, 2015
I want to thank all my friends, family, and fans that support me when i win or lose.it means alot. fight just was not my best. Bad cut — Daron Cruickshank (@Cruickshank155) March 15, 2015
Broken arm with no pain meds…..oh well guess I gotta man up — Roger Narvaez (@Silverback316) March 15, 2015
All you can do is fight, not run, need to join a track meet, next time pow, pow, thank for the support love the fans http://t.co/2yk2llODD9 — Roy Nelson (@roynelsonmma) March 15, 2015
I just talked to @roynelsonmma to see if he is ok and he just asked me for another fight ASAP!!! That guy is not HUMAN!! Toughest guy EVER!! — Dana White (@danawhite) March 15, 2015
I have amazing friends and fans I sincerely appreciate your support. I'll be back stronger than ever very soon…… #fact — Matt Brown (@IamTheImmortal) March 15, 2015
Congrats @RdosAnjosMMA you fought a great fight. — Anthony Pettis (@Showtimepettis) March 15, 2015
The victorious
Thanks to @Firas_Zahabi and @MarioPereiraMMA for all their help this evening was second to none! — Joseph duffy (@Duffy_MMA) March 15, 2015
Also thanks to @LOCKloaded for takin care of the cut!! What a night thank you all for the support #UFC185 — Joseph duffy (@Duffy_MMA) March 15, 2015
Adrenaline was pumping. I respect Pettis and his camp very very much they have a great group. Was a long long lay off for me. @ufc — Ryan Benoit (@BabyfaceBenoit) March 15, 2015
I'm not Twitter savvy, but just want to thank everybody for the love #glorytoGod — Beneil Dariush (@beneildariush_) March 15, 2015
"Let's just say, 'fear was not a factor' today." "How dare you." http://t.co/5RVgWPetGd — The Spartan (@EliasTheodorou) March 15, 2015
“@kristiejpearson: So proud of my ❤️ @RossTheRealDeal through ups and downs 👊 my ride or die. Congrats 😘 love u beautiful 😘😘 — Ross Pearson (@RossTheRealDeal) March 15, 2015
THANK YOU for all of your support! ¡GRACIAS por todo su apoyo! #UFC185 — Henry Cejudo (@HenryCejudo) March 15, 2015
Believe in your dream. You can do anything. #UFC185. #besomebody. — Henry Cejudo (@HenryCejudo) March 15, 2015
Victory!!! But I do have a thick lip and a black eye! Roy Nelson is one tough cookie! Thank you coaches & fans! @UFC pic.twitter.com/kxVZbMUvwp — Alistair Overeem (@Alistairovereem) March 15, 2015
Hey @Showtimepettis it was an honor sharing the cage with you. You are a great fighter and I have nothing but respect for you @ufc — Rafael dos Anjos (@RdosAnjosMMA) March 15, 2015
For more on UFC 185, check out the UFC Events section of the site.PHOENIX (Reuters) - Firefighters struggled on Wednesday to slow the advance of a fast-growing wildfire threatening thousands of structures in central Arizona and forcing evacuations of residents from at least a dozen communities, authorities said.
The so-called Goodwin Fire, roaring through dense, sun-baked chaparral, has destroyed a number of homes in an area close to where flames erupted on Saturday in the Prescott National Forest, about 70 miles north of Phoenix.
But the full extent of property losses has yet to be determined because of continued fierce fire activity in the vicinity, said Tiffany Davila, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Forestry and Fire.
“We know there’s losses back in there, but we don’t know how bad it is,” she told Reuters.
As of Wednesday, the wind-whipped blaze had charred 21,000 acres, while firefighters have managed to carve containment lines around just 1 percent of the perimeter.
A force of about 1,000 fire personnel, backed by airplane tankers dumping payloads of flame-retardant chemicals, focused on trying to safeguard the most heavily populated areas lying in harm’s way on the northeastern fringe of the blaze, Davila said.
Yavapai County spokesman David McAtee said an estimated 3,000 homes and other buildings were under threat, with evacuations expanded to cover the entire town of Mayer, parts of Dewey-Humboldt and at least 10 other communities or subdivisions.
Mayer alone is home to about 1,400 residents, and Davila said as many as 3,000 people in all were believed to be under evacuation orders or advisories warning them to be prepared to flee at a moment’s notice.
Governor Doug Ducey issued state of emergency for Yavapai County, freeing up extra funds to help fight the blaze there.
Davila said Goodwin was the most severe of 35 wildfires burning across Arizona on Wednesday, from smaller, isolated blazes to a 60-square-mile conflagration in the southeastern corner of the state reported to be 43 percent contained.
The National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, reported nearly 30 “active large” fires in Arizona and eight other Western states on Wednesday that have engulfed nearly 180,000 acres.
Heavy rainfall in parts of the West over the winter and spring helped delay the onset of wildfires, but spurred the growth of dense vegetation that has now dried out and was fueling fire activity as summertime heat sets in.
In the neighboring state of Utah, another fierce wildfire that has destroyed more than a dozen homes and forced the evacuation of 1,500 residents raged for a 12th day on Wednesday about 300 miles (483 km) south of Salt Lake City. That fire has scorched more than 54,000 acres (21,853 hectares), an increase of about 4,000 acres since Tuesday.
In California, several smaller wildfires were burning on Wednesday, including a new blaze threatening hillside homes in the Los Angeles suburb of Burbank, and the so-called Hill Fire along the state’s central coast that destroyed the home of “The Big Bang Theory” actor Johnny Galecki and two other structures.Washington: US President Donald Trump’s keenly awaited decision on whether to move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Occupied Jerusalem will not come by a Monday deadline, the White House said.
“The president has been clear on this issue from the get-go: It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when,” said White House spokesman Hogan Gidley hours before the administration’s decision was due.
Trump was theoretically due Monday to decide whether to sign a legal waiver delaying by six months plans to move the US embassy to Occupied Jerusalem — as successive administrations have done at regular intervals for more than two decades.
“No action though will be taken on the waiver today and we will declare a decision on the waiver in the coming days,” Gidley said.Friday, February 27th, 2015
RANCHO CUCAMONGA, Calif. (KABC) -- A man accused of killing a family of four and burying their bodies in the desert tells Eyewitness News that he did not commit the crime.
In an exclusive interview at the West Valley Detention Center, Charles "Chase" Merritt claims he is innocent for the 2010 murders of the McStay family members.
He was arrested in 2014 on suspicion of beating the four family members to death in their home in Fallbrook.
The family disappeared from their home in San Diego in 2010, and their skeletal remains were found in two shallow graves in a desert in Victorville in November 2013.
In January, a San Bernardino judge granted Merritt permission to represent himself in court during his murder trial.
During the exclusive interview, Merritt said that his former attorney was "in over his head."
Merritt was granted permission to represent himself because he has congestive heart failure, and his former attorney claimed Merritt may only have six to eight months left to live.
In regards to his health, Merritt said he feels fine and is getting the attention and care he needs at the jail.
As for his upcoming trial, Merritt said the evidence he has reviewed shows there is nothing to connect him to either the gravesite or the scene of the killings at the family home.
He calls the investigation against him a thorough one, but it has a ridiculous outcome.
He said 40-year-old Joseph McStay was not a business associate of his, but rather a best friend to him. The two spoke to one another 15 to 30 times each day, Merritt said.
He adds that the business the two were a part of was doing well. But after the four McStay members went missing, the rest of the family ran the business into the ground. This caused a falling out.
Merritt said because of that he did not call any of the other McStay family members to offer condolences after the bodies were found, but he did eventually speak with Joseph McStay's brother, who told him it would not be appropriate to attend a remembrance service.
He said people should expect big surprises at his preliminary hearing, when evidence that had been sealed from the public will be reviewed.
He admits there are "skeletons in his closet," but he said by the time his trial is over he expects to be fully acquitted.
nullOBJECTIVE:
To determine the anabolic and lipolytic effects of a low dosage of clenbuterol administered orally in working and nonworking equids.
ANIMALS:
8 nonworking horses and 47 polo ponies in active training.
PROCEDURES:
Each polo pony continued training and received either clenbuterol (0.8 μg/kg) or an equal volume of corn syrup (placebo) orally twice daily for 21 days, and then was evaluated for another 21-day period. Nonworking horses received clenbuterol or placebo at the same dosage for 21 days in a crossover trial (2 treatments/horse). For working and nonworking horses, percentage body fat (PBF) was estimated before treatment and then 2 and 3 times/wk, respectively. Body weight was measured at intervals.
RESULTS:
Full data sets were not available for 8 working horses. For working horses, a significant treatment effect of clenbuterol was detected by day 3 and continued through the last day of treatment; at day 21, the mean change in PBF from baseline following clenbuterol or placebo treatment was -0.80% (representing a 12% decrease in PBF) and -0.32%, respectively. By day 32 through 42 (without treatment), PBF change did not differ between groups. When treated with clenbuterol, the nonworking horses had a similar mean change in PBF from baseline from day 6 onward, which peaked at -0.75% on day 18 (an 8% decrease in PBF). Time and treatment had no significant effect on body weight in either experiment.
CONCLUSIONS AND CLINICAL RELEVANCE:
Among the study equids, long-term low-dose clenbuterol administration resulted in significant decreases in body fat with no loss in body weight.C arrier Corp. announced this week that it plans to shutter its Indianapolis manufacturing facility, laying off 1,400 workers and moving operations to Mexico.
Yet less than three years ago, the company received a $5.1 million stimulus-funded tax credit from the Department of Energy — for the sole purpose of creating and maintaining green jobs in the United States.
“In this instance, Carrier Corp. is betraying the program’s aim of keeping green jobs in the United States,” says Philip Mattera, research director at Good Jobs First, a nonprofit tracking subsidies.
The shuttering of the Carrier facility is yet another failure in the Obama administration’s attempts to use stimulus cash to prop up domestic green manufacturing.
The $2.3 billion Advanced Manufacturing Tax Credit Program, more wonkily known as the 48C program, provided a 30 percent tax credit for companies that invested in green manufacturing facilities in the United States.
Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz then claimed that the tax credits would “create new jobs and supply more clean-energy projects in the United States and abroad with equipment made in America.” And Senator Joe Donnelly (D., Ind.) said, “The tax credits will help these companies invest further in more good-paying manufacturing jobs right here in Indiana.”
Carrier, a subsidiary of United Technologies Corporation, won the $5.1 million award in 2013 after vowing to expand production of energy-efficient gas furnaces at its Indianapolis facility.
“Now, they’re going to build them in Mexico instead of building them here,” says Chuck Jones, the president of Indianapolis’s United Steelworkers Local 1999. “It’s a damn shame all the way around.... They blind-sided us — 1,400 people and their families are going to be disrupted.... There will be no more jobs in Indianapolis.”
A 2010 report by Good Jobs First and the Apollo Alliance raised questions about some of the companies receiving tax credits through the 48C program.
A sizeable minority of recipients had foreign parent companies, and U.S.-based companies received only 59 percent of the total amount of money distributed in the first round of funding, announced in 2010. Furthermore, many of the recipients with foreign ownership also seemed to be expanding their production at facilities in other low-wage countries.
“While the 48C credits are likely leading these companies to pay more attention to U.S. production, it is also possible that their American manufacturing activities are little more than fig leaves meant to hide the fact that they are mainly relying on offshore low-wage activities,” the report concluded
Though the report ultimately supported the 48C Program, Good Jobs First recommended “adding ‘clawback’ provisions that would enable the federal government to recoup the tax credits if 48C jobs ended up being sent offshore.”
By deadline, the Department of Energy had not responded to National Review ’s queries about what went wrong at the Indianapolis facility, whether any such clawback provision was introduced, or whether taxpayers would recoup their investment.
A spokesperson for Carrier wrote in an e-mail, “We do not disclose the details of our negotiations with state and local officials, but we will honor the terms of our agreement in Indiana as we do everywhere.” She would not provide more-specific details of how the company would fulfill its obligations.
— Jillian Kay Melchior writes for National Review as a Thomas L. Rhodes Fellow for the Franklin Center. She is also a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum and the Tony Blankley Fellow at the Steamboat Institute.
Under the 48C Program, facilities that received awards in 2013 were supposed to have functioning projects in place by 2017.The Legion of Skanks Podcast, and its hosts Big Jay Oakerson, Dave Smith and Luis J. Gomez, officially announced the comedy festival they’ve been teasing for weeks– Skankfest is coming to NYC in June.
Skankfest organizers say their mission is to push back against the PC climate that is creeping into comedy and encourage the performers to take risks.
The festival will descend on Long Island City’s Creek and the Cave and completely take over for 28 hours of shows which will include stand up, podcasts, even sketch and musical acts. Sixty different performers will hit the stages (three of them). This will not be your typical festival. The shows are expected to push boundaries, be experimental, and in case you’re wondering how serious they are about that– naked comedy is on the agenda. Most of the shows have not yet been announced, but here’s what we know so far. The Naked Roast will take roast battle style comedy to a new level. You’ve seen roasts, you’ve heard about naked comedy, but you’ve never seen a naked roast battle. Performers will be in the buff, which opens up a whole new direction to go with insults. Also on the agenda, Legion of Skanks Live, of course, Big Jay Oakerson’s What’s Your Fucking Deal?, Next Generation Filthy, and the Skanks answer to the new faces shows– Jew Faces of Comedy.
Full lineups will be announced on May 16th, but tickets are available for pre-sale now. The full details: shows will take place Saturday June 18th and Sunday June 19th from noon to 2am at The Creek and the Cave. Three stages, sixty performers, 14 hours each day, for two days. VIP All Access Passes will get you access to every single event for $90, and if you order your pass before May 16th you get a $10 discount. Single day passes are also available for $50. Your VIP All Access Pass also gets you discounts at other venues throughout NYC for the week leading up to the festival (6/12 through 6/16).Currently, man-portable air defense systems comprise five percent of attacks on U.S. aircraft in Iraq, Middle East Newsline reported. The army operates the AH-64D Apache, the UH-60 Black Hawk and the CH-47 Chinook on a 24-hour basis.
In an Oct. 19 briefing, Shanahan said Iranian SAM systems have forced army helicopter pilots to revise their tactics. He said the Iranian-origin missiles arrived in Iraq over the last three months.
"In the last several months, we have had an increased threat from systems that we had not seen in the first part of the year," Shanahan said.
Shanahan did not identify the Iranian missiles. Over the last 18 months, Iran was said to have received the SA-18 Igla-S man-portable missile from Russia.
Officials said U.S. Army helicopters have been equipped with additional sensors and diffusers in an effort to decrease the infrared signatures of the air platforms.
They said the biggest threat has been from shoulder-launched heat-seeking surface-to-air missiles, such as the SA-7.
"But if you ask the pilots, they would say that MANPADS is the biggest threat," Shanahan said.By Jody Bourton
Earth News reporter
The saltmarsh sparrow has 'wild' mating habits
A bird living on the coast of the US is the world's most promiscuous bird, say scientists. The saltmarsh sparrow, a bird that lives in the marshes of Connecticut, was found to have extreme levels of multiple mating. The researchers found that 95% of females mated with more than one male during each nesting period. This unusual behaviour could be a survival mechanism due to coastal flooding, researchers say. The researchers, who are based in the US, publish their results in the journal The Auk. Sexy sparrows Using DNA analyses and studying the birds mating behaviour in the marsh habitat, the scientists revealed the highly promiscuous activities of the bird. We think that it is the most promiscuous bird species studied to date
Professor Chris Elphick
University of Connecticut "We found that nearly every clutch of eggs was the product of more than one father, and that within broods it was extremely common for any two siblings to have different fathers," says Professor Chris Elphick from the University of Connecticut. Professor Elphick undertook his research along with Professor Christopher Hill from Coastal Carolina University in South Carolina, US and Carina Gjerdrum of the Canadian Wildlife Service. The scientists found that at least 95% of females mate with more than one male for a single clutch of eggs. A clutch is defined as a set of eggs laid together in the nest at one time. One in three nests had a different father for every chick, and the average brood of chicks had more than 2.5 fathers. "The chance that any two chicks in the same nest have the same father is only 23%," says Professor Elphick. "We were not surprised to find some level of promiscuity," he says. "But we were quite stunned at just how extreme the rate was." 'Eggs in one basket' The saltmarsh sparrow (Ammodramus caudacutus) is a small, stocky bird that lives along the US Atlantic coast. Some of their behaviour is unusual for songbirds; males and females do not bond together to form pairs, and the males play no role in caring for chicks. The sparrows nest amongst the saltmarshes, and are vulnerable to frequent high tides, which can cause a high level of nest loss. Very high tides occur every four weeks - the same length of time it takes for the sparrow to raise a family. Who's your father? Professor Elphick suggests that the mating patterns are are a response to this risky environment. "If they lose their young to flooding, they have to re-nest almost immediately if the new set of young is to survive," he says. This means that female birds do not have time to look for and invest in the best male partner. The lack of time increases the likelihood of choosing a poor quality mate. To overcome this, it seems that females mate with several males. "The females don't want to put all their eggs in one basket so to speak," says Professor Elphick. Love contenders "We think that it is the most promiscuous bird species studied to date, although there are a couple of other possible contenders," says Professor Elphick. The greater vasa parrot (Coracopsis vasa) of Madagascar, and the superb fairywren (Malurus cyaneus) of Australia have comparable rates of promiscuity. "Both of these species also have multiple paternity in most nests, but it is unclear whether they have so many fathers per nest." The differences between studies that have been carried out into each of the bird species mean it is impossible to make a direct comparison. But their extreme promiscuity is not the most interesting thing about these birds, says Professor Elphick. "What is most interesting about these three species is that all have totally different social systems," he explains. "Unrelated species have all converged on high levels of promiscuity through very different sets of behaviours." "It's the multidimensional complexity of all those species - the many ways in which they differ from one another that makes the natural world so amazing."
Bookmark with: Delicious
Digg
reddit
Facebook
StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionTurkish divers have discovered the wreckage of a century-old Russian vessel that sunk in Lake Van nearly five decades ago.
Divers from the Lake Van Underwater Exploration Society have discovered the remains of a ship in good condition resting at the bottom of the lake, which apparently used to be a Russian cargo vessel that sank nearly half a century ago.
Tahsin Ceylan, prominent underwater photography and one of the society members, explained that this discovery was not in fact a fluke but rather a result of hard work and meticulous research.
"This vessel endured several eras. It witnessed the events that took place during the time of Russian and Ottoman empires, as well as the Turkish republic," he remarked.
According to Ceylan, while studying a 1968 treatise on the history of Tatvan, one of the ports on Lake Van, they learned that three vessels were built on a shipyard there when Russian Empire seized control of that area during World War I. One of the ships was destroyed by a fire while the second ended up as a rotting derelict; the third one however, a cargo ship called Akdamar (named after one of the Lake Van islands) sunk after hitting rocks during a storm in 1958.
The society researchers spent a whole year trying to determine the shipwreck’s location, and only announced their discovery when divers had found the vessel.
"Despite the fact that the ship was built in 1915, it is still in surprisingly good condition. It’s about 40 meters long, with a 6-7 meters tall mast. When the Russians abandoned this territory, the ship’s ownership passed first to the Ottoman Empire and then to the Turkish Republic; the vessel remained in service up until 1958 when it sank after hitting rocks, most likely during storm," Ceylan explained.
He also added that this is the first shipwreck to be discovered in Lake Van, and that this find may help promote underwater tourism in the region.BRISTOL, CT—Assigned to provide commentary over SportsCenter's Euro 2012 highlights Tuesday night, ESPN anchor Bob Ley was forced to explain first the existence of Europe to the show's audience, a daunting task that clearly frustrated him. "You know how we say the U.S. is a country? Well, Europe is many countries put together, and people live in them just like people live here," said Ley, rushing through his script as England and Ukraine played on screen, and failing to make it through even a brief overview of the continent's history or why it was relevant, much less who Wayne Rooney is or why it was good that the ball bounced off his head at the end of the field. "Over by where the Red Sox play is some water called the Atlantic Ocean, and on the other side of the water is Europe… Okay, let's just leave it at that. I've probably lost most of you by now." Ley then went on to highlights of the Sweden-France match, simplifying things by just calling the two foreign nations the "Blue Jays" and the "Expos."
AdvertisementPhoto
Donald J. Trump has had such a habit of reversing past positions that you can find some 30 varieties of flip-flops with his name on them for sale on Zazzle.
Photo
The liberal Media Matters website just highlighted CNN’s report on Trump reversals on foreign policy. The conservative National Review recently nailed him for “Flip-Flopping toward the Center.”
But Grist’s Ben Adler and Rebecca Leber have reported a fresh doozy, finding Trump’s name among dozens on a full-page ad that ran on Dec. 6, 2009, in The New York Times, as climate treaty talks were beginning in Copenhagen, calling for President Obama and Congress “to strengthen and pass United States legislation, and lead the world by example.” (Deepak Chopra, another signatory, published the letter on Huffington Post.)
Reflect for a second on just how profoundly the following portions of the ad text contradict Trump’s recent attacks on Obama’s climate concerns, Trump’s pledge to undo the Paris climate agreement and other Trump assertions listed by Adler and Leber:
We support your effort to ensure meaningful and effective measures to control climate change, an immediate challenge facing the United States and the world today. Please don’t postpone the earth. If we fail to act now, it is scientifically irrefutable that there will be catastrophic and irreversible consequences for humanity and our planet. We recognize the key role that American innovation and leadership play in stimulating the worldwide economy. Investing in a Clean Energy Economy will drive state-of-the-art technologies that will spur economic growth, create new energy jobs, and increase our energy security all while reducing the harmful emissions that are putting our planet at risk.
Here’s a closeup look at some of the names on the open letter:
Photo
Will these contradictions matter to the voters who’ll make a difference in November?
I’d like to think so, but I wouldn’t count on it.A Lesson from Jiro: How to Maximize the Impact of Your Craft
A.H. Chu Blocked Unblock Follow Following Oct 13, 2015
Damn good sushi. Courtesy: Sassy Raconeur
I do the same thing over and over. Improving bit by bit.
- Jiro Ono
In 2011, a documentary called Jiro Dreams of Sushi came out that tracked the life of 85-year-old sushi master, Jiro Ono, and how, over a lifetime of daily routine, like a single stream of water etching a hole in stone, Jiro has etched out one of the finest sushi experiences in the world.
On the surface, the quality of Jiro’s work is almost self-evident. Three Michelin stars. President Obama and Shinzo Abe dining there in 2014. Countless celebrities making it a point to visit his 10-seat restaurant. A month long wait list that fills the moment it becomes available.
Yes, this is damn good sushi and possibly the best sushi on the planet.
Like a radio tower, Jiro has been quietly broadcasting a signal so low but so penetrating that it has taken 85 years to build to this level.
But the question remains, how did he do it?
There must be something here to tell us what makes Jiro’s signal so strong, and his frequency so penetrating. An astute observation by the late Roger Ebert gives us an insightful glimpse into this mystery, a “portrait of tunnel vision” as he refers to it:
“Standing behind his counter, Jiro notices things. Some customers are left-handed, some right-handed. That helps determine where they are seated at his counter.
As he serves a perfect piece of sushi, he observes it being eaten. He knows the history of that piece of seafood. He knows his staff has recently started massaging an octopus for 45 minutes and not half an hour, for example.
Does he search a customer’s eyes for a signal that this change has been an improvement? Half an hour of massage was good enough to win three Michelin stars. You realize the tragedy of Jiro Ono’s life is that there are not, and will never be, four stars.” (Ebert, 2012)
Here is a man whose only obsession is not money, not power, not fame, but the perfect piece of sushi. If he had listened to the prevalent wisdom of the crowds, he may have picked a very different path.
But Jiro’s path is not a well-trodden one, it is a relentless pursuit of high quality. In narrowing his focus, like a lens directing sunlight to a single focal point, Jiro has increased his signal to noise ratio to other-worldly levels.
Take a look again at Roger Ebert’s description. Jiro notices things, whether customers are left or right handed. He serves. He observes. He knows the history of the food but he constantly seeks more. He makes a change to how he prepares. He searches his customer’s eyes for a signal that this change has been an improvement. The signal. These are the signs of a master tuning his frequency for maximum impact.
Observation
One sign of a high quality source is an astute power of observation. Observation is essential for the tuning process. Without a process in place to receive feedback, a radio tower only sends a signal one direction.
Over time, a radio tower that only sends a signal out but never receives a response back may find itself broadcasting on a frequency that no one is tuned into. This does not result in a very strong signal no matter how positive its content.
With all the little observations Jiro makes, from noticing which hand a customer favors, to watching the signals in their eyes as they eat, he is collecting this feedback endlessly. In contrast to the mass marketing surveys mentioned in The Secret of In-N-Out’s Success, this is not an impersonal check-the-box questionnaire. This is communication at a very deep level.
Jiro doesn’t talk very much in the documentary and probably talks even less in real life. But he is always communicating. The give and take between him and his customers is the life blood that keeps him going, keeps him tuned to his relentless pursuit and gives an endless stream of feedback that he can continue to use ad infinitum.
He |
ions are likely to give me this, provided I keep the warlord and vanguard with them as two separate units will easily give me the point, I then just need to keep my lines clear of enemy units.
Ascendency
Lots of obsec should make this straightforward.
Supremacy
Again the mobile obsec units should make this relatively straightforward, even if they only result in me contesting those other objectives, I can make sure the enemy doesn't hold them.
Domination
Up to 8 obsec units gives me the best possible chance when they can drop in and are so mobile. The main issue here will be drawing it late if my combat squads have been whittled down.
Overwhelming firepower
I really shouldn't struggle to achieve at least the base level with this list.
Blood and guts
This list isn't really designed to achieve the higher level of this card, but is certainly capable in terms of destroying units in combat.
No prisoners
The army is based around quality fire supported by volume, and whilst it might not have quite the ability to score the top level, it's got a good chance of reaching level 2.
Hungry for glory
The Warlord is a decent combat choice and should(!) beat most units he goes up against.
Psychological Warfare
There's not much I can do to affect this, but having a good combat option helps, because morale is the only place where an enemy's leadership can be reliably affected. Granted, taking the 1st company strikeforce would help here, but that would mean taking a third veteran unit and that's not really viable at these points levels.
Harness the warp
Sticking a librarian in there will help me get the base level, though if I want the higher level I'd need to drop some units to get another psyker into the list.
Kingslayer
This list is capable of killing most enemy HQ's, the only real question is how well the enemy protects them.
Witch Hunter
Again, this list shouldn't struggle to be able to kill a witch if I draw this card.
Scour the Skies
The Storm Hawk is made for this card.
Assassinate
Again, the list shouldn't struggle to facilitate character removal, the only problem will be if the enemy doesn't bring many, but it should still be possible.
Demolitions
Imperial Fists chapter tactics make the centurions extremely handy at achieving this one, on the rare occasions that my opponents actually bring a building!
Big Game Hunter
Shouldn't be a problem.
Space marine specific objectives
Death from above
With 3 drop pods and a jump unit, it should be possible, the only problem is if I lose the vanguard and my drop pods have already arrived by then. This further reinforces keeping the vanguard safe early on.
Honour the chapter
Realistically, the warlord is the only guy I'd really want to put forward for this one, though against minor characters I can see the vanguard sergeant being able. It should be achievable.
No mercy, no respite
The way morale works, I'm probably more likely to achieve it through kills, but the firepower in the list should certainly help in that regard.
For the Emperor.
If I do draw this one, then it's certainly a practical option to split off my warlord and pick up a pair of charges with him and the vanguard. I then only need 1 other unit to be in range for a token charge to pick up D3 points - doable.
Lightning Strike
The drop pods and the centurions certainly look likely candidates to fill this role, and the Storm Hawk should also be pretty good at it.
The Emperor's Retribution
Drop pods are ideal units for this type of work, though any obsec unit is able, and with some fast obsec stuff in my list there's no reason it shouldn't be possible to do.
Ok, so I'm pretty happy that all those objectives are as much within the reach of the army as possible, the only thing to consider is if I want to drop all the extra bits to try and fit in a librarian, and where he would go if I did - the sternguard are certainly an option in their pod, as would be the centurions to try and get them invisibility, or the vanguard to add yet more punch to that unit.
I'll let you know what I decide, though don't be surprised to see a libby with a jump pack in my hobby updates soon!
UPDATE:
I've been thinking quite a bit about this list over the last few days since I drafted this post, and I've looked to tighten it up in a few areas.
HQ
Captain remains the same
Level 2 librarian included, with jump pack and the Bones of Osrak. I decided that actually having a librarian in there was too important to leave out, the potential for psychic shriek, or invisibility on the devastator centurions for example, plus having a force weapon is never a bad thing. Given a single librarian can be fairly limited in effectiveness and is prone to suffering from a crappy roll or two, I decided the Bones of Osrak would give me some reliability. An extra power die and re-rolling failed psychic tests would make a single librarian a much more significant proposition for my opponents to face. I gave him a jump pack so that he would be capable of accompanying my warlord, or moving to other units quickly as necessary.
To pay for this however, I needed to make a few changes.
Elites
The sternguard lose the locator beacon from their pod - two would be nice but against most opponents one would be perfectly satisfactory. I've also jiggled their armament a bit, leaving three of them with combi grav weapons, but giving the remaining two meltaguns. Now they're a proper swiss army knife, meltas deal with tanks, grav with elite infantry and special ammo with anything else.
The vanguard change a bit too, with the sergeant dropping his relic blade back to a power sword instead. The effectiveness of this should be accounted for by the normal inclusion of the librarian in the unit.
Troops
This section probably sees the most change, with the scout squad losing their camo cloaks (not an ideal situation, but not drastic either.
The first tactical squad stay broadly the same, but the sergeant picks up a combi grav to support the grav, grav cannon and disintegration gun. This squad is now a prime candidate for using the combat squads rule, with 4 members of the unit carrying significant anti-elite weaponry. At full effectiveness, they'll be putting out 11 grav shots and 2 S5 AP2 instant death shots from the disintegration gun.
The second tactical squad gets the most change, as it gets cut to just five members. The sergeant picks up a combi flamer to support the flamer in the unit and the heavy bolter is dropped. This unit is now pretty much dedicated anti horde, with a pair of flamers being very nasty to blob squads. Ideally I'd have supplemented that with the large blast launcher for the pod, but I just didn't have the points.
Fast Attack
The storm hawk remains unchanged - the only points I could really save are for the typhoon missile launcher but I just find Skyhammer missiles a bit lacklustre.
Heavy Support
Only a tiny change here - the Centurion sergeant gets an omniscope. It's an incredibly useful piece of kit, and one I didn't really like leaving off in the first place - this is where the points from the camo cloaks went and I'm pretty confident the additional damage output and flexibility from the cents is worth the loss of cover for the scouts. I'll just have to keep them in their speeder longer is all!
Right, sorry for the monster post - congratulations if you got this far, hopefully it's been helpful to those of you who are new to building an army list, and equally interesting to those with experience to see how someone else goes about making the choices over what to include.
I'll leave you with last night's achievement - Epistolary Aquilino
And yes, I do love the irony of using Black Templars parts for the construction of my librarians.
Till next time, TBE
Well, the codex is not short of anti armour choices, from drop pods filled with melta guns to conversion beamers at range and lots of options in between.In my experience though, there's only one unit that tickles my fancy in this regard, and it's one I've reviewed on the blog previously - Devastator Centurions. Whilst the usual weapon load for centurions is grav cannons with deployment via drop pod, I prefer the slightly more subtle approach. Giving my centurions lascannons and missile launchers makes them an extremely potent anti armour threat, particularly if you give them Imperial Fists tactics to give them tank hunter on those S8/9 shots. The additional range on the guns over the grav cannons allows them to be deployed in a more defensive position, and remain fairly static throughout the game, there aren't many places on the table a lascannon can't reach if you think carefully about your deployment. I've used these guys before and they are exceedingly handy, and more to the point, they rarely got removed from the board in my games - I can only think of three occasions, the first when I advanced them up the table into the enemy guns for tactical reasons, the second when a Tau commander and crisis squad with plasma rifles deep struck into their faces (I then counter charged and picked up slay the warlord, whilst stopping my opponent getting linebreaker) and the third was when my opponent changed his list up to bring a plasma command squad - 8 plasma shots put paid to that particular adventure since there was no real cover on the board to use to protect them.That pretty much covers the reasons for including them I think, but it also raises the one drawback with regard to the centurions - being charged or dropped on! This point leads me onto my next choice, and conveniently also addresses one of the other questions I posed earlier - can I hold my own against a combat monster? Given that my centurions are a juicy target, and one that isn't particularly capable in combat, I will need to protect them, and that means having a unit around that will counter charge anything that drops in my face to target them. I can't do anything about units that drop in and shoot them to death (cough, grav centurions, cough) but I can look to protect them from more aggressive options.Whilst 40k is very much a game of shooting for the most part these days, combat is still an extremely useful tool in terms of the rapidity with which it can remove your opponent's units, as well as the capability of tying up the more devastating shooting options in an enemy force.With a few exceptions, I'm a firm believer that it's very difficult to build a truly balanced army without having something in there that is capable in combat. Yes, some armies build their entire damage output around it, while others ignore it completely, but if you don't bring anything capable in combat, you'd better have some serious shooting to counteract it. This was illustrated to me recently when a Chaos Warlord on a bike bounced around from fight to fight being more than capable of shredding the units he was facing, but always evading return firepower though a combination of speed, toughness and putting spawn units in the way. Whilst I had brought a combat unit to that game, it wasn't capable of dealing with a foe who struck before them and ignored their armour - consequently when the fight was joined my own combat option was neutered.Now as we have seen above, I've already built a combat warlord for this army, so he would need a bodyguard unit to run with him and provide support without being useless. Options for combat units in the marine codex are much less prevalent than choices in other parts of the codex, and I'm going to limit them even further by saying that I only want units that can keep up with the captain.As I see it that leaves me with three choices - the Assault Squad, the Vanguard Veterans and the Command Squad on bikes.The Assault squad is the cheapest of these, but I've said before and will say it again to anyone who doesn't run away with their hands over their ears, that the space marine assault squad is worthless as an assault unit - almost zero access to weapons with any sensible AP value limits them to the role of bullies against non combat units - and in this list I need this combat unit to be able to pull its weight.The Command Squad is a very effective unit I've used before with the Iron Fists, the extra point of toughness granted to the marines helps to keep them alive prior to getting into a fight, and against some opponents even makes hurting them in that fight more difficult. I'm not a huge fan of storm shields though, the limitation on damage output in my opinion really hurts a combat unit, and so I look to try and maximise damage output instead. My Captain will be capable of dealing with most things with his higher initiative and AP2, so really I'm looking to supplement his powers with a larger volume of quality attacks to give my opponents pause. In this instance, I'm inclined to go with the vanguard squad - the bike command squad is strictly speaking a better option, with higher toughness and the potential for feel no pain outweighing the additional damage output, but at 35pts more than the vanguard, they are more limiting for this list in terms of the points they eat up out of my total.5 Vanguard Veterans with jump packs should fit the bill nicely I think, with a relic blade for the sergeant to deal with tougher units, a pair of swords for dealing with 3+ armour at initiative values and a couple of axes to bite through terminator plate.In tactical terms however, this unit when combined with the captain is a costly one! It therefore needs to be wielded carefully, minimising its exposure to enemy fire.That pretty much covers the basics then, and I still have points to spend, so where do we go from here?Well, I'm using a CAD, and given the prevalence of maelstrom missions these days, some additional objective secured units won't go amiss, so I'll throw in another tactical squad to give me up to three more obsec units, taking the army total up to 8.These guys I want to keep fairly generic I think, and since I only really have one dedicated anti horde unit in the army so far, let's bulk out that section of the army. A full tactical squad with a heavy flamer and heavy bolter should do, and as with the first tactical squad I'll stick a power fist on the sergeant, you never know when they'll come in handy! These guys can go in a pod as well, which means ideally I want a third pod unit to make the most of the drop pod assault special rules.What's the best swiss army knife unit in the marine book? You guessed it, Sternguard. I'll stick a locator beacon on their pod too, so I've got two pods with them on, which should bring the third in nicely on target to give me a secondary battle line if I need one. Five guys with combi weapons should be sufficient in this regard, and I'm inclined to go with either melta or plasma on them. Melta to boost the anti tank potential of the army or plasma to give me more powerful anti infantry. Grav is an option, but without a grav amp it's not massively threatening to vehicles and I want these to be a threat to anything on the board. Plasma does that through high strength and decent rate of fire, whilst even a single melta is well capable of busting armour. I may even end up splitting the weaponry to bring a couple of plasmas and some melta.Bringing that all together then, we come up with the following:- main role - counter-assault. If the enemy has no drop capacity to threaten my deployment zone, then this unit is free to be more aggressive, using its mobility to either claim objectives, or threaten/tie up dangerous enemy units.- one fast mobile obsec unit, two units deployable around the table providing massed firepower with an element of anti elite infantry if necessary.- a single limited mobility unit with high damage resistance and long range firepower, supplemented by a fast moving flyer with anti tank capability and a mobile deployable anti tank threat.- air superiority fighter incorporated into the list, supplemented if necessary by twin linked anti armour fire from the ground, and high volume shooting against more fragile air units from tactical squads.I always think it's worth thinking about what else you could add to your list if necessary to make it more capable, particularly with reference to the 'typical' maelstrom cards that you may be asked to complete.Now it's fairly commonplace these days (and certainly within my club) to re-draw any maelstrom cards that can't be achieved within the possibility of the game, such as harnessing the warp if you have no psykers, or shooting down a flyer if your opponent has none etc.However, it's also fairly simple to add some flexibility into your army by seeing what you can do to achieve these cards, and harnessing the warp seemed to me to be the obvious standout from the possibilities. I've also found it's prudent to run your army through achieving each of the tactical objectives you might be faced with in your games, so here we go!Secure objective XHmm, I mentioned 8 obsec units didn't I? With a fast moving/infiltrating option as well, I've pretty much got the ability to claim objectives, if not at will, then certainly with a good degree of flexibility.ReconShouldn't be a problem with the number of pods and mobility within the army.Behind enemy linesMarines struggle less than any army here, and just a single pod with combat squads deploying from it will score me D3 points - I need to remember that when deciding whether to use combat squads or not, also that the unit doesn't have to bewithin 12", unlike linebreaker.Hold the lineMy centurions are likely to give me this, provided I keep the warlord and vanguard with them as two separate units will easily give me the point, I then just need to keep my lines clear of enemy units.AscendencyLots of obsec should make this straightforward.SupremacyAgain the mobile obsec units should make this relatively straightforward, even if they only result in me contesting those other objectives, I can make sure the enemy doesn't hold them.DominationUp to 8 obsec units gives me the best possible chance when they can drop in and are so mobile. The main issue here will be drawing it late if my combat squads have been whittled down.Overwhelming firepowerI really shouldn't struggle to achieve at least the base level with this list.Blood and gutsThis list isn't really designed to achieve the higher level of this card, but is certainly capable in terms of destroying units in combat.No prisonersThe army is based around quality fire supported by volume, and whilst it might not have quite the ability to score the top level, it's got a good chance of reaching level 2.Hungry for gloryThe Warlord is a decent combat choice and should(!) beat most units he goes up against.Psychological WarfareThere's not much I can do to affect this, but having a good combat option helps, because morale is the only place where an enemy's leadership can be reliably affected. Granted, taking the 1st company strikeforce would help here, but that would mean taking a third veteran unit and that's not really viable at these points levels.Harness the warpSticking a librarian in there will help me get the base level, though if I want the higher level I'd need to drop some units to get another psyker into the list.KingslayerThis list is capable of killing most enemy HQ's, the only real question is how well the enemy protects them.Witch HunterAgain, this list shouldn't struggle to be able to kill a witch if I draw this card.Scour the SkiesThe Storm Hawk is made for this card.AssassinateAgain, the list shouldn't struggle to facilitate character removal, the only problem will be if the enemy doesn't bring many, but it should still be possible.DemolitionsImperial Fists chapter tactics make the centurions extremely handy at achieving this one, on the rare occasions that my opponents actually bring a building!Big Game HunterShouldn't be a problem.Space marine specific objectivesDeath from aboveWith 3 drop pods and a jump unit, it should be possible, the only problem is if I lose the vanguard and my drop pods have already arrived by then. This further reinforces keeping the vanguard safe early on.Honour the chapterRealistically, the warlord is the only guy I'd really want to put forward for this one, though against minor characters I can see the vanguard sergeant being able. It should be achievable.No mercy, no respiteThe way morale works, I'm probably more likely to achieve it through kills, but the firepower in the list should certainly help in that regard.For the Emperor.If I do draw this one, then it's certainly a practical option to split off my warlord and pick up a pair of charges with him and the vanguard. I then only need 1 other unit to be in range for a token charge to pick up D3 points - doable.Lightning StrikeThe drop pods and the centurions certainly look likely candidates to fill this role, and the Storm Hawk should also be pretty good at it.The Emperor's RetributionDrop pods are ideal units for this type of work, though any obsec unit is able, and with some fast obsec stuff in my list there's no reason it shouldn't be possible to do.Ok, so I'm pretty happy that all those objectives are as much within the reach of the army as possible, the only thing to consider is if I want to drop all the extra bits to try and fit in a librarian, and where he would go if I did - the sternguard are certainly an option in their pod, as would be the centurions to try and get them invisibility, or the vanguard to add yet more punch to that unit.I'll let you know what I decide, though don't be surprised to see a libby with a jump pack in my hobby updates soon!UPDATE:I've been thinking quite a bit about this list over the last few days since I drafted this post, and I've looked to tighten it up in a few areas.HQCaptain remains the sameLevel 2 librarian included, with jump pack and the Bones of Osrak. I decided that actually having a librarian in there was too important to leave out, the potential for psychic shriek, or invisibility on the devastator centurions for example, plus having a force weapon is never a bad thing. Given a single librarian can be fairly limited in effectiveness and is prone to suffering from a crappy roll or two, I decided the Bones of Osrak would give me some reliability. An extra power die and re-rolling failed psychic tests would make a single librarian a much more significant proposition for my opponents to face. I gave him a jump pack so that he would be capable of accompanying my warlord, or moving to other units quickly as necessary.To pay for this however, I needed to make a few changes.ElitesThe sternguard lose the locator beacon from their pod - two would be nice but against most opponents one would be perfectly satisfactory. I've also jiggled their armament a bit, leaving three of them with combi grav weapons, but giving the remaining two meltaguns. Now they're a proper swiss army knife, meltas deal with tanks, grav with elite infantry and special ammo with anything else.The vanguard change a bit too, with the sergeant dropping his relic blade back to a power sword instead. The effectiveness of this should be accounted for by the normal inclusion of the librarian in the unit.TroopsThis section probably sees the most change, with the scout squad losing their camo cloaks (not an ideal situation, but not drastic either.The first tactical squad stay broadly the same, but the sergeant picks up a combi grav to support the grav, grav cannon and disintegration gun. This squad is now a prime candidate for using the combat squads rule, with 4 members of the unit carrying significant anti-elite weaponry. At full effectiveness, they'll be putting out 11 grav shots and 2 S5 AP2 instant death shots from the disintegration gun.The second tactical squad gets the most change, as it gets cut to just five members. The sergeant picks up a combi flamer to support the flamer in the unit and the heavy bolter is dropped. This unit is now pretty much dedicated anti horde, with a pair of flamers being very nasty to blob squads. Ideally I'd have supplemented that with the large blast launcher for the pod, but I just didn't have the points.Fast AttackThe storm hawk remains unchanged - the only points I could really save are for the typhoon missile launcher but I just find Skyhammer missiles a bit lacklustre.Heavy SupportOnly a tiny change here - the Centurion sergeant gets an omniscope. It's an incredibly useful piece of kit, and one I didn't really like leaving off in the first place - this is where the points from the camo cloaks went and I'm pretty confident the additional damage output and flexibility from the cents is worth the loss of cover for the scouts. I'll just have to keep them in their speeder longer is all!Right, sorry for the monster post - congratulations if you got this far, hopefully it's been helpful to those of you who are new to building an army list, and equally interesting to those with experience to see how someone else goes about making the choices over what to include.I'll leave you with last night's achievement - Epistolary AquilinoI went 'overboard' a bit on the details with this model, but having kept the 3rd company captain very plain (you'll see him on Monday) I wanted a contrast with the more mystical librarian. I'll need to think of something suitably impressive to paint on his banner, but there's loads of detail here - I even went so far as to add a little reliquary to his belt for the Bones of Osrak.And yes, I do love the irony of using Black Templars parts for the construction of my librarians.Till next time, TBE
So we're back to this again - another look at the Dusk Knights space marines and my efforts at creating a'standard' list for use in my games.Given how I'm also trying to go back to 'basics' with the marines and how I use them, I also decided to go back to first principles and use a CAD as the basis for the list. If it's effective I can then look at how to go about tweaking it to fit into either a gladius or a sternhammer later (I've looked at the other options and don't like them).So, as ever we need answers for the following questions.I'm not addressing the matter of psychic powers there, because in my experience, unless you're a psychic heavy army yourself, the psychic phase is either not overly devastating if your opponent isn't focusing on it either, or you won't compete at all if they are.On top of that, having been devastated recently by a rampaging Chaos Warlord, I also need to think about the following.The report is a review of an earlier decision denying compensation to the employee, who is not identified. The Workplace Compensation Board of British Columbia, citing privacy laws, would not give information about the worker or his settlement.
The dogs were owned by Howling Dogs Tours Whistler, a company controlled by Outdoor Adventures. Ms. Moriarty said that her inspectors had investigated other complaints about Howling Dogs’ treatment of its animals over the past few years. In the period leading up to the Olympics, she added, the company expanded its operations, moving to Whistler from a smaller town.
Exactly what prompted the killings in April is not clear from the report.
Ms. Moriarty speculated that without the Olympic tourists, Howling Dogs found that it could not afford to carry 300 animals. Graham Aldcroft, the director of operations for Outdoor Adventures, denied that was the case in an e-mail, but he did not offer another explanation.
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.
According to the report, a veterinarian refused to kill healthy dogs. Attempts to find them other homes were unsuccessful. Ms. Moriarty said that because sled dogs usually spend their entire lives outdoors, primarily in the company of other animals, they “are not highly adoptable.”
The killing went on for two days, and several of the deaths were grisly, the compensation board’s report said. When an initial shot failed to kill a dog that was the mother of the employee’s family pet, she ran around with her “cheek blown off and her eye hanging out” until she was felled by a rifle with a scope, according to the report. The bullet also penetrated another dog, which was not supposed to be part of the kill and which suffered for about 15 minutes before dying.
Another dog, left for dead for 20 minutes, emerged from a mass grave only to be shot again, the report said. The employee said he eventually wrapped his arms in foam padding after the frightened dogs began attacking him.
Under Canadian criminal law it is not illegal to kill dogs using a gun, provided it is done without undue suffering. Ms. Moriarty’s officers may dig up the mass grave after the spring thaw.
Outdoor Adventures said in a statement that it had known about the cull, “but it was our expectation that it was done in a proper, legal and humane manner.” The company said that it learned otherwise only on Friday, when it received a copy of the compensation board’s report. The company said that new policies were introduced several months ago to prevent another mass shooting.
The man who shot the dogs remains an employee, the company said.Auro Update for April 2014, and the Dinofarm Forums
Time for an Auro update! This past month has been incredibly huge for this game – probably one of the most productive months on record, largely because I reached a threshold in learning to program that has allowed me to really start contributing on the code side (not just the game design, music, sound, writing, and web stuff sides). I’ll put this one in sort of a list-like format, just to spice stuff up. Here we go!
First of all, you can go check out the new Beta Updates thread over here to find out exactly what’s been going on, down to the nitty-gritty detail. In this post, I’ll just mention some of the big stuff.
I single handedly, with my own two hands programmed the entirety of the PLAY MODE metagame. You can now win and lose games which add or subtract from a big green XP bar. If you win more games, you level up. As you level up, the game gets harder. If you’re up to the Hard Mode levels, losing makes you lose XP. Even cooler: there’s a placement match when you first start, so that if you’re already good when the game comes out (as many of our beta testers already are), the game will automatically advance you to a higher skill level so that you don’t have to grind through the easier modes.
There’s also a Custom Games screen which allows players to “free play” an un-ranked game on any difficulty mode.
In the Custom Games screen you can also play MADNESS MODE, which has crazy, unfair and outrageous monster generation. You might face a level full of a dozen Slimes, or 3Yetis and 3 Troggles, or 20 rats. It’s unfair, unranked, and unpredictable!
The game now keeps track of all kinds of records, like wins and losses, highest scores on various modes, and more.
I mostly implemented a system of NOTES that will appear throughout the game. Think of notes as kinda like “loading screen texts” – little 2-3 sentence long ditties that give you some bit of lore, a tip, or some other strange thing. You can collect these, and the game keeps track of how many you’ve found.
Tons of balancing on the Easy, Normal and Hard modes. Can’t wait to get a new version out to testers to see what they think.
Oh, I also created a new commercial site for Auro – check it out at http://www.auro-game.com.
Yes, I’ve switched from the all-caps AURO to Auro. I think it’s better that way; AURO looks like it’s an acronym for something. Also we have a subtitle now – “Auro: A Tactical Bumping Game” is the full title. What do you think?
So them’s the updates. Things are generally happening on-schedule and I’m feeling good about getting this game out before the summer comes. With PLAY MODE basically 100% done, all that’s left to do is some story mode tweaks, bug fixes, and polish. Experienced developers are probably going, “oh is that ALL?!” sarcastically. I know that’s a lot, but we’ve now got three programmers on the job, so I’m pretty optimistic.
Dinofarm Games Forums
The other thing I wanted to talk about briefly is our forums, which can be accessed at http://www.dinofarmgames.com/forum/. The forums have been active since Auro began around two years ago, but in the last few months they’ve really taken off. What I really want for the forums is to create a place where somewhat like-minded people can get together to talk about game design and other topics, and recently that has become a reality. Some very high quality conversations have been taking place in the last few months, and if you like to talk about game design or anything in a very critical, clinical and not-personal way, you should consider coming by. Here are some of the best threads:
– A thread taking apart grinding and trying to parse exactly what it even is
– A great discussion about the fundamental differences between contests and games, and why “rankings” don’t work in games
– Is “reading” really a thing, or no?
A massive thread about stories in games and why they don’t work
As well as some lighter stuff, like this PC/Console/Web game recommendation thread and this iOS/Android game recommendation thread. Anyway, I’m posting about it because we’d love to have some more members. Please consider stopping by and inviting some friends. Oh, and as always, feel free to sign up for the Auro Beta in the Getting Started section of the Auro forum.California is the only state where lane-splitting is legal. Here is what lane-splitting looks like from a car on a busy Los Angeles highway. (The Washington Post)
LOS ANGELES — Let’s say you’re stuck in traffic in Los Angeles, which is a frequent and annoying experience, but also the price you pay for living in one of the greatest cities on earth, or visiting here.
Suddenly, a motorcycle roars past, so close to your car that you think his kneecap is going to whack your side view mirror. You watch with amazement as this helmeted daredevil threads through two lines of cars, sometimes weaving as traffic shifts lanes. Then you look in the rear view mirror and see a line of motorcycles coming your way, about to do the same thing. You wonder where the cops are. And then you see a California Highway Patrol motorcycle officer zipping through traffic the same way.
This is lane-splitting, California-style. Also known as lane-sharing, filtering, or stripe-riding, lane-splitting allows motorcyclists to cut through slow-moving traffic by cutting between cars. It’s wild, it’s scary, it’s fascinating and – despite how crazy it looks – it’s legal in the Golden State. The big surprise is that, within limits, it’s also safe, at least according to one of the few studies that’s looked at the practice.
And that’s why the Washington region area should consider allowing it here.
“There’s many opinions about it and very little data,” said Chris Cochran, a spokesman for the California Office of Traffic Safety, which conducted a study of lane-splitting. “Out of that study came the data that lane-splitting in and of itself — when done in what we refer to as in a safe and prudent manner — is no more dangerous than regular motorcycle-riding.”
Motorcyclists have long claimed that the practice is safer than remaining in a lane in stop-and-go traffic because it lowers the risk of being rear-ended and allows them to maneuver to open road. It also saves time, obviously. But it also means riding much closer to other vehicles.
The subject comes up a lot in riders’ forums. Although it’s illegal in most jurisdictions, many motorcyclists admit to lane-splitting when highways become parking lots, even if it means risking a traffic ticket. They say law enforcement generally overlooks the practice, unless the biker blazes through.
The most negative reaction usually comes from angry drivers in cars. For them, it’s not only startling to have a motorcycle whiz by so close, it can seem dangerous. And some car-bound motorists just don’t like it that motorcyclists are cutting to the head of the line.
Right now, California is the only place lane-splitting is allowed, Cochran said. State law there, unlike in other jurisdictions, is silent on the issue. That could change soon, however, as the California State Assembly considers legislation to recognize and allow lane-splitting under certain conditions.
[Not lane-splitting: this guy taunted the police stunting and found out why that’s not too smart]
California, by virtue of its size and climate, has a sizable number of motorcycles, and its pack is growing. The number of registered motorcycles in California has increased by about 29 percent in 10 years, from nearly 700,000 in 2005 to nearly 900,000 in 2015, Cochran said.
The number of accidents has also risen. In 2013, which is most recent year of easily available data, there were 463 motorcycle fatalities and 11,946 seriously injuries, Cochran said.
His agency decided to look into lane-splitting because of its widespread practice there and commissioned studies on the subject, including one on motorists’ attitudes toward lane-splitting and another on safety.
The safety study – which was conducted by the Safe Transportation Research & Education Center at the University of California Berkeley — found that lane-splitting, when done within certain limits, is no more dangerous than riding a motorcycle otherwise. The study examined 5,969 crashes between June 2012 and August 2013 using enhanced data-reporting by police. It found a lower rate of fatalities among lane-splitting motorcycles and less serious injuries overall.
The study found that most of the bikers who |
us will take a weekly look at each player left in the game, ranking them in order from most likely – least likely to win the game as of the end of the weeks’ action.
The scoring system is pretty simple; each ranker receives points correlating to the Survivor’s ranking the week they are voted out. For example, if the next person voted out was Anneliese, James would score 1 point, Jonathan would score 1 and Josh would score 2. At the end of the season, the highest scorer wins.
This segment, and this website in general, is all about feedback, so please comment/tweet about who you agree with, and make this a real discussion between the fan community.
Competition Standings (Up until the end of episode 11) – Kent voted out this week.
1. James – 45 Points ( up 8)
2. Jonathan – 38 Points ( up 8)
3. Josh – 33 Points ( up 6)
SAMATAU
James Rowland @jamrowl Jonathan Sloan @jonathanlsloan Josh Willett @jaywill_72 1 Jarrad Seng Nicola ‘Ziggy’ Zagame Nicola ‘Ziggy’ Zagame 2 Tessa O’Halloran Jarrad Seng Jarrad Seng 3 Locky Gilbert Tessa O’Halloran Tessa O’Halloran 4 Peter Conte Ben Morgan Peter Conte 5 Nicola ‘Ziggy’ Zagame Peter Conte Henry Nicholson 6 Ben Morgan Aaron ‘AK’ Knight Ben Morgan 7 Henry Nicholson Locky Gilbert Locky Gilbert 8 Aaron ‘AK’ Knight Henry Nicholson Aaron ‘AK’ Knight
James
With the impending complete tribe swap I’m going to assess each player on their game and how high likely the target will be on them in a likely swap scenario.
Jarrad has gone quiet lately after his strong opening. I don’t think he is neccessarily seen as AK’s No.2 which bodes well for him. He is good enough in challenges and not making too many waves to be considered for now. Tessa will find a way to avoid the vote, I do realise she was targeted early but if the numbers don’t go her way there will be bigger fish to fry. Locky will be saved by this swap and more likely than not he will be kept until the merge for challenge prowess. Can’t wait for the scenes where he complains about AK to others. Peter, I thought you were not in trouble, but Tara was very salty when you didn’t vote with her 15 odd days ago. But you should be right, Tara doesn’t hold a grudge right? I sat screaming at my TV. You absolutely, do not, want to be voted to get the reward. But if your tribe is offering it up you aren’t just going to flat out refuse that now are you? HUGE target is set on Ziggy’s back now. Very interested to see what she tells her tribe about the idol(s). Ben has improved in my eyes, that clutch finish to the immunity super special reward challenge was impressive. In saying that I could see Ben being culled if your tribe loses and there is not an AK or Henry to target. Better hope you swap into a pond with big fish. Henry you are one of my absolute favourites this season. But mate, you really are in a tough spot going into this swap. Your two closest allies have been chopped and you only made a bond with Locky on Samatau. Nice move in handing Jericho a fake clue, but possibly the wrong guy to try that on. AK is a known game threat and if he is swapped onto a tribe with any coalition that doesn’t consist of his majority, I see AK in a huge amount of trouble. No idol to save him and people gunning for him who he already voted out. I’d be asking Ziggy if she could give you one of those idols quick smart.
Jonathan
Ziggy is clearly the player to beat right now. The fact that everyone trusted her enough to basically give her this super idol speaks volumes as to just how good her social game is. I read that we’ve gone seven consecutive episodes without hearing from Jarrad, which is a new Survivor record, but for some reason it’s not like he’s been absent from the show. Maybe we just haven’t heard from him because his spot in the game is perfect. To be honest, Tessa’s been pretty forgettable these last few weeks. But she seems smart, so I’m giving her the benefit of the doubt. This was absolutely the breakout week for my boy Ben. Won the challenge for Samatau in the most recent episode, and I’m sure this is the start of a legacy for the true challenge beast. Ozzy who? I found it really telling that, when AK was naming his allies before the Reward Tribal Council, he mentioned that he trusted Ziggy, Jarrad and Tessa, but not Peter. That’s not ideal going forward if he’s the obvious fifth wheel in that alliance, coupled with Tara’s grudge against him. To be honest, if I hadn’t seen the ad for the tribe swap, I would have had AK much higher, because he’s sitting beautifully in this tribe. But a swap could seriously derail that, because he’s such an obvious target moving forward. This tribe swap can’t come quickly enough for Locky. At this point, I don’t think he even cares where he goes, as long as it isn’t with AK. same fam. Anyone who’s seen me in the live Reddit throws knows that I’m a huge Henry fan, and I would legitimately love to go to Splendour and see Vampire Weekend with him, but things aren’t looking good at the moment. His best shot is getting swapped to a tribe without Ziggy and her idol-cancelling power, because I think that idol is gonna have to be used if he’s to make the merge.
Josh
Ziggy is straight to the top after she was backed in by her tribemates to win the Super Idol. It’ll be interesting to see how she explains the situation to her tribe, but regardless she is in a fantastic spot. Jarrad is still playing a part in calling the shots for the majority, but he’d be loving the fact that he can patiently wait in the wings while the alpha males duke it out around him. Tessa is in a good spot within the majority alliance and seems to have some influence within the tribe. She is playing a good game and is placed well barring any major moves. I’m not 100% on Peter’s game at the moment, but he’s sitting in the majority so I guess he’s safe for the time being? Henry has a huge target on his back after giving off some serious “AK week one” vibes of trying way too hard to engrain himself within the tribe. His immunity idol is still in play so he should be safe for now, but his overall plan of switching tribes is falling apart just like his old alliance. Ben has made the most of his shift to Samatau, and is placed in the majority alliance. I mean yes he’s on the bottom of the majority, but he’s still in it, so that’s a plus for him. Locky managed to get over the fact that he’s not him when he’s hungry (Is he gunning for a Snickers sponsorship post game?), but his attempt to get himself the ultimate reward was dead before it started, so he’s clearly still very much on the outer. AK’s laziness around the camp has to be grinding a few gears, plus I’m really falling behind the other boys so I’m persisting with the Hail Mary pass that is having AK on the bottom of my ranking. It would take a big move for it to happen, but I do think it’s getting more conceivable by the episode.
ASAGA
James Rowland @jamrowl Jonathan Sloan @jonathanlsloan Josh Willett @jaywill_72 1 Anneliese Wilson Sarah Tilleke Anneliese Wilson 2 Sarah Tilleke Anneliese Wilson Sarah Tilleke 3 Odette Blacklock Jericho Malabonga Luke Toki 4 Michelle Dougan Luke Toki Jericho Malabonga 5 Jericho Malabonga Michelle Dougan Tara Pitt 6 Luke Toki Tara Pitt Michelle Dougan 7 Tara Pitt Odette Blacklock Odette Blacklock
James
Anneliese had an awesome showing this week. From the cheeky idol snag to creating a bond with Sarah, it shows that she is thinking about the game. Some may say it was dumb to trust Sarah but it shows vulnerability that someone like Sarah will appreciate. She is forging a bond which will go far. Why would I doubt that Sarah would land on her feet? After being ousted by Kent as a threat, her name didn’t pop up again and she handled Anneliese’s situation great. Other people would go back to the majority with information about an idol but Sarah saw the opportunity to create something else which was spot on. Odette could be saved by this swap, she is unassuming and now in a position to make the merge. As long as her and Sarah don’t bicker too much in future challenges! Michelle is par for the course right now. Not the biggest threat but also could be a challenge liability. Really depends on who she ends up with. Jericho has proven to be sneaky and this perception will eventually show up on the island. He may be collateral in a swap. While Luke is personable and so bloody fun (TWO SHARKS), he could be in trouble. Somewhat seen as the head of the Asaga majority, he could be targeted by a Tessa, AK, Jarrad core if the numbers fall that way. Imagine if he Teams up with AK though. That would be a producers dream. In Survivor it is not a good idea to be hellbent on revenge. It tends to unravel and the person you target so hard may go out but you will have created such a target on yourself that you will be next. Tara will not rest until AK is out, I can guarantee that. She’s going to be so vocal about it that it will ruin her game, again.
Jonathan
For some reason, everyone seems to want to work with Sarah, which is great for her, but really poor judgement from everyone else. Anneliese had a great week, with her dorky T-Shirt being the MVP of the family gifts. Also now holds an idol, so she’s looking good for the moment. Jericho is getting all the benefits from his relationship with Luke, but without any of the target. Also, interviews from those who have been voted out have all said that everybody out there loves this guy almost as much as he loves cookies and ice cream, so surely that’s a good sign. He’s undoubtedly the breakout star of the season, and he’s sitting pretty at the moment, but there’s definitely a danger that Luke could be usurped pre-merge, just like Craig last year. Could Sarah be his Phoebe and ruin it all for him? Last week we learnt that Michelle is a wine mum. This week we learned that she needs to get herself some Passion Pop ASAP, because she needs to relax. The INV-INV-INV-OTTN5 edgic is a bold move Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off. I honestly can’t really remember anything Tara did on the show this week. I’m just assuming it wasn’t very good, because that seems to be the recurring trend with Tara’s gameplay. Was great to hear a bit about Odette’s backstory, but the numbers aren’t looking good for her. While a tribe swap sounds good for Odette, she doesn’t really have any allies to work with.
Josh
Anneliese has rocketed to the top for me after finding that immunity idol and linking up with Sarah, she’s in a very strong position and must be absolutely loving her move to Asaga. Sarah had another good week of making moves, and she’s in a fantastic spot aligned now with Anneliese. She’ll be around for another while I reckon. Luke will keep making bold claims and trying to make big moves, but I’m not sure there’s enough of a reason for the others to try to get rid of him, which suits him perfectly. Jericho is still placed well as the loveable scamp of the tribe, and still not seen as a threat which is exactly what he’s after. Tara seems to have solidified a place within Asaga, so I think she’s safe for now unless she gets chucked back in with her Samatau mates in the swap. Michelle’s name just keeps coming up at tribal council, and there’s only so much further she can go given her struggles in challenges. Odette looks clearly on the outer after this week and even though it could just be the edit, I’m not sure she has the social game to drag herself back into the majority. She could be in strife.
What do you think? Are we close at all or way off? Who has the best chance to win our competition?
Thanks for reading!
AdvertisementsWith the Sacramento Kings most likely not making the playoffs this season, you would think it was time for George Karl to start playing his young players more minutes right? False.
Although fans have seen a flash or two where the young players of the Kings were able to get some decent minutes on the court it has however been inconsistent.
One player that has experienced this uncertainty has been one of the Kings shooting guards Seth Curry.
Curry has been a player that the Kings, and especially their fans, have been optimism of since joining the Kings this season due to his potential as a sharpshooter.
So far in his tenure with Sacramento (33 games) he has averaged 4 points per game off of shooting 44% from the floor, 40.4% from the perimeter, and 78.1% from the free throw line.
Also, in the 33 games that Curry has sported the Sacramento uniform on the court, he is only averaging a hair over 11 minutes of play in each contest. That is the lowest amount of playing time compared to the other two guards on the squad which contain Ben McLemore, Marco Belinelli, and James Anderson.
To be fair, Curry was given 34 minutes of playing time when the Kings faced off against the New Orleans Pelicans last Wednesday, but the three games after that he has seen a mere total of 4 minutes of action. One of those games he didn’t even see the court against a hapless New York Knicks team.
Like I said, the chances that the Kings will make the playoffs this season are pretty much over, so why not play Curry more minutes to gain more experience?
Curry is still only 25 years of age and has only played a total of 37 games in his NBA career. More experience will definitely give him a better feel for the speed, strength, and IQ of the NBA that will benefit him going forward.
Not only that but McLemore, usual starting two-guard, has been out since March 9 due to a finger injury. So those minutes should, at least, be partially made up by Curry due to them playing the same role and position.
Seth Curry has shown some promise throughout this season that he can be part of the Kings future going forward, but if the Kings keep sitting him on the bench it’s going to slow down the process of him reaching his full potential.
It’s confusing why Curry doesn’t get enough time on the court. Like I said the Kings need to evaluate their young talent plus he also has the promise to be a good player.
Even despite that, Curry has shown through his play that sometimes he can be the best option at two-guard for the Kings. Maybe Karl (former North Carolina Tar Heel) just despises anything Duke related, Curry’s former collegiate team.
So with 12 more games left in the regular season, it is uncertain whether Coach Karl will give more playing for Curry. But one thing certain is that he sure deserves it.“I’m getting my PhD in sociology.”
“Wow, ang galing naman!” (Wow, that’s so impressive!)
ADVERTISEMENT
Whenever Filipinos ask me what I do for a living, I explain that I am a Ph.D. student in sociology. As a Filipina who purposely pursued a career in a non-medical field, I am a unicorn in the Filipino community. I selected my career not because I want to be financially secure—the ultimate goal of any child of Filipino immigrants—but because our community faces deep issues with the current US immigration policy.
And yet, the Filipino community is not talking about these issues. At least not out in the open. If you are lucky enough to be in a party with a house full of Filipinos, then your chances of hearing immigration stories are relatively high.
“Pupunta na dito yung kapatid ko! Ten years kaming hindi nagkita.” (My sibling is finally coming [to the US]! I haven’t her in 10 years!)
“Hanggang ngayon, hindi pa siya citizen. Nag-age out kasi sa petition, eh.” (Until now, she’s not a [U.S.] citizen. She aged out of the petition.)
Separations and problems
These narratives of family separation and problems with legal status are commonplace within the Filipino community both in New York City and around the country. For Filipino immigrant families, family separation—sometimes spanning years, sometimes decades—has evolved into the norm rather than the exception.
The discussions surrounding these issues in Filipino parties are typically descriptive and not critical of the institutions at work.
The attitude of “Bahala na” (leave it to chance) or as it is colloquially known, Bahala na si Batman, also speaks to the religious faith of Filipinos: the universe will help you solve your problems and there is no need to raise a ruckus.
I, however, cannot remain silent about these issues.
ADVERTISEMENT
I am conducting my dissertation on how legal status affects ethnic identity formation in Filipino immigrant young adults. I interview US citizens, permanent residents, non-immigrant visa holders and undocumented Filipinos living in the Greater New York-New Jersey metropolitan area who are between 21 and 32 years old.
After about two years of data collection, I have collected 36 interviews—20 U.S. citizens, eight permanent residents, seven non-immigrant visa holders, and one undocumented person. My goal is to conduct interviews with 15 Filipinos for each legal status group.
Difficulty finding interviewees
When I wrote my dissertation proposal, I surmised that the Greater New York-New Jersey metropolitan area’s large concentration of Filipinos would make my data collection progress smooth. I interviewed 20 Filipino U.S. citizens without much of a hitch. About 5 percent of the 3.4 million Filipinos in the United States reside in New York State while New Jersey has another 5 percent.
Despite this large concentration of Filipinos in my recruitment sites, I have found it extremely difficult to find noncitizen Filipinos to interview. The “hiya” (shame, embarrassment) associated with legal status, especially with TNT’s (‘tago nang tago,’ literally translates to “hiding and hiding”), has made it impossible for me to find willing noncitizens for my research.
Even Filipinos with legal status are afraid to be interviewed, for fear of accidentally revealing too much. I found this resistance to be surprising; in social settings, Filipinos are more than happy to “out” their family or friends’ legal status. But when I ask for help and referrals from potential participants, I am often met with hesitation and sometimes downright hostility.
Inadequacies of system
As a researcher, I am obligated to show how the inadequacies of the current immigration system affect the Filipino and Filipino American community. The current literature on Filipino immigrants does not reflect the reality of Filipino-U.S. immigration. At the time of this writing, there are few studies on Filipino immigrant young adults living in the United States. Present studies on Filipino immigrants focus on those with U.S. citizenship. Conclusions based on these may not apply to all of the thousands of Filipinos who immigrate to the U. every year. Finally, the narratives of Filipinos who immigrate, become undocumented and live their lives in the shadows, are sorely lacking in the current academic literature and political discussion.
The Department of Homeland Security estimates 310,000 out of the 3.4 million Filipinos residing in the United States are undocumented. Of those, approximately 22,000 young Filipino immigrants were eligible for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Now that President Trump is putting an end to the DACA program, the 6,000 Filipino young adults who applied for DACA are at risk of deportation.
Now more than ever, the Filipino community needs research that discusses the implications of the U.S. immigration system and pushes the dire need for comprehensive immigration reform.
Daniela Pila is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University at Albany, SUNY. She would very much like to conduct more interviews with noncitizen Filipinos and finish her dissertation sometime before the next millennia. She can be reached at dpila@albany.edu. She lives in Rockland County with her husband and their fur child, Luna. To learn more about Daniela’s research, please click on the link below: https://youtu.be/13abPYdw5bQ.
Read NextBRITAIN’S ECONOMY MAY be heading for a triple dip, but for posh British cars the recession has long been over. Sales of Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) last year were 30% up on the previous year. Over the past two years JLR has taken on 9,000 people, and has just decided to near-double the size of the engine factory it is building in the West Midlands.
Rolls-Royce, which sold a record 3,575 of its ultra-luxury cars last year, is on a roll too. At the Geneva motor show it unveiled the new Wraith, a coupé for playboys with at least €245,000 ($320,000) to spare who want to leave the chauffeur at home and do the driving themselves. Bentley, which launched a new Flying Spur limousine at the Geneva motor show, enjoyed sales growth of 24% last year.
Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks.
These days JLR is owned by India’s Tata Group, Rolls-Royce by BMW and Bentley by Volkswagen, but the cars’ appeal still relies on their quintessential Britishness. Similarly, the success of BMW, Mercedes and Audi cars rests on their German styling and precision engineering, both in rich countries and among the new wealthy of the emerging world.
The contrast between the luxury end and the mass-market part of the European car business is striking. BMW has recently been making operating profits of about €4,000 ($5,200) on each car it sells whereas Opel-Vauxhall, the European arm of GM, has been losing about €1,500 per car. And the global boom in premium-priced cars looks likely to continue. “One thing is for sure,” says Rolls-Royce’s boss, Torsten Müller-Ötvös. “You will see more rich people in the world.” The group of “ultra-high net worth individuals” from which his customers are drawn is expected to grow by 3-5% a year in the years ahead. And in East Asia, where sales are growing fastest, it is more acceptable—expected, even—to underline your success in life by conspicuous consumption.
In a recent study of motor-industry executives from around the world by KPMG, those from rich countries said customers were scaling down to smaller, more efficient and greener models, whereas those from the BRIC countries reported that buyers wanted upmarket models. Even those who could not currently afford these seemed to be looking forward to the day when they would. Tata’s super-cheap Nano has not sold well because India’s first-time car buyers would rather wait than drive what they see as a poor man’s car.
The feelgood factor
A survey by McKinsey of Chinese consumers found that after an initial burst of “if you’ve got it, flaunt it”, motives for buying foreign luxury brands were becoming more subtle. Some respondents saw having the right car as a visiting card with which to impress potential business partners. Many considered a fancy car a delightful self-indulgence rather than something to show off to others. Mr Müller-Ötvös sees the same trend among Rolls-Royce buyers: they are less interested in exterior bling, more in interior comforts, “like having the fur inside your coat”.
In China the market for luxury cars in the past decade has grown by an average of 36% a year, far outstripping the 26% annual rise in its overall car market. Even as growth slows down in the next few years, McKinsey expects the premium-car market to maintain a lead, expanding by an average of 12% a year to 2020, compared with around 8% for the car market as a whole. By then China will be the biggest market for luxury cars.
Nor is it just Chinese buyers who are keen on status symbols on wheels. JLR’s sales chief, Phil Popham, says his company expects the global market for premium cars to increase by up to 45% over the next ten years. JLR is looking beyond the BRICs into the MIST: populous countries such as Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea and Turkey, whose middle classes are also expanding. Its cars, especially its Range Rover sport-utility vehicle, have joined the elite group of “Veblen goods”, the sort that become more desirable as they get more expensive (named after Thorstein Veblen, a sociologist who invented the concept in 1899). The first incarnation of the Range Rover in the 1970s was a rugged, utilitarian beast ideal for farmers. The latest version, with its sleek styling, plush interiors, high-tech aluminium frame and impressive performance, caters to a different kind of customer. Prices range from £71,000 ($109,000) to well over £100,000.
One of Rolls-Royce’s stories is that three-quarters of the cars the company has ever produced are still on the road
The key to success in the luxury market, explains Mr Müller-Ötvös, is that customers want to be able to tell their friends, family and business associates some good stories about what they have bought. For a brand as steeped in history as Rolls-Royce, that is no problem. One of its stories is that three-quarters of the cars the company has ever produced are still on the road: “It is a smart investment,” he says. McLaren, a successful British maker of sports cars, is drawing on its heritage as a Formula 1 racing team. Tesla’s Model S glories in being an advanced car made by a Silicon Valley start-up created by a tech billionaire.
This lucrative market is hard to get into. Even Mercedes recently failed in its attempt to revive Maybach, a pre-war ultra-luxury brand. It took VW’s Audi three decades of steady improvements and skilful marketing to reach its current level of desirability. Japan’s three biggest carmakers have put a lot of effort into creating premium brands of their own—Toyota with Lexus, Nissan with Infiniti and Honda with Acura—but have yet to catch up with Europe’s most prestigious marques. KPMG’s Mr Leech thinks they may do well with those Asian consumers on whom the finer points of German or British styling are lost, but McKinsey’s Mr Kaas is not so sure. Chinese consumers are developing Western tastes, he says, and value the long history and brand cachet of European luxury marques.
Some of Europe’s struggling volume carmakers, such as Peugeot and Opel, are trying to move upmarket too in order to get back into the black. Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, is calling for a revival of Soviet-era luxury brands such as Zil and Chaika. China’s new carmaker, Qoros, may also be aiming to establish itself as a premium brand. Mr Kaas says they all need to hurry up. Although brand loyalty in emerging markets is less strong than in the West, tastes are maturing and new luxury brands will find it ever harder to grab a share of the cake.Human Ad Hoc Networks using Telepathic Connections
Yupapin PP1,2*
1 Advanced Studies Center, Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang (KMITL), Bangkok 10520, Thailand
2 Quantum Life Institute, Supakorn Biz-town, Sainoi, Nonthaburi 11150, Thailand
*Corresponding Author: Yupapin PP
Advanced Studies Center
Department of Physics, Faculty of Science
King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang
Bangkok (KMITL), Thailand
Tel: +660232980
E-mail: [email protected]
Received Date: March 06, 2014; Accepted Date: March 07, 2014; Published Date: March 13, 2014
Citation: Yupapin PP (2014) Human Ad Hoc Networks using Telepathic Connections. J Biosens Bioelectron 5:e129. doi: 10.4172/2155-6210.1000e129
Copyright: © 2014 Yupapin PP. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Visit for more related articles at Journal of Biosensors & Bioelectronics
Abstract
Generally, human communications can be linked by way of feelings, emotions, thoughts, images and desires, where some people can communicate telepathically when dreaming. Clairvoyance is the term given to a message received in a visual form. While hearing an inner voice is referred to as clairaudience. A feeling is termed as clairsentience, and par cognition refers to an instant knowing of something. Telepathy describes receiving thoughts or feelings from another person over distance, without using one of the five typical senses of sight, sound, touch, taste or smell, which is more likely to happen between people who have an existing close relationship. In this concept paper, the ad hoc network is used incorporating the human telepathic connections, which has been the interesting system for short range communication link [1,2], where the advantage is that the communication among small group of people with security and privacy is plausible, in which the dynamic network, for instance, sport rally network, vehicular network, conference participant network, community network and modern social network can also be implemented. Systematically, the ad hoc network is required the mobile communication/electronic instruments including the central controller (dynamic server). Human ad hoc network can be formed by such a system that can provide the short range dynamic network among people, where the basic communication requirement is a brain signal, where the required commands are generated and linked to the information, which is propagated via the whispering gallery mode of coherent light (brain signal) to the required destination [3]. This is allowed the closed loop of communication, which is required the electronic instruments such as amplifier, filter, blue tooth and transceiver with nano-antenna (thin film) [4].
Basically, brain signal is used as telepathic communication medium, which is formed by coherent light in holographic locations. The required brain signals can project to cells (nerves) when the required functions are assigned [5-7], the signal concentration can be formed by the whispering gallery mode, which can be amplified for higher field strength before propagation via a thin film antenna to the destination, where the signal modulation and filter are required. Recently, telepathic communication has shown the promising results [8-10], where the individual telepathic signals can form the short range communication link, which is shown by the model in Figure 1 [11]. The ability to send to and receive from each other thoughts and feelings comes from a spiritual connection between the two of people. The original telepathic signal strength can be increased by using the electronic instruments such as amplifier, which is modulated and transmitted via a nano-antenna, where the up and down conversion link can be operated and formed the communication.
Figure 1: Short range telepathic communication link.
Brain signal can generate the specific Rabi oscillation frequency [12,13], which will be harder for others to sense. People psychically put up a shield to prevent them from seeing his/her intentions. This is namely as code (quantum code, qubit) that can be used for protection, i.e. security. Generally, someone of a stronger mind and greater clarity of thinking can penetrate to the psychic shields of others and see what they are thinking. When two people are spiritually close, they trust each other and they have mutual empathy, where the code is given for communication. Empathy is one of the key ingredients of telepathy. Telepathy which is of the psychic level of the mind tends to operate beyond pure words and linguistics, which takes place in the form of feelings, images and desires. People may be able to receive telepathic communication from another person in the form of pure words. But usually it comes through a feeling, image or desire.
In principle, telepathic communication model consists of two directions, sending and receiving, where two people are able to communicate without being in contact physically, speak to each other through telepathy. The ability to send to and receive from each other thoughts and feelings comes from a spiritual connection between them. When two people are spiritually close to each other, they are often able to sense what the other is feeling or thinking. In operation, the Rabi oscillation frequency can be formed the up and down links by the transceivers between users, while the ad hoc network can be formed by using telepathic telephony network. Brain signals are modulated and transmitted by the nano-antenna arrays to the destinations, the required signals can be accepted and demodulated by the end user antennas, where finally, the corrected signals can be connected by cells and nerves. In Figure 2 [11], the transceiver with amplifier is formed by a blue tooth tag, which is linked between brain signals and thin film nano-antenna.
Figure 2: Telepathic telephony model, where thin film optical transceiver (fore head tag) can be used incorporating blue tooth (ear tag) for each user.
Human ad hoc network can be implemented by using the short range wireless communication network, where the group of users can be linked and communicated dynamically, where the controlled unit (server) is existed and moved among the users. In Figure 3a [11], the individual telepathic signals can be monitored and linked by the brain and computer interfacing instruments, where the telepathic network can be formed as shown in Figure 3b [11], which is controlled and linked by the central server. The important issue of telepathic communication network is the awareness, where lack of awareness, skepticism and general societal views are often big factors in people locking out this special intuitive ability. It is possible to block others from being able to send and receive telepathic communications, in which the codes (qubits) can be automatically established by each user.
Figure 3: Human ad hoc networks, where (a) telepathic server(b) ad hoc networks.
In practice, the telepathic signal strength can be improved by people meditation, which can help to relax the mind and body and make people more receptive to receiving and sending telepathic communications. The noisy signals are almost neglected during the perfect meditation, thus, the telepathic signal becomes the stronger signals in this situation. It also assists with ridding people mind of unwanted and unnecessary thoughts. The open mindedness enhances the chances of telepathic communications, while a closed mind is less likely to be able to transmit or receive effectively. The original telepathic signal without noise is able to link for long distance, for instance, Buddhist saint can have such ability.
The human contact memory is established by the first registration during the first perception and contact between two people (Alice: Sender and Bob: End user), which will be kept (allocated) within the human brain space permanently. The security codes between them will be generated and the information blocked by their security codes if the end user (Bob) is not the required one. On the other hand, the unlocked information will be transmitted if the required end user is confirmed by the feedback brain signals (spirit signals), i.e. telepathic link, where finally, the required security codes will be opened and the information will be transmitted. Moreover, the quantum flip-flop signals can also be generated by using a coherent light source propagates within micro-optical device, where the Rabi oscillation frequency can be established for the started/stopped transmission bits security, in which the stream of information can be securely transmitted in the telepathic communication.
The scanning image information will be recognized of the required end users by million brain cells, where they will be addressed within the brain memory by many layers and sub-layers in the brain cloud computing system [14]. The image recovery can be done by the image pattern recognition recovery, in which the probability of image pattern recognition, where the identical image probability is the criteria of recovery decision. The projection of coherent signals will bring the de-coherent states, where the collapse of waves will bring the required results (required image recovery).
In conclusion, we have proposed that human ad hoc network can be performed by telepathic telephone connections, which can be used as dynamic voiceless networks by using the thin film electronic instruments such as transceiver, nano-antenna and amplifier, where the amplified and modulated signal parts can be constructed by the voiceless mobile telephone system, which can be useful for deaf people. However, the privacy is also needed to clarify and protect, which will be the important issue of required technology. In general, this kind of network will be constructed and popularly used in the near future.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang (KMITL), Bangkok 10520, Thailand for giving the research facilities.
ReferencesWhat do they mean by that? Well, this data is tied to Pokémon Go. The game is currently celebrating its one year anniversary (by letting players catch Ash's Pikachu), so decluttr decided to see which Pokémon players were Googling the most. They "paired up phrases like ‘Where is…’ and ‘How to find…’ with all the Pokémon in the game" to determine which ones players are looking for the most. So perhaps this isn't a true measure of popularity, but a combination of that factor and which Pokémon players are most in need of or are having trouble encountering.
Pikachu took the top spot in six states, while Eevee is tops in four states. The site made a similar map last year, back when Pokémon Go only included first-generation Pokémon. As far as second-generation Pokémon go, Umbreon is the most sought after in three states.
It's also interesting to compare the differences in state-by-state data between last year and this year, so pour over that information here, and let us know in the comments if you're proud of the Pokémon your state wants |
) and face the second-most big chances per match (a clear-cut opportunity for the opponent to score).
As Chris Wondolowski, Oswaldo Minda and Segares will tell you, slack marking is one of the reasons why Toronto’s opponents are creating and finishing so many of those chances inside the 18. When professionals are given the time and space to finish, they normally come through.
Other examples:
WATCH: Nyarko rounds Kocic for winner
#3: 3-2, Patrick Nyarko (Dominic Oduro)
Reggie Lambe turns the ball over at the top of Chicago’s penalty area. Logan Pause turns and finds a wide-open Oduro in the midfield, who turns and threads a through ball to Nyarko. The forward speeds toward goal, rounds Kocic and scores the winner.
Trend: Toronto give opponents the space and time needed to exploit their own weaknesses
The Reds' biggest weakness is almost certainly the lack of pressure opponents feel when they are on the ball, especially in counter-attacking situations.
Nyarko’s goal was simply the most recent in a long line of attacks spurred by either a turnover or lack of defensive pressure in the midfield, both of which tend to be followed by opponents picking out runners and creating numerical advantages going forward.
Team CBI/Game Toronto 26.33 LA Galaxy 31.00 Montreal 35.88 Vancouver 36.00 Houston 37.20 League average 40.74
And although turnovers play a part, it’s the lack of pressure (measured in this case in part by combined defensive clearances, blocks and interceptions) that allows Toronto’s opponents to force their way into dangerous areas and – as we saw in goal No. 2 – finish once they get there.
Through six games, Toronto have the fewest combined CBI in the league by a wide margin. And although this in itself is not an indication of defensive frailty (see chart at right), that trend combined with the Reds’ other tendencies helps explain why they have so much trouble keeping other teams off the scoresheet.
Other examples:
Follow@AndrewWiebe_MLSI’ve had a number of emails over the past week with new band 12 LTE sightings. I figured I’d share them with you before I take the weekend off to celebrate the beginning of the second year in to my thirties.
It’s no coincidence that these sightings have fallen in line with the new Android 5.1 software update on the Nexus 6, but it comes as further confirmation that T-Mobile really is rolling out its 700MHz airwaves “furiously”.
T-Mobile has already mentioned officially that its Band 12 network is live in and around Cleveland, so it’s no surprise to see a few sightings in the area. We’ve been emailed two. One in Seven Hills and the other in Poland, OH.
Poland, OH
Seven Hills, OH
Just a few hours down the road – and this is pretty big news – is that Cincinnati seems to have some 700MHz action going on too. Interestingly, this is a city which, up until fairly recently, didn’t have any LTE. When it did arrive, it was in the 1900MHz flavor. We’ve even seen evidence to support the theory that all three bands T-Mobile uses for LTE are active in the area. But for now, let’s stick with the 700MHz sighting:
Others include Oroville in California, Stratford in Connecticut and Denver, Colorado. The open map in seemingly permanent creation by DanRant of Reddit also indicates that we now have 700MHz LTE active in Los Angeles. We now have dozens of live sites showing up in Connecticut, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Los Angeles, New York and Ohio among others. It’s well worth a check to see if an area near you has one up and running.
T-Mobile’s network improvements aren’t just about the 700MHz frequency though. It’s also rolling out LTE to new locations. One of those is Fargo, North Dakota.
As always, keep your new sightings rolling in, particularly if you have 700MHz show up for the first time. Email cam@tmonews.com.Researchers studying the presence of plastic in the world’s oceans found plastic debris in 88 percent of samples taken from the ocean's surfaces at hundreds of sites around the globe, according to a new report published Monday.
Aggressive consumption and subsequent disposal of plastics since the 1950s has led to a visible accumulation of the nonbiodegradable material in the world’s oceans. The plastic products reach remote areas, including the open ocean, via storm runoff and littering.
“Ocean currents carry plastic objects, which split into smaller and smaller fragments due to solar radiation,” Andres Cozar, a researcher from the University of Cadiz in Spain, said in a release. “Those little pieces of plastics, known as microplastics, can last hundreds of years and were detected in 88 percent of the ocean surface sampled.”
Researchers at the University of Cadiz conducted the study, and the results were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Ocean samples were taken as part of the Malaspina Circumnavigation Expedition from 2010 to 2011, aimed at studying the impact of global change — including population, globalization, climate and other factors — on the marine ecosystem.
Plastic pollution on the surface of the ocean is made up mainly of particles smaller than 1 cm (0.39 inch) in diameter and microplastics, originating from bigger pieces of plastic that have broken down or commonly used cosmetics that contain microbeads.
“These microplastics have an influence on the behavior and the food chain of marine organisms,” Cozar said. “The tiny plastic fragments often accumulate contaminants that, if swallowed, can be passed to organisms during digestion —without forgetting the gastrointestinal obstructions, which are another of the most common problems with this type of waste.”
Researchers had been aware of the massive plastic accumulation in the northern Pacific Ocean, called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, estimated to be larger than Texas.
But this study showed that plastics have accumulated in all five ocean gyres, or areas where currents converge.
“Our results show that the high concentration of plastic is not a unique feature of the North Pacific but occurs in each of the subtropical gyres,” Carlos Duarte, coordinator of the Malaspina expedition, said in a release.Sen. Lindsey Graham says U.S. intelligence agencies tell him that a conversation he had with a foreign individual was picked up in surveillance and that an unknown U.S. official or officials asked to know his identity as a party in the conversation.
Graham says he doesn't know if intelligence agencies actually revealed his name. But he's sent a letter to the FBI, CIA and the National Security Agency seeking information on any incidental collection of his communications with foreign targets.
Graham says he wants to know if Obama administration officials sought the unmasking of Americans in foreign intelligence reports for political reasons.
Graham, R-S.C., spoke Friday on Fox News Channel's "America's Newsroom."
The Senate intelligence committee has invited top spy and law enforcement officials to testify Wednesday at a hearing about the federal law governing foreign intelligence collection.
The hearing is being held because the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is expiring at the end of the year. But lawmakers are expected also to ask questions about the committee's investigation into Russian activities during the presidential election.
Democrats will likely ask in either the open or closed session about reports that President Donald Trump wanted Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and National Security Agency Director Adm. Mike Rogers to say publicly that there was no collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign.
Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe and deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein also are expected to testify.
House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi is objecting to subpoenas issued by the intelligence committee's Republican chairman on the Russia probe.
Pelosi says Rep. Devin Nunes should not be issuing subpoenas because he stepped aside from the investigation after being criticized for being too close to the White House. She says she shared her objection with House Speaker Paul Ryan.
Nunes sent subpoenas to the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency. They seek information about Obama administration requests to unmask the identities of Americans named in foreign intelligence reports. Republicans say Nunes is still chairman and still responsible for making sure the identities of Americans are not unmasked for political purposes.
President Vladimir Putin is ridiculing allegations of Russian meddling in U.S. elections, accusing the Democrats of trying to shift blame for their defeat and likening the accusations against Russia to anti-Semitism.
During a panel discussion at St. Petersburg's economic forum, Putin said the claims of Russian interference in the U.S. election contained "nothing concrete, only assumptions."
Asked about the "fingerprints" -- IP addresses allegedly belonging to Russian hackers -- he said those could have been easily rigged and couldn't stand as credible evidence.
Putin said sarcastically: "What fingerprints? Hoof prints? Horn prints? Technology experts can invent anything and put the blame on anyone."Dario Saric is a 6 foot 10 Croatian basketball player, whose NBA rights are held by the Philadelphia 76ers, and who made waves last season as he played for Anadolu Efes in the Euroleague and the Turkish League.
The Euroleague is not the NBA. The comparisons are definitely not one-to-one. However, Saric achieved membership of the mythical 50-40-90 in Euroleague competition this season. He shot over 40% from deep on 72 attempts in 24 games for Anadolu Efes in the 2015-16 Euroleague season.
Saric was drafted 12th overall by the Orlando Magic in the 2014 NBA Draft, and was traded straight to the Philadelphia 76ers. He’s spent the last two years in Europe, and is expected to arrive in the NBA this summer.
When Saric was drafted, he said he would spend two years in Europe before joining the Sixers. There have been reports going around that he has told his teammates in Turkey that he is heading to the NBA this summer. However, as Philly.com‘s John Smallwood lays out here in a brilliant article, it would be in Saric’s interest to spend another year in Europe and make a lot more money when he eventually arrives in the NBA, as Nikola Mirotic did when he joined the Chicago Bulls from Real Madrid.
Saric’s size makes him the prototypical new school, “stretch four” power forward. His 3-point shot and floor spacing ability, combined with his 243lbs in a 6′ 10 frame, make him the perfect complementary big man.
His position in the NBA doesn’t need to be determined, but where he suits up next season is still up for discussion.
On a recent edition of The Ringer NBA Show, Danny Chau and Jonathan Tjarks talked about the 76ers and the NBA Draft Lottery. One point that arose during the look at the Sixers franchise was their belief that Dario Saric would likely be traded.
When considering the possibility and likelihood of Philadelphia trading Saric, there are a few points it is paramount to consider:
The Sixers’ draft decision comes down to Ben Simmons or Brandon Ingram.
ESPN’s Marc Stein reported that the Philly front office were testing the waters in order to see whether there is any market for big men Jahlil Okafor and Nerlens Noel.
With Joel Embiid finally getting healthy, the Sixers are going to have a log jam at the four and five spots.
If he were in the Draft this year, Dario Saric would probably be the third best prospect in the class, behind the aforementioned Simmons and Ingram.
This brings us to the question where Dario Saric fits in the NBA, team-wise, rather than position-wise.
There are a number of spots where Dario Saric would fit in easily, receive regular minutes, and where the team have the draft or player capital to trade for him.
Minnesota Timberwolves
Bill Simmons has mentioned numerous times on his podcasts that he believes Serge Ibaka would be a great fit for the Timberwolves alongside Karl-Anthony Towns in the front court. His 3-point shooting would give some range and floor-spacing to a team that has a non-shooting point guard in Ricky Rubio and a wing player in Andrew Wiggins whose 3-point shot is still lacking.
However, everything Ibaka can give them offensively can be found by trading for Dario Saric instead. The Croatian would help Zach LaVine spread the floor for the Timberwolves with his 3-point shooting. Additionally, Saric would fit in well with the rest of the Wolves’ players age-wise, putting them on the same Championship path; avoiding the problems the Knicks have faced in deciding whether to put all their chips behind Carmelo Anthony or Kristaps Porzingis.
The 5th overall pick would be a reasonable amount to give up for Saric, particularly if Minnesota believe he is better than what they could get at that spot in the Draft.
Detroit Pistons
Stan Van Gundy’s best Orlando Magic team’s always had a strong stretch four. Ryan Anderson is a free agent this offseason, but Saric would be a cheaper alternative, who would fit well alongside Andre Drummond.
The Pistons used Marcus Morris, Tobias Harris, and Stanley Johnson as stretch fours last season, however, Morris was the best 3-point shooter of the bunch, and he was only just above average. Saric would bring an upgrade in this regard and help spread the floor more.
Detroit would likely have to give one of these players up in any potential trade, and the 76ers would definitely ask for Stanley Johnson, who Van Gundy and the Pistons front office wouldn’t want to let go.
Houston Rockets
Before he got the job as the General Manager for the Philadelphia 76ers, Sam Hinkie played a key role in the Houston front office alongside Daryl Morey. Couple this with the fact that two Rockets big men, Terrence Jones and Donatas Motiejunas, will be free agents, and Houston trading for Dario Saric looks like a capital-collecting move that Morey loves to make.
Pairing Dario Saric with fellow youthful, international big man Clint Cappella would give the Rockets a big man pairing, that along with a rejuvenated James Harden, could help the Houston Rockets make it back to the Western Conference Finals, and go beyond.
Memphis Grizzlies
This one is really simple. Memphis have been an inside-out team in recent years, while the rest of the League has been playing outside-in. Dario Saric could help make up for the Grizzlies’ absolute lack of 3-point shooting. Saric alongside a returning-from-injury Marc Gasol could give Memphis an international front court that could form the basis of their pursuit of the best teams in the West.
We have somewhere between four and seven games left in this NBA season. Once they’re finished, the buzz, talk, and reporting around the NBA Draft and Free Agency is going to take the leap to another level.
AdvertisementsShare
Detailed within a press release earlier today, AT&T and representatives within the state of Tennessee are joining forces to start testing emergency 911 texting before a nationwide launch of the useful feature. In order to enable the new text-to-911 service, all 911 text messages from AT&T customers will be routed through Tennessee’s Emergency Service IP Network (ESInet) and send to emergency call centers around the state. As the new feature undergoes significant testing, AT&T and the state will get a better understanding of how useful the text-to-911 service is for the public in addition to measuring how efficient call center operators will be at handling the flow and distribution of emergency messages. AT&T hopes to develop a set of rules and standards that will help guide emergency call centers within other states.
This new service will be particularly helpful for anyone that’s physically lost the ability to vocalize their emergency with a traditional voice call through 911 emergency services. In addition, the hearing impaired community will be able to communicate problems vastly quicker with a text message through the text-to-911 service.
Another scenario where a text-to-911 service would be vital would be a home invasion. A young child hiding within the home could easily text the emergency to 911 in order to avoid making any noise by speaking during a typical voice call. In addition, a text-to-911 service could be particularly helpful for customers that get poor voice reception in a remote area and have significant problems with dropped calls.
During August 2011, the Federal Communications Commission announced plans to push forward on the text-to-911 service and include the ability to send photos and videos to call center operators. A year prior to that, the FCC has started the initial planning on the project, namely because of the tragic shootings on the Virginia Tech campus. Apparently students were sending text messages to 911 during the shootings, but call centers weren’t equipped to receive the messages.
When asked about the trial run of the text-to-911 service, AT&T Business Solutions VP of Public Safety Solutions Mel Coker stated “AT&T is committed to working with standard bodies, national, state, and local public safety organizations to determine how best to integrate SMS text messages and other advanced communications into future 9-1-1 systems and wireless networks. This trial will be vital in evaluating Text to 9-1-1 solutions with the goal of providing reliable, universal access for our customers.”
Announced during May 2012, Verizon is also working toward providing a text-to-911 service to customers. Verizon customers will simply need a wireless phone capable of sending messages in addition to the wireless service plan that supports text messaging. Based off prior plans, Verizon representatives will launch the new feature within several major metropolitan areas during the first half of 2013 prior to launching the feature across the entire nation. A future planned addition to the text-to-911 service is the ability to automatically include a link to the user’s location. However, the phone would have to utilize a built-in GPS chip in order to relay that specific information to emergency services.What about all this talk of Mike Glennon giving valuable information to Bears coaches as they plan for Sunday’s game against the Buccaneers?
Joe asked Dirk Koetter about that process today.
Specifically, Joe asked Koetter if in his many years of NFL coaching, has he ever gotten valuable info from a player on his team who once played for an opponent.
Candid Koetter did not disappoint.
“I mean, coaches have been trying to do that. I mean, ever since I came into the league, coaches have told me about certain teams that would cut a guy and bring another guy in off the street because he played for [an upcoming opponent] Koetter said. “Every time I’ve tried to do that personally, if I asked [the player] 10 questions, about eight of their answers made no sense at all to me, one of them made a little bit of sense, and one of them said, ‘Oh, yeah, we watched the same film.’ “But again a quarterback is maybe a little bit different animal. When Mike [Glennon] left, we had an oath that he was sworn to secrecy. But we’ll see.”
Great stuff there from Koetter. Joe remembers Ronde Barber talking about this subject a handful of years ago and believing intelligence from players who once played for an opponent was often either incorrect, or it accurate but making Bucs defensive players think too much.
Barber’s take was that teams were largely better off without the knowledge.
Before Joe hit Koetter with the question above, Koetter noted Glennon took good notes with the Bucs and certainly was capable of helping his new coaches and teammates.
Interesting chess match ahead, but football is still about blocking and tackling and talent. And the Bucs should win on all those fronts Sunday.As anybody with a TV, radio or newspaper subscription can affirm, the big story coming out of the 2012 election is the long feared/eagerly awaited arrival of the Latino vote as a national political force capable of deciding a presidential contest. Latinos accounted for a record ten percent of the electorate this year, and something north of 70 percent of them cast their ballots for Obama. Meanwhile, fewer Latinos than ever before voted for the Republican candidate. With the Latino segment of the electorate poised to continue expanding for many election cycles to come, leaders of both parties are tripping over each other to position themselves on immigration reform, and even in blood red states like Texas, GOP strategists are warning of imminent doom for their party if Republicans fail to break their cycle of addiction to racism, xenophobia and pandering to border-guarding lunatics.
The story is both accurate to a point and incomplete, as conventional wisdom is wont to be. Tavis Smiley, for instance, has highlighted the grating irony of black voters being left out of the punditocracy's post-election anointing of the "new governing coalition," following the second presidential election in a row in which African Americans broke records turning out to support Barack Obama. And when it comes to speculating about long-term electoral prospects, there's another demographic category of Americans that's getting glossed over in this mechanical extrapolation of the present into the future. Interestingly, it's the one that Obama himself belongs to: multiracial Americans.
That's not to say that mixed-race voters were a big electoral force in this election or any other national election in history. Nor is "mixed race" really much of a coherent ethnic identity in the first place (then again, neither arguably is "Latino" or "Asian"). As a demographic category, however, it's going to be a significant factor for both parties to grapple with in future elections. It's simply inevitable: About fifteen percent of new marriages nationally in 2010 were interracial, according to a Pew study published earlier this year. That's more than double the proportion of the 1980s. Those couples are having kids, and those kids are growing up to become voters. Moreover, according to the study, quaint taboos against interracial coupling are pretty close to completely breaking down, with nearly two-thirds of Americans fine with the idea, so we can expect the phenomenon to continue and accelerate going forward: more multiracial couples, more mixed race kids. And in politics, as they say, demography is destiny.
Among the states in which interracial marriages are above twenty percent are, not surprisingly, deep blue states like California and Hawaii. But some of the most conservative states in the country are also on the 20 percent-plus list, including Alaska, Arizona and Oklahoma. Texas and Kansas aren't far behind. Also above average are new and perennial swing states like Colorado, Virgina and Florida. The highest rates of interracial marriage skew west, where three of the four states with the fastest-growing populations in the country are located (or four of the four, depending on whether you consider Texas a Western or a Southern state). The bottom line is that mixed-race matrimony is a national phenomenon that cuts across the red-blue divide. As the children of those couples come into voting age, there will be more and more Americans in every part of the country who don't fit into the tidy racial boxes that form the basis of the long-term electoral prognostications being offered up by the dozens in the aftermath of Obama's re-election.
Will mixed race voters help the Republicans or the Democrats? That's a murkier question than you might assume, since Pew's data shows sharper differences in terms of income and education between various mixed-marriage demographic sub-groups (the parents of those voters-to-be) than between mixed couples and non-mixed couples as a whole; there's little in the way of a uniform set of characteristics of interracial households to grasp onto.
But it's also the wrong question. The political effect of mixed race voters on future elections will probably be one of obfuscation rather than of party advantage, comparable to the effect of the growing prevalence of independent voters on partisan contests. Multiracial Americans will make simple questions about single issues more complicated, and facile assumptions about voter sympathies more tenuous. Where does a half-Mexican, half-black woman from Texas come down on immigration reform? What does a quarter Chinese, quarter Filipino, half-Jewish male from Florida think about affirmative action? What does either voter think about expanding charter schools, gay marriage, abortion rights, cutting Medicare, or raising taxes on the rich? These questions are difficult enough today, as racial sub-groups become more diversified by class. As the mixed race population of Americans expands and renders ethnic identities less categorical, more subjective, and more abstract, those once-easy categories will lose even more of their value as predictors of political behavior. They may even start to lose some of their personal relevance in the lives of multiracial Americans themselves.
My girlfriend and I are both of mixed racial heritage. I'm half Japanese and half Anglo. She's half Salvadoran and half Jewish. If and when we have children, they'll be a quarter Asian, a quarter Latino and half white, with the white side split WASP/Jewish. When our kids become 18 and fill out their first voter registration forms, the only ethnic category that will make any sense for them to check off is "Multiracial." Today, checking off that box feels pretty close to checking off "Other" or "None of the above" on a questionnaire on any given topic; it's a throwaway category for misfits that has little if any analytical value to the researchers who review the data, but that has to be in there to get the respondent to the next section. When enough Americans start checking off that box, however, it's going to be impossible to ignore -- and difficult to integrate into existing statistical models. Like "Other," "Multiracial" isn't an actual, distinctive population with a common culture and history that you can add into the mix as another subgroup to track; it's just a heuristic catch-all term for everyone who doesn't fit into the conventional taxonomy. Once it becomes statistically meaningful -- perhaps meaningful enough to impact election forecasts -- pollsters and demographers will have to scrap the mechanical models they're working with and start devising more fluid and subjective analytical approaches that reflect the fluidity and subjectivity of increasingly porous ethnic and racial categories.One of Mitt Romney’s top surrogates acknowledged Tuesday that the GOP candidate’s tax plan will only be revenue neutral if it sparks a degree of economic growth most economists regard as wildly implausible.
At the same time he warned Romney against targeting popular tax benefits as sources of new revenue to help pay for his plan to cut taxes by $5 trillion.
Taken together, the comments illustrate just how difficult it would be for any president to reform the tax code, and serve as a reminder that Romney’s tax plan is particularly dubious — and would likely require either increasing middle class taxes or tolerating significantly higher budget deficits.
“There will be a very helpful debate about whether things like the charitable deduction, the health insurance premium, the home interest deduction should be part of the deal,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) at a Bloomberg View event.“[Reducing the mortgage interest deduction] is troubling, because it really helps the middle class,” he said. “Do you really want to hurt charitable giving in a country when you are saying that you want to rely less on government and more on private institutions to deal with these issues? And how are you going to raise taxes on people on their health care premiums when you are saying you want there to be a system in place where folks can have more control over their own money?”
The tax exclusion on employer-provided health care and mortgage interest deduction are the two largest expenditures in the federal tax code. Charitable giving ranks in the top 10. All three, among others, are popular and have strong bipartisan support in Congress.
That a leading surrogate would be reluctant to roll them back makes Romney’s tax math even less realistic — and thus more reliant on dubious conservative tax cut assumptions.
“Here is where you get into that debate,” Rubio said. “You don’t dynamically score these things … I know you are going to roll your eyes. But I am a firm believer that economic growth is generated by these things and the evidence is there.”
The most comprehensive analysis of Romney’s tax plan, performed by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, borrowed economic growth assumptions from one of Romney’s own advisers. Despite those assumptions, they concluded Romney’s plan would either require higher taxes on middle-income earners or tolerating larger budget deficits.
Rubio’s remarks that he’d want Romney to tread lightly around big, popular deductions suggest that Romney’s across the board 20 percent tax rate cuts could simply end up starving the federal government of revenue.
A Rubio spokesman did not immediately respond to TPM’s request for comment.Conservative Representatives Michele Bachmann, Steve King and Louie Gohmert appealed directly to Glenn Beck and his audience yesterday on the upcoming immigration bill. Michele Bachmann told Glenn, “We’re losing badly.”
Mediaite reported:
With immigration reform still going through Congress, a number of conservative Republicans are not happy with how their party has jumped on the bandwagon to fight for a bill that concedes the argument to the Democrats. Michele Bachmann, Louie Gohmert, and Steve King made a joint appearance Thursday on Glenn Beck‘s show to lobby him and his audience directly to stand up against a bill that they say is only getting bipartisan support because of how progressivism is spreading throughout the Republican party like a disease.
RELATED: Michele Bachmann: If ‘Amnesty’ Passes, We’ll Never Again See Another GOP President
Bachmann insisted that they will be able to “kill” the bill, while King explained how people are getting selective information on immigration reform that only touts the positives of passing it. He said they will be holding a press conference next week, admitting that “we can’t get the right debate inside of Congress.” Bachmann described the event as a “Lincoln-Douglas debate” to tackle the issue, pointing out that the American people “pushed back hard” the last time Congress tried to take up this issue.
Bachmann added that a lot of people (singling out Beck’s viewers in particular) don’t know what’s going on, and admitted the conservative wing of the GOP is “losing badly.”THE AFL has purchased Etihad Stadium in a deal that will provide a significant financial boost for its tenant clubs.
The AFL would have taken ownership of the stadium for just $30 in March 2025, but has been negotiating its early release.
The sale price is believed to be somewhere between $150 — $200 million with the handover starting in November.
It was reported earlier this year that the league is planning a $300 million revamp of the precinct which is likely to include a new waterside gateway, open-air bars, parks and a running track.
Acting Victorian minister for sport Martin Foley said the decision to purchase Etihad was a step in the right direction.
“We welcome this decision, which provides certainty and financial stability for tenant clubs,” Foley said.
“We’ve put together a Ministerial Taskforce to take a good look at what sporting infrastructure we’ve got today, and what we need for the future.
“This will ensure Melbourne’s next major transformation cements its title as the sporting capital of the country and the world’s most liveable city.”
EJ Whitten match. Daisy Pearce (left) and Steph Chiocci (right) flank footy legends Cameron Ling and Matthew Richardson on the roof of Etihad Stadium.. Picture: Eugene Hyland Source: News Corp Australia
Although the fans will benefit, the biggest winners will be tenant clubs St Kilda, Western Bulldogs, Carlton, Essendon and North Melbourne.
The Saints, Dogs and Blues in particular have long complained of the poor deals they claim to have.
Clubs have to hit an attendance figure of between 25,000 and 26,000 to break even which is far less favourable than grounds such as the MCG and interstate venues.
In 2013 the Saints were handed a bill of almost $100,000 for a home and away game at Etihad Stadium.
In 2014, St Kilda made as much revenue playing one game in New Zealand or two games at the MCG as it did playing eight games at Etihad Stadium.
And last year North Melbourne Chairman James Brayshaw labelled the arrangement the “worst stadium deal in the history of world sport”.
Essendon's James Hird at team training session. Australian Rules A/CT Source: News Corp Australia
The AFL released a statement on Friday confirming its purchase.
“Owning Etihad Stadium enables the AFL to continue to strengthen the financial health of
several of our Victorian clubs, develop an asset for our whole industry, and commit to being
a serious stakeholder in the future of the Docklands precinct.” Gillon McLachlan said.
“The AFL will continue to operate Etihad Stadium as a multi-purpose entertainment venue
hosting AFL matches, other sports, concerts and a broad range of entertainment options.”
Melbourne Stadiums Limited (MSL) chairman Tony Hallam was delighted with the purchase.
“The AFL’s purchase of Etihad Stadium is an investment by them into the future of its clubs
and fans. Etihad Stadium is world class and, by purchasing now, the AFL acquires a
profitable, well run sports and entertainment stadium with the potential for further growth in
the future,” Hallam said.
“Importantly, for our people who work at the stadium every day, and our commercial
partners, becoming part of the extended AFL organisation opens up new and exciting
development opportunities,” Mr Hallam said.
Etihad Airways will continue as the naming rights partner to the Stadium under its current
agreement to 2019, with options to further extend that partnership.
Tom Morris is on Twitter: @tommorris32Watch us break down Manchester on False Flag Weekly News above – click HERE for story links. Hope to see you in NYC next Sunday, June 4!
Professor Anthony Hall and I, co-hosts of False Flag Weekly News, will be taking our show on the road next week – to New York City for the Left Forum.
Our NYC visit signals a defiant challenge to “self-hating Zionist” Spencer Sunshine, who led an apparent one-man-effort to censor our panels on 9/11 truth, false flags, and fake terrorism.
Though the Left Forum capitulated to Sunshine, we have found a nearby alternate venue. As the press release below states:
Due to a recognized pattern of harassment by apparent Zionists elements, the location of the banned panels will not be announced until Friday, June 2 via the following website: http://noliesradio.org/archives/130703.
The Left Forum – America’s biggest Left event – attracts many thousands of people and showcases a wide variety of topics and viewpoints. It seems odd that leftists, who are theoretically champions of peace and free speech, would crush discussion of the deceptions that lead the world into war.
Below is the press release from the Left Forum’s Deep State track organizers.
–Kevin Barrett, Veterans Today Editor
PS If you can’t make it to New York, you can still watch the panels live on NoLiesRadio.org.
LEFT FORUM BANS 3 DEEP STATE PANELS
SPEAKERS REFUSE TO BE SILENCED
COME TO THE “LEFT OUT FORUM”!
The Left Forum, the country’s largest leftist conference, has banned three panels on the Deep State from this year’s line-up without any explanation, apparently due to baseless charges of “antisemitism” by two individuals.
Please publicize this pernicious threat to free speech and support the “Left Out Forum.”
The Left Forum will be held June 2-4, 2017, at John Jay Criminal College in New York City. Approximately 3,000 people attend the annual conference to hear up to 250 panels, plenaries, and keynote speeches.
The three banned panels are:
“Terrorism”: Fake Enemies, Fraudulent Wars
False Flags: Staged, Scripted, Mass Psy-Op Events
9/11 Truth: Ground Zero for a Resistance Movement
It seems it was several speakers—not content—that were deemed objectionable. The Left Forum had received two letters with contorted, out-of-context allegations claiming some of the panelists were antisemitic and should not be allowed to speak. The Board subsequently rejected three of the five panels submitted by grassroots activists less than a month before the conference start.
The Left Forum shared both letters with the panel organizers, whose only recourse was to email a vigorous response rebutting the false and libelous accusations. Panel speakers and many supporters wrote letters of protest as well, all of which went unanswered. The Board refused to reverse their decision to allow the three panels. The entire process had the hallmarks of a secretive grand jury.
The Left Forum’s capitulation to shadowy pressure must be contextualized as part of a brazen repression of academics and activists whose alternative perspectives run counter to official versions of controversial events. Many academics—including several Deep State panel speakers—have been fired or suspended, almost all without reprieve. Much, but not all, of this thought policing derives from an organized meta strategy to oppose any criticism of Israel.
The following are just a few examples of silencing dissent by labeling it “antisemitic” based on an extreme, warped interpretation of hate speech.
Dr. Kevin Barrett’s GoFundMe account was abruptly shut down and his donor database liquidated, all without a single explanation
Zionists rabidly heckled Richard Falk at a British university, leading other institutions to cancel his lectures on Palestinian issues
The sophisticated criminal activities of terrorist-troll Josh Goldberg, who hides behind multiple online personalities in order to frame non-Jews for antisemitic activities.
The witch hunt of Alison Weir, founder of If Americans Knew and a leading advocate for the human rights of Palestinians
The Canary Mission website which publicizes and monitors alleged “antisemitic” academics
Amazon’s banishment (i.e., cyber book burning) of scores of books with alternative views on WWII
Given the conference theme is “Resistance,” it is ironic that the Left Forum Board is using neo-McCarthyist tactics to thwart resistance by grassroots activists of debatable official narratives.
Recommended reading: We Will Not Be Silenced: The Academic Repression of Israel’s Critics, edited by William I. Robinson and Maryam S. Griffin
The “Left Out Forum”
The organizers and speakers of the banned panels are compelled to resist this Left Forum censorship by presenting the three banned panels at a location near the Left Forum’s John Jay Criminal College venue.
Due to a pattern of harassment by Zionists elements, the location of the banned panels will not be announced until Friday, June 2, at http://noliesradio.org/archives/130703.
The Deep State panel line-up on Sunday, June 4 will be:
Left Forum – Approved Panels
10:00-11:50 – Political Correctness: The Dangers of Thought Crime Police
Speakers: Dr. Anthony Hall, Jeremy Rothe-Kushel
Moderator: Cheryl Curtiss
Room 1.91, John Jay Criminal College
12:00-1:50 – Co-Opting the Left: Infiltration by the Corporate State to Neutralize Resistance
Speakers: Kevin Zeese, Margaret Flowers, Glen Ford
Moderator: Cheryl Curtiss
Room 1.91, John Jay Criminal College
“Left Out Forum” – Banned Panels
12:00-1:50 –”Terrorism”: Fake Enemies, Fraudulent Wars
Speakers: Michael Springmann, Dr. Anthony Hall |
The court accepted the government’s allegation that the defendants had provided financial assistance to the Muslim Brotherhood and helped it conduct military training and plan attacks on security forces.
Prosecutors should withdraw their request for the designations, and parliament should cancel the relevant law or amend it to ensure due process guarantees a narrower and more specific definition of terrorism.
Among those placed on the list were former President Mohamed Morsy and his sons; senior Brotherhood leaders and their sons and daughters; Safwan Thabet, a businessman; the former soccer star Mohamed Abu Trika; Mostafa Sakr, a newspaper publisher; and Hisham Gaafar, a journalist. At least five deceased individuals were placed on the list by the decision, Human Rights Watch confirmed.
Lawyers for several of the people told Human Rights Watch that the authorities did not inform their clients about any related court sessions and that they first knew about the decision from media outlets that reported it on January 17.
The terrorist designations were based on Law 8 of 2015 for Organizing Lists of Terrorist Entities and Terrorists, issued by a decree by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in February 2015, in the absence of a parliament. The law authorizes the prosecutor general to request designated Cairo criminal courts to name individuals or groups to the list for three-year renewable periods. The court has seven days to consider the request before deciding.
The law violates several legal protections laid out in the Egyptian Constitution, previous decisions of Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court, and international human rights law.
The consequences for people designated as “terrorists” under this law are similar to those for people convicted at trial, but the law does not require finding them guilty of a crime and makes no provision for them to contest the evidence prosecutors present in their request, violating the individuals’ right to fair trial. Human Rights Watch was able to verify that many people added to the list on January 12 are either currently on trial or in pretrial detention.
The definition of terrorism in the law exceeds even the overly broad language in Egypt’s penal code. The 2015 law defines a “terrorist entity” as a group that practices or advocates infringements on public order or national unity; harm to the environment, antiquities, or public or private property; obstruction of public or private transportation; or impeding the application of the provisions of the constitution, laws, or regulations.
Such a framework criminalizes activities that go far beyond the description of terrorist acts in United Nations Security Council resolution 1566, unanimously adopted in 2004. That resolution described terrorism as acts committed with the intent to kill, cause serious bodily injury, or take hostages with the aim of intimidating or terrorizing a population or compelling a government or international organization to do or abstain from doing something.
The overbroad definition of terrorism in the 2015 law runs counter to a basic principle in international human rights law that requires laws to be precisely drafted and understandable as a safeguard against their arbitrary use and so that people know what actions constitute a crime. Egypt’s constitution endorses this principle, and its Supreme Constitutional Court has previously ruled that ambiguous penal statutes allow authorities to apply the law according to “personal norms” and “subjective inclinations” and preclude courts from applying “strict, definitive rules.”
Furthermore, the court’s January 12 decision to list hundreds of individuals rests on a request from a government committee in charge of seizing Muslim Brotherhood assets whose authority remains legally unclear.
A Cairo urgent matters court, whose jurisdiction is normally temporary civil injunctions, first banned the activities of the Brotherhood in September 2013. Based on that decision, Egypt’s cabinet formed a committee days later to seize and manage all assets connected to the Brotherhood or its members. In February 2014, the urgent matters court ruled that the Brotherhood was a banned terrorist group. That ruling remains on appeal and legal analysts have said that the court most likely exceeded its jurisdiction.
Since the committee’s formation, it has seized tens of millions of Egyptian pounds and hundreds of schools, clinics, and other institutions, but Egyptian administrative courts have repeatedly overturned its decisions, ruling that the committee exceeded its mandate and encroached on judicial prerogatives. The dispute is under review at the Supreme Constitutional Court and the Supreme Administrative Court.
Egypt’s highest appeals court, the Cassation Court – which hears appeals from people named to the terrorist list – in September 2015 overturned a previous decision by prosecutors to add high-ranking Brotherhood leaders to the terrorist list. The court ruled that the prosecutors had not obtained a ruling from a competent court. The Cassation Court has accepted appeals by individuals named to the terrorist list in several other situations.
Like many courts since the military removed former President Morsy in 2013, the criminal court also appeared to rely entirely on evidence from the Interior Ministry’s National Security Agency for its January 12 decision.
Egypt’s parliament should repeal the terrorist entities law or amend it extensively to bring it within international standards, and prosecutors should file requests to repeal the terrorist listings made so far. Assets should be frozen only by judicial decisions that follow due process, Human Rights Watch said.
“Terrorism is a real issue in Egypt, but the authorities are using blunt tools of questionable legality to confront the problem,” Stork said. “Such an approach disregards facts indiscriminately labels opponents as terrorists, and makes no effort to sort the guilty from the innocent.”Getty Images
The Green Bay Packers fired a pair of assistant coaches this week after last week’s season-ending loss to the Arizona Cardinals. One of the assistants let go was tight ends coach Jerry Fontenot.
According to Alex Marvez of FOXSports.com, the Packers have found Fontenot’s replacement. The team is set to hire former Cleveland Browns tight ends coach Brian Angelichio.
Angelichio was let go by the Browns after Mike Pettine was fired as head coach at the end of the season. He has four seasons of NFL experience, two seasons with the Browns and two under Greg Schiano with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Tight ends under Angelichio have had strong seasons. Tim Wright caught 54 passes for 571 yards and five touchdowns with the Buccaneers in 2013 and Gary Barnidge had a stellar 2015 season with 79 catches for 1,043 yards and nine touchdowns in Cleveland.In the first quarter of a scoreless 2016 AFC Championship game against the New England Patriots, Peyton Manning and the Denver Broncos faced third-and-6 from their own 44-yard line. Wide receiver Demaryius Thomas ran a 15-yard out, breaking toward the Broncos’ sideline. He did not catch Manning’s wobbly throw, but there was contact on the play, and Denver’s players and coaching staff appealed to the official for a pass interference call on Patriots cornerback Logan Ryan. They got one, and the Broncos got a first down, scoring the game’s opening touchdown four plays later.
On the ensuing drive, the Patriots faced third-and-3 at their own 27-yard line. Rob Gronkowski ran a wheel route up the Broncos’ sideline with T.J. Ward in coverage. As the Patriots tight end turned to look back for the ball, the defender made contact and shoved him, preventing a catch. Both Gronk and Tom Brady yelled for a penalty. The flag did not come, and the Patriots were forced to punt.
Similar plays led to different outcomes that benefited the team on the sideline closest to the on-field action. Most NFL refs would likely say they are immune any sideline bias. “If I make a call because a coach is screaming at me on one side of the field and it’s wrong, that’s a bad day for me,” former NFL official Scott Green told us. (The NFL declined to comment.)
But as it turns out, a sideline bias in the NFL is real, and it’s spectacular. To prove it, we looked at the rates at which refs call the NFL’s most severe penalties, including defensive pass interference, aggressive infractions like personal fouls and unnecessary roughness, and offensive holding calls, based on where the offensive team ran its play.
For three common penalties, the direction of the play — that is, whether it’s run toward the offensive or defensive team’s sideline — makes a significant difference. In other words, refs make more defensive pass interference calls on the offensive team’s sideline but more offensive holding calls on the defensive team’s sideline. What’s more, these differences aren’t uniform across the field — the effect only shows up on plays run, roughly, between the 32-yard lines, the same space where coaches and players are allowed to stand during play.
The following graphs show the penalty rates per 1,000 plays for defensive pass interference and aggressive defensive penalties, which include unnecessary roughness, personal fouls, unsportsmanlike conduct, and horse-collar tackles.
Refs throw flags for defensive infractions at significantly higher rates when plays are run in the direction of the offensive team’s sideline; near midfield, defensive penalties are called about 50 percent more often on the offensive team’s sideline than the defensive team’s. Close to the end zone, where the sidelines are supposed to be free of coaches and players, these differences are negligible.
For offensive flags, that association is reversed, at least on holding penalties. Here’s the rate of holding calls made on outside run plays, which shows how the defensive team’s sideline can help draw flags on the offense. Around midfield, offensive holding gets called about 35 percent more often on plays run at the defensive team’s sideline.
So what could be causing this phenomenon?
Refs are faced with a near-impossible task. They make judgment calls in real time, relying on just their eyes and their experience. Deprived of the advantages, like instant replay, that we enjoy from the couch, refs have less information to help them resist the normal subconscious urge to draw on external cues for assistance in making borderline calls. In psychology terms, this process is called cue learning. It’s why we laugh longer in the presence of other humans laughing, why we eat more in the presence of overweight company, and why our judgment of persuasive speeches is influenced by the audience’s reaction.
The most common cue in sports is crowd noise, and because crowd noise almost always supports the home team, the way the fans sway the referees is the No. 1 driver of home-field advantage in sports. And one notable experiment suggests that how loud a crowd is helps refs decide whether an interaction should be penalized. A pair of German researchers showed actual referees old video clips of possible soccer infractions, with crowd noise played at high or low volume. Refs looking at the exact same interactions were more likely to hand out a yellow card when they heard a lot of crowd noise than when the volume was low.
It follows, then, that screaming and hat-throwing football personnel may also have an effect on referee choices. In football, this sideline bias even seems to supersede refs’ tendency to support the home team: The differences in the penalty rates from sideline to sideline are several times larger than the differences in penalty rates between the home and away teams.
That bias can affect the outcome even when officials have time to confer. In a 2015 playoff game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Detroit Lions, Matthew Stafford threw a third-and-1 pass to Brandon Pettigrew. Officials initially called defensive pass interference on the Cowboys’ Anthony Hitchens.
But the flag occurred right in front of the Cowboys sideline. This led to some confusion. It also led to a helmetless Dez Bryant yelling at the official.
After conferring with each other, the officials picked up the flag, a decision that Mike Pereira, Fox Sports’ rules analyst and the NFL’s former vice president of officiating, said was incorrect. Brian Burke of Advanced Football Analytics calculates that when the official picked up the flag, the Lions’ chances of winning that game dropped by 12 percentage points.
Dallas won 24-20.
Check out our latest NFL playoff predictions.The INSIDER Summary: • Nathan Eigenfeld is building his own tiny mobile home.
• He'll live in it during a three-month ski trip to British Columbia this winter.
• He has no substantial construction experience, so the project has been frustrating and rewarding.
Originally from Minnesota, Colorado resident Nathan Eigenfeld, 27, is turning an 8x6 trailer into a cozy ski lodge on wheels, which he plans to live in this winter. He's building the tiny home with no real construction experience... though his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering certainly helps. Slides View As: One Page
Nathan Eigenfeld graduated with a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from University of Colorado Boulder last winter. He's continued working there as a postdoctoral research associate.
This winter, he's planning to take a much-needed break to go skiing in British Columbia from January through March. "I didn't take any breaks coming in from undergraduate directly into my Ph.D., and then directly from my Ph.D. into postdoc," he said.
"I have been wanting to go to British Columbia for several years to ski," Eigenfeld said. "It's kind of the powder Mecca of North America."
His friends are all cramming into an RV for the trip, but Eigenfeld decided to build his own mobile home to hitch to his Toyota Tundra. "I was going to buy a camper, but figured I would just build one instead," he said. "Building these rigs is definitely trending."
He began creating the tiny home with no initial design, eyeballing measurements and taking it day by day.
"I'd say I have no substantial construction experience, but with some common sense and YouTube you can do a lot," he said.
"It's definitely a learning process, because just about every single step of the process is a first try, so that can add some serious anxiety and frustration."
Still, Eigenfeld is making progress. He recently finished constructing and insulating the exterior.
Next up is furnishing the inside with a wood burning stove and other amenities.
His original budget was $3,000, but he estimates the total cost of the project will be somewhere between $4,000 and $4,500. "There are certain things that I ended up splurging on to make it nicer," he said, citing double-pane windows, a hardwood door, and pine paneling. "These are all very standard household items that are all on the cheap side, but since I'm trying to do it super dirt bag level, to me, these were splurge items. My original thoughts were to make a metal box I could sleep in, but it turned into something bigger, more of an investment."
Despite some difficulties along the way, he believes that anyone can build their own tiny home.An FBI agent is being held on anti-terrorism charges in Pakistan after authorities found ammunition in a bag as he boarded a plane in Karachi, Pakistani and U.S. officials said Tuesday.
Joel Cox, 32, was detained by airport police in Karachi about 4 p.m. Monday when he tried to board a Pakistan International Airlines flight to Islamabad. He was in possession of 15 bullets and a magazine for a 9mm pistol, police officials said.
On Tuesday, he appeared in court on charges that he had violated local anti-terrorism laws that prohibit the carrying of weapons or ammunition on a commercial flight. A judge ordered that Cox be detained until at least Saturday so Pakistani security officials can investigate the matter.
The American’s arrest was news across Pakistan, and one television station aired footage of Cox sitting in a jail cell in Karachi, the country’s largest city and one of its most dangerous.
U.S. officials in Washington confirmed that the agent, who is assigned to the FBI Miami Field Office, was in Pakistan on temporary duty. They had earlier requested that Cox’s name be withheld, citing the sensitivity of the situation, but his name has now been widely publicized in Pakistan. The FBI did not return calls Wednesday morning.
A U.S. official with knowledge of the case said the agent was not armed and had apparently forgotten about the loaded magazine in his bag. Cox was in Pakistan as part of a multi-agency effort to help the Pakistanis investigate corruption, the official said.
Reached by phone, Cox’s father said his son was scheduled to be in Pakistan for about three months for “office-type work” with “a non-FBI-type” entity.
An FBI spokesman in Miami referred questions about the arrest to the State Department.
Meghan Gregonis, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, said U.S. officials are working to resolve the matter.
“We are aware of the reports, and we are coordinating closely with Pakistani authorities on the matter,” Gregonis said.
State Department officials also voiced optimism that the matter can be quickly resolved. But a Pakistani Foreign Ministry official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive subject, said officials are trying to gather more information about the agent’s job in Pakistan.
It’s common for FBI agents to be assigned overseas, where they often work out of U.S. consulates or embassies.
One former FBI agent who used to work in Pakistan said agents are allowed to carry weapons there. But the former agent, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid, said they are not allowed to carry weapons onto civilian aircraft.
In recent years, several Americans have been detained in Pakistan on charges that fueled diplomatic tension between the two countries. In the most high-profile case, a CIA contractor was detained for nearly two months in 2011 in the killing of two men in Lahore.Raymond A. Davis, who was part of a secret CIA team that had been operating in the eastern city, argued that he had acted in self-defense after the two men tried to rob him.
The incident sparked violent protests across Pakistan and greatly strained bilateral relations. Pakistan initially rebuffed requests from senior Obama administration officials that Davis be granted diplomatic immunity. But he was eventually freed after arrangements were made to compensate the relatives of the victims.
At the time, anti-American sentiment was growing in Pakistan because of U.S. drone strikes and disagreements over whether the Pakistani military was doing enough to combat terrorism.
But in the past year, officials on both sides have stressed that relations are on the upswing.
On Monday, the Pakistani military announced that the U.S. military was being granted rare permission to use Pakistani airspace so it could more safely transport vehicles and other supplies from Karachi to Afghanistan.
Craig reported from Kabul. Julie Tate in Washington, Nisar Mehdi in Karachi and Shaiq Hussain in Islamabad contributed to this report.New year, new tanks! Try out the new Swedish tanks, or find 'em and take 'em out, and get awesome stuff while you're at it! Collect points with three missions, including the usual daily mission for 20,000 XP, and unlock levels of prizing at TankRewards.com.
This time, with every level of prizing you unlock weekly, you'll receive a free Premium tank rental for three days. The more you play, the more you win!
Starts January 13, 03:20 PT / 06:20 ET
Ends March 6, 03:20 PT / 06:20 ET
Missions for TankRewards.com (Up to 71 Points) "TankRewards.com Daily" (Earn 20,000 XP in tier IV+ vehicles) One point per day Complete 51 times for extra Credit-boosting Personal Reserves
"TankRewards.com Swedish Champion" (Win 10 battles in tier IV+ Swedish vehicles) Up to ten points per account Complete 10 times for extra Credit-boosting Personal Reserves
"TankRewards.com Swedish Hunter" (Destroy 10 Swedish vehicles in tier IV+ vehicles) Up to ten points per account Complete 10 times for extra Credit-boosting Personal Reserves Q: How do I find the mission requirements? A: G o into your Garage and click on the "Missions" tab just above your Crew: If you're still curious, check out our handy guide!MacRumors confirmed our test password "dontdisplaythis" appeared as the hint
A second video with English system language is embedded below
Tried myself & it's true: #HighSierra shows the #APFS volume password as hint. Persists reboots, not stored in keychain. Wow. Just wow. pic.twitter.com/FkcHI9KHl9 — Felix Schwarz (@felix_schwarz) October 5, 2017
Brazilian software developer Matheus Mariano appears to have discovered a significant Disk Utility bug that exposes the passwords of encrypted Apple File System volumes in plain text on macOS High Sierra.Mariano added a new encrypted APFS volume to a container, set a password and hint, and unmounted and remounted the container in order to force a password prompt for demonstration purposes. Then, he clicked the "Show Hint" button, which revealed the full password in plain text rather than the hint.MacRumors reproduced this behavior on a 2016 MacBook Pro running macOS High Sierra, including versions 10.13 and 10.13.1 beta. German software developer Felix Schwarz also shared a video of the issue on Twitter today.The issue currently only affects Macs with SSD storage due to Apple File System compatibility, but APFS will eventually support machines with Fusion Drives as well. Schwarz believes users who haven't specified a password hint, or haven't used Disk Utility whatsoever, are probably not affected.For clarity, this appears to be a bug within Disk Utility itself. When creating an encrypted APFS volume in Terminal with the diskutil command line utility, the actual hint is shown, rather than the password.Mariano said he has reported the vulnerability to Apple. The company did not immediately respond to our request for a comment on the matter, but we'll update this article if we hear back.Apple has addressed this bug by releasing a macOS High Sierra 10.13 Supplemental Update, available from the Updates tab in the Mac App Store. Apple has also shared a support document outlining steps to back up, erase, and restore the encrypted APFS volume upon updating.The bug has also been fixed in the base version of macOS High Sierra for those who have yet to install the full software update.Coming Soon
Carlo & Malik
An old-school homicide detective in Rome is paired up with a star rookie born in Ivory Coast in this crime series starring Claudio Amendola.
I Am Not Okay With This
A teen navigates the complexities of high school, family and her sexuality while dealing with new superpowers. Based on Charles Forsman's graphic novel.
Warrior Nun
A young woman wakes up in a morgue with inexplicable powers and gets caught in a battle between good and evil. Inspired by the manga novels.
Tuca & Bertie
Two bird women -- a carefree toucan and an anxious songbird -- live in the same apartment building and share their lives in this animated comedy.
Team Kaylie
After one too many misdemeanors, selfie-obsessed teen socialite Kaylie Konners is legally tasked with leading an after-school wilderness club.
The I-Land
In this sci-fi adventure series, ten people wake up on a treacherous island with no memory and soon discover this world is not as it seems.
Nowhere Man
A strange encounter causes a man awaiting execution to experience alternate timelines, leading to his escape from prison to protect his family.
KAOS
This genre-bending series puts a modern twist on Greek and Roman mythology, exploring themes of gender politics, power and life in the underworld.CHEVROLET The Chevrolet Bolt EV is a compact four-door, five-seat hatchback.
Well, That was easy.
Twenty years and a million tears after General Motors’ GM, -0.07% senior scientists built a fleet of nimble, lovable all-electric cars (the EV1) and then crushed them -- an episode told in Chris Paine’s film “Who Killed the Electric Car?” -- GM has delivered the world’s first affordable, long-range EV, the Chevrolet Bolt, with an EPA-estimated range of 238 miles and an MSRP of $37,495, before the $7,500 federal tax credit.
Now read: GM earnings: Will driverless-car, ride-sharing investments pay off?
GM reached this mark a few months sooner than industry pioneer Tesla TSLA, -0.30%, which is only now ramping up production of its Model 3 compact sedan to satisfy some 450,000 preorders. The Bolt -- a compact four-door, five-seat hatchback, assembled at the Orion plant near Detroit -- offers about the same range and acceleration as reported for Model 3 with the standard battery (50 kWh) and a bit more cargo flexibility, owing to the hatch design.
The situation is ironic, since building a mass-market EV has been Tesla boss Elon Musk’s goal all along, whereas GM management had to be dragged to it, kicking and screaming. But there is value in being first. Wait-times for new orders of the Model 3 stretch from 12 to 18 months. While no raving beauty -- rather like a glass boot -- the Bolt is certainly good enough to peel some off the Tesla waiting list. If nothing else they can lease the Chevy until their Model 3 arrives.
Obviously, these machines have very different pedigrees -- Tesla the disrupter, GM the disrupted -- and hold out contrasting owner narratives. The Bolt doesn’t reinvent GM’s wheel entirely. My butt could tell those seats blindfolded. Also, in our $43,905 Premier test car, the driver’s door’s inner seam wasn’t quite plumb. They do that to make me crazy.
See also: How to buy a $35,000 brand-new electric car for under $14,000
But the Bolt is a hell of a car, the quickest soulless appliance you could ask for, an absolute hoot in the sack. It dominates the BMW i3 and the Nissan Leaf, with more room, more power and more range. That’s amazing when you think about it: Nissan sank an entire year’s worth of R&D, $6 billion, tooling up for the Leaf. If the Bolt team had been given $6 billion they could have made it fly.
What made the difference? At the risk of being reductive, the falling cost of automotive-grade lithium batteries. And while the Bolt’s liquid-cooled battery pack certainly boasts some respectable numbers, volts- and amps-wise, mostly it’s just big: 60 kWh sandwiched between the floorboards. The Bolt is all about the battery.
While they were flirting with innovation, the designers worked to keep the human interface familiar. Unlike Tesla products, the Bolt waits for the driver to press the start button before the instrument panels bloom (the Tesla unlocks as you approach and lights up when you touch it). The Bolt’s gear selector is conventional in position and operation (you have to remember to press the P for park button). It’s not nearly as fun as the BMW i3 gear selector, like turning the right bolt in Frankenstein’s neck.
At a stop, if you release the Bolt’s brake the car will start creeping forward, as if it had an engine and automatic transmission. As owners become more familiar with regenerative braking -- one-pedal operation, whereby the car slows when you lift the e-throttle -- they can slip the gear selector into L mode. One-pedal operation is more intuitive and safer than conventional foot controls and is one of the benefits of EVs.
But after my first week with the Bolt, I would say the Bolt’s primary innovation is emotional. It’s the Prozac of range anxiety.
Your humble correspondent is learning as I go. I had a Level 2 charger installed at my house this year; the Bolt is the first test car to get home-charging treatment. At 240 volts/32 amps, the Bolt can acquire 25 miles of range per hour of charging, amounting to a full charge overnight. At a fast-charge station (480 volts) those figures are 90 miles of range in 30 minutes, but that requires the optional fast-charge hardware ($750).
Not being the fretful sort, I didn’t think I suffered from range anxiety, the fear of being stranded on the road with a flat battery. Even in EVs with less than 100 miles range, the charging duties seemed manageable. But, in retrospect, those ever-dwindling states of charge were never far from my mind, always in the corner of my eye. I never registered this gloom until it was lifted.
The Bolt’s +200-mile range puts it beyond the nagging agues of range anxiety. I drove more than 170 miles in a day last week, mostly highway miles between 70 and 80 mph, with no apprehension. Just as important, the Bolt’s long legs means the average owner can skip several days between charges. If I owned a Bolt, I’d plug in about as often as I take the family van to the gas station now. And the bathrooms at home are cleaner.
The Bolt’s mighty electron reserves change the experience fundamentally. It’s amazing how much fun EVs are when you’re not worried sick about running out of juice.
What follows only sounds controversial but it’s not: For a general audience, electric vehicles will offer a better driving experience than cars with internal-combustion engines. It’s in the nature of the mechanism, which dispenses with the trembling gas-fired whirligig under the hood, the transmission, gas tank and tailpipes, in favor of a murmuring electric motor(s), a single gearset, soft-singing voltage controllers and low-slung batteries.
For example, auto makers spend millions of development dollars keeping engine noise, vibration and harshness away from the cabin, lately including exotica like active noise cancellation, dynamic engine mounts and damping flywheels in the transmission. The Bolt doesn’t have any of that and at 70 mph it was so quiet in the cabin I could hear my wristwatch ticking, and my hearing ain’t all that good.
It’s also quiet on the outside. I’m afraid I surprised a squirrel.
Efficiency? The energy content of a gallon of gas is about 33 kWh, which means that the Bolt travels 238 miles on the equivalent of less than two gallons of gas (128/110/119 mpg-e, city/highway/combined.)
Did somebody say acceleration? The Bolt is as good as its name. From a standstill, and hampered by its low-rolling-resistance tires, the Bolt hits 60 mph in less than 6.5 seconds, officially. But once it’s rolling, say, between 20 and 60 mph, the Bolt is outrageously, throw-your-head-back quick, stealthy and spontaneous. With 266 lb-ft of torque on hair-trigger alert, this little family car squirts past slower cars like a Subaru WRX STI, except nobody thinks it’s an air raid. The Bolt should come with a traffic attorney on retainer.
As with other such EVs, the battery pack (960 pounds) imbues the Bolt with a low center of gravity, which is all the more palpable from the elevated perch of the driver seat. The low C-of-G does nice things for the Bolt’s standard-issue small-car suspension (struts in front and torsion-bar rear), like lead in a keel. With its low CofG and minimal body roll, the Bolt gives and gives in corners until the tires chirp their surrender.
That, right... there... is gasoline’s Achilles’ heel: the comparative user experience. In the end, it will not matter how much the Big Oil spends propagandizing against electric cars or if gasoline goes back to 30 cents a gallon. Gainsayers need only run down to a Chevrolet dealership and drive, back to back, dollar for dollar, one of the company’s anodyne family haulers and the Bolt. Which one is quieter, more refined, quicker around town (much!), with better ride and handling? Which one feels like the future and the past?
This column originally appeared at WSJ.com."You guys burnt the place down, turned it into a single column of flame. More people died there in the firestorm, in that one big flame, than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined." --Kurt Vonnegut, Jr On the evening of February 13, 1945, an orgy of genocide and barbarism began against a defenseless German city, one of the greatest cultural centers of northern Europe. Within less than 14 hours not only was it reduced to flaming ruins, but an estimated one-third of its inhabitants, possibly as many as a half a million, had perished in what was the worst single event massacre of all time. ___ Toward the end of World War II, as Allied planes rained death and destruction over Germany, the old Saxon city of Dresden lay like an island of tranquillity amid desolation. Famous as a cultural center and possessing no military value, Dresden had been spared the terror that descended from the skies over the rest of the country.
In fact, little had been done to provide the ancient city of artists and craftsmen with anti-aircraft defenses. One squadron of planes had been stationed in Dresden for awhile, but the Luftwaffe decided to move the aircraft to another area where they would be of use. A gentlemen's agreement seemed to prevail, designating Dresden an "open city."
February 13/14 1945: Holocaust over Dresden, known as the Florence of the North. Dresden was a hospital city for wounded soldiers. Not one military unit, not one anti-aircraft battery was deployed in the city. Together with the 600.000 refugees from Breslau, Dresden was filled with nearly 1.2 million people. Churchill had asked for "suggestions how to blaze 600.000 refugees". He wasn't interested how to target military installations 60 miles outside of Dresden. More than 700.000 phosphorus bombs were dropped on 1.2 million people. One bomb for every 2 people. The temperature in the centre of the city reached 1600 o centigrade. More than 260.000 bodies and residues of bodies were counted. But those who perished in the centre of the city can't be traced. Approximately 500.000 children, women, the elderly, wounded soldiers and the animals of the zoo were slaughtered in one night.
On Shrove Tuesday, February 13, 1945, a flood of refugees fleeing the Red Army 60 miles away had swollen the city's population to well over a million. Each new refugee brought fearful accounts of Soviet atrocities. Little did those refugees retreating from the Red terror imagine that they were about to die in a horror worse than anything Stalin could devise.
Normally, a carnival atmosphere prevailed in Dresden on Shrove Tuesday. In 1945, however, the outlook was rather dismal. Houses everywhere overflowed with refugees, and thousands were forced to camp out in the streets shivering in the bitter cold.
However, the people felt relatively safe; and although the mood was grim, the circus played to a full house that night as thousands came to forget for a moment the horrors of war. Bands of little girls paraded about in carnival dress in an effort to bolster warning spirits. Half-sad smiles greeted the laughing girls, but spirits were lifted.
No one realized that in less than 24 hours those same innocent children would die screaming in Churchill's firestorms. But, of course, no one could know that then. The Russians, to be sure, were savages, but at least the Americans and British were "honorable."
So, when those first alarms signaled the start of 14 hours of hell, Dresden's people streamed dutifully into their shelters. But they did so without much enthusiasm, believing the alarms to be false, since their city had never been threatened from the air. Many would never come out alive, for that "great democratic statesman," Winston Churchill--in collusion with that other "great democratic statesman," Franklin Delano Roosevelt--had decided that the city of Dresden was to be obliterated by saturation bombing.
What where Churchill's motives? They appear to have been political, rather than military. Historians unanimously agree that Dresden had no military value. What industry it did have produced only cigarettes and china.
But the Yalta Conference was coming up, in which the Soviets and their Western allies would sit down like ghouls to carve up the shattered corpse of Europe. Churchill wanted a trump card--a devastating "thunderclap of Anglo-American annihilation"--with which to "impress" Stalin.
That card, however, was never played at Yalta, because bad weather delayed the originally scheduled raid. Yet Churchill insisted that the raid be carried out--to "disrupt and confuse" the German civilian population behind the lines.
Dresden's citizens barely had time to reach their shelters. The first bomb fell at 10:09 p.m. The attack lasted 24 minutes, leaving the inner city a raging sea of fire. "Precision saturation bombing" had created the desired firestorm. A firestorm is caused when hundreds of smaller fires join in one vast conflagration. Huge masses of air are sucked in to feed the inferno, causing an artificial tornado. Those persons unlucky enough to be caught in the rush of wind are hurled down entire streets into the flames. Those who seek refuge underground often suffocate as oxygen is pulled from the air to feed the blaze, or they perish in a blast of white heat--heat intense enough to melt human flesh. One eyewitness who survived told of seeing "young women carrying babies running up and down the streets, their dresses and hair on fire, screaming until they fell down, or the collapsing buildings fell on top of them."
There was a three-hour pause between the first and second raids. The lull had been calculated to lure civilians from their shelters into the open again. To escape the flames, tens of thousands of civilians had crowded into the Grosser Garten, a magnificent park nearly one and a half miles square.
The second raid came at 1:22 a.m. with no warning. Twice as many bombers returned with a massive load of incendiary bombs. The second wave was designed to spread the raging firestorm into the Grosser Garten.
It was a complete "success." Within a few minutes a sheet of flame ripped across the grass, uprooting trees and littering the branches of others with everything from bicycles to human limbs. For days afterward, they remained bizarrely strewn about as grim reminders of Allied sadism.
At the start of the second air assault, many were still huddled in tunnels and cellars, waiting for the fires of the first attack to die down. At 1:30 a.m. an ominous rumble reached the ears of the commander of a Labor Service convoy sent into the city on a rescue mission. He described it this way:
"The detonation shook the cellar walls. The sound of the explosions mingled with a new, stranger sound which seemed to come closer and closer, the sound of a thundering waterfall; it was the sound of the mighty tornado howling in the inner city." MELTING HUMAN FLESH Others hiding below ground died. But they died painlessly--they simply glowed bright orange and blue in the darkness. As the heat intensified, they either disintegrated into cinders or melted into a thick liquid--often three or four feet deep in spots.
Shortly after 10:30 on the morning of February 14, the last raid swept over the city. American bombers pounded the rubble that had been Dresden for a steady 38 minutes. But this attack was not nearly as heavy as the first two.
However, what distinguished this raid was the cold-blooded ruthlessness with which it was carried out. |
Measured against the size of the economy, federal revenues at the end of Bush’s term were smaller than when he took office.
Christie’s statement has some superficial accuracy but a more complete picture shows that he has omitted many details that would lead to a different conclusion. We rate this claim Mostly False.With its Creators Update for Windows 10, Microsoft promised that users would have the option to postpone future updates for a limited period of time and many rejoiced. But now that the update has started rolling out, it’s become apparent that there are still some stability issues and performing a manual installation isn’t recommended right now.
Advertisement
In a blog post, Microsoft’s director of program management explained that the latest update has been rolling out slowly because there are known issues that could be a problem for anyone who isn’t an advanced user. The post doesn’t go in depth on what those issues are but it appears that all the bugs haven’t been ironed out for certain devices. For instance, PCs that use a certain type of Broadcom radio were having connectivity problems with Bluetooth devices.
If you aren’t the type to manually install updates, this probably isn’t your problem. Windows 10 has automatically pushed updates to users since it debuted. The Creators Update has a lot of cool little features, but the most useful one is that it offers a simple way to pause installing updates for up to seven days. Updates are good for security but Windows has had an insidious way of suddenly deciding it’s time to install that latest patch and restart right when you’re in the middle of something important.
Microsoft is still automatically updating users this time around and if you encounter problems, you can find instructions for rolling back the update here. If you’re the cavalier type who doesn’t care about warnings and just wants to start making 3D dogs in MS Paint, you can manually download the update here.
Advertisement
[Microsoft, The Register]Wicca is a beloved 5 yr old American Staffordshire Bull Terrier who has been deemed a dangerous dog by the city of Montreal despite the fact that she only grazed a woman on the abdomen when she spooked her lying next to her owner, on leash on a terrasse. We the people had requested that Wicca's execution be overturned. Normally, an incident as mild as this warrants a 90 day muzzle order, a fine and an evaluation by a canine professional. Wicca was never given that opportunity by the city of Montreal. Her case was denied by the court of appeals and an injunction was also denied. The city refused to back down. They even refused to allow Wicca to be sent to the Smiling Dogs Sanctuary in Texas. World famous dog expert Cesar Millan was also refused. Wicca was euthanized on July 26th,2012. This petition is to make sure this never happens again. The laws need to change. Here in Montreal, it is a simple civil servant who has the power to decide which dog lives and which dog dies. This case was pure breed discrimination.
Wicca est une femelle de 5 ans de race American Staffordshire Bull Terrier jugée dangereuse par la ville de Montréal malgré le fait qu'elle a simplement légègement blessée l'abdomen d'une dame qui a mal réagie lorsqu'elle l'a vue par surprise sur une terrasse couchée au pied de son maitre en laisse. Nous le peuple demandions que l'ordre d'éxécution de Wicca soit renversée. Normalement, un incident si mineur requiert un ordre de 90 jours de muselière, une amende et une évaluation d'un professionnel canin. Wicca n'a jamais eue sa permission à ces droits. Son cas a été refusé par la cour d'appel ainsi qu'une injonction. La ville a même refusée de permettre que Wicca soit prise en charge par le sanctuaire Smiling Dogs au Texas. Le célèbre Cesar Millan lui aussi a été refusé. Wicca a été euthanasiée le 26 Juillet, 2012.
Cette pétition a pour but de changer les lois pour que ceci ne se reproduise plus. À Montréal, c'est un simple employé civil qui a le pouvoir de décider si un chien vit ou meurt. Le cas de Wicca est un example de pure discrimination canine.
Wicca es una perra « American Staffordshire Bull Terrier » muy amada, de 5 años de edad, que se ha considerado una perra peligroso por la ciudad de Montreal (Quebec/Canada). Esto a pesar de que solo araño a una mujer en el estomago cuando se asusto. (Esteva acostada al lado de su dueño, en una terraza cuando paso la señora.) Nosotros, el pueblo pedimos que la ejecución de Wicca se revoca. Normalmente, un incidente haci tiene que el pero use un hocico por 90 días, una multa y una evaluación de un profesional canino. A Wicca, nunca se le dio esta oportunidad. Su caso fue rechazado por el tribunal de apelaciones y una orden judicial también fue rechazado. La ciudad se negó a dar marcha atrás. Incluso se negó a permitir a Wicca a ser enviada al santuario Smiling Dogs en Texas, USA y Cesar Millan tambien. Wicca fue sacrificada el 26 de julio de 2012 y perdió su vida. Esta petición es para asegurar que esto no vuelva a suceder. Las leyes deben cambiar. Aquí, en Montreal, es un simple servidor público que tiene el poder de decidir qué perros viven y que perro mueren. Este caso fue la discriminación de raza y nada mas.
https://www.facebook.com/notes/montrealdogsca/wicca-a-beloved-pit-bull/171502749641623
http://www.spca.com/?p=1834&lang=en
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Save-Wicca/450404848326080Edge, the new web browser from Microsoft for Windows 10 is not free of problems. Users often complain that the Edge browser doesn’t open, Edge browser is slow, and Edge browser automatically closes a few seconds after starting it.
For all these days, Windows 10 users had to reset/reinstall the Edge browser to fix most of the issues. Reinstalling/resetting the Edge browser requires you to delete a system folder and then executing a couple of commands in PowerShell. Novice users always hesitate to run some unknown commands and try to avoid Command Prompt and PowerShell.
Users were asking Microsoft to provide an option to repair the Edge browser in Windows 10. Finally, Microsoft seems to have listened to users feedback as there are provisions to repair and reset the Edge browser in Windows 10 Fall Creators Update (version 1709).
The reset and repair operations of Edge browser can be done by navigating to Settings > Apps > Apps & features > Microsoft Edge.
In this guide, we will see how to repair the Edge browser in Windows 10 without the help of any after-market utilities or without modifying any system tools.
Repair Microsoft Edge browser
Here is how to repair Microsoft Edge browser in Windows 10.
IMPORTANT: The ability to repair Microsoft Edge browser is available in Fall Creators Update for Windows 10 (version 1709). The same feature doesn’t exist in Windows 10 Creators Update (v1703).
Step 1: Open the Settings app. Navigate to Apps > Apps & features.
Step 2: Look for Microsoft Edge entry and click on the same. You should now see Advanced options link. Click on the link to open Storage usage and app reset page.
Step 3: Here, you will see two options: Repair, and Reset. The Repair option repairs Microsoft Edge browser without removing your data. The Reset option is meant to reset Microsoft Edge browser to default settings by deleting your data, including browser history, cookies, and other Edge settings.
Since we want to repair the Edge browser, click the Repair button. Finally, if you see a confirmation dialog, click Repair button again to begin repairing the Edge browser installation.
Your Edge browser should be ready to use in a few seconds. If Windows 10 asks you to restart your PC, do the same once.
Don’t forget to read our how to uninstall and remove Microsoft Edge browser from Windows 10 guide.Fresh off of a fistfight with security at the Israeli High Court, MP Michael Ben Ari and his Strong Israel party took to the streets today in an anti-African rally in Southern Tel-Aviv.
The protest came after Israeli police revealed that an Eritrean had been arrested on suspicion of rape in the neighborhood, prompting Ben Ari to conclude that southern Tel Aviv is now occupied soil.
The next step, to them, was a rally at which Ben Ari et al cursed Africans, hurled water at them, accusing them of making Israel a “living hell” and insisting that the elections should refocus on the issue of the mass expulsion of all Africans from the nation.
The religious Shas Party, which had long made the goal of expulsion of Africans a centerpiece argument, is heading for the hills now, announcing that they are canceling a campaign video in which Interior Minister Eli Yishai refers to them as “infiltrators” and includes snippets of Shas supporters blaming Africans for everything from the housing shortage to the cost of goods in stores. It concluded with the promise that if Shas wins “not one Sudanese will remain.”
Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz** Apple Game of the Year 2014 **
** Winner of Apple Design Award 2014 **
In Monument Valley you will manipulate impossible architecture and guide a silent princess through a stunningly beautiful world.
Monument Valley is a surreal exploration through fantastical architecture and impossible geometry. Guide the silent princess Ida through mysterious monuments, uncovering hidden paths, unfolding optical illusions and outsmarting the enigmatic Crow People.
"Forgotten Shores": Eight new chapters of adventure and illusion available now as a separate purchase.
Buy or download Monument Valley now and you’ll also get our fully animated iMessage sticker pack, including 5 stickers exclusive to players! Only available on iOS10 and above.
=======
"This might be the most beautiful iPad game of 2014" - Wired
"Brilliant design... stayed with me like a dream I didn't want to forget" 9/10 - Polygon
"The most sublime hour my iPad has ever given me... and the value of such a thing is incalculable" - Kotaku
"Monument Valley stuns with it's serenity... each screen is a work of art" - Huffington Post
"Almost impossibly gorgeous... a feast for your senses" 5/5 - Touch Arcade
=======
BEAUTIFUL
Inspired by minimalist 3D design, optical illusions and palaces and temples from around the world, every monument is a unique, hand-crafted world to explore.
EASY TO USE
Twist and drag to reshape the world and help Ida to explore. Designed to be easy for everyone to pick up, enjoy and complete.
SOUND
Audio reacts to your manipulation of the world to provide a surreal and beautiful soundscape. Best experienced with headphones.
iCloud
Synchronize your game across all your devices.
** Monument Valley is designed for iPhone 4 and above. It is NOT compatible with iPod Touch 4th Generation.A Somali soldier patrols next to the burnt-out wreckage of a car that was used by suspected al-Shabab fighters on April 16, 2017. (Mohamed Abdiwahab/AFP/Getty)
A Navy SEAL was killed during a firefight with al-Shabab militants in Somalia, the U.S. military said Friday, a sign of the risks the United States faces as it expands its fight against al-Qaeda-linked extremists there.
Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said that the service member, who has not been identified, was killed as a team of U.S. troops provided support to a Somali army mission targeting a Shabab cell believed to be linked to plots against U.S., Somali and African Union forces.
Defense officials said that a firefight erupted shortly after a team of Navy SEALs and Somali army forces were dropped by helicopter near an al-Shabab compound in an area called Barii, about 40 miles west of the capital Mogadishu. In addition to the slain SEAL, at least two other Americans were wounded, one official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive operations. A number of Shabab militants were believed to have been killed, officials said.
An al-Shabab spokesman said that U.S. forces had launched an assault on one of the group’s bases, Reuters reported.
[Trump signs off on the Pentagon carrying out offensive strikes in Somalia]
The incident marks the first U.S. combat death in Somalia since 1993, when 18 American service members were killed in an extended battle with Somali militiamen, defense officials said. That incident, which became known as “Black Hawk Down,” generated a firestorm of criticism for the Clinton administration, prompting the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Somalia and the resignation of then-Defense Secretary Les Aspin.
It was also the latest casualty to occur during counter-terrorism missions under the Trump administration, following recent incidents in Yemen and Afghanistan. The deaths highlight the risks inherent to ground missions against militant targets, which are typically conducted by Special Operations troops and often take place in areas without a significant military footprint.
The firefight comes several weeks after the Pentagon announced that President Trump had approved expanded military operations in Somalia, authorizing unilateral U.S. counter-terrorism ground and air strikes against al-Shabab.
The decision to allow more expansive operations in Somalia is a signal of the Trump administration’s willingness to delegate decision-making power to military commanders and authorize a greater use of force more generally. It has already done so in Yemen, where U.S. forces are conducting intensified operations against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and in Syria, where President Trump launched missile strikes on Syrian government facilities last month in retaliation for a chemical attack.
[The Pentagon said it killed Islamist militants in Somalia. Turns out they were allies.]
Even before the Trump administration’s move in Somalia, the Obama administration had gradually expanded counter-terrorism operations there, adding special operators and permitting more expansive ground missions. A force of 50 U.S. troops is tasked with partnering with the Somali army, and additional forces come and go for shorter periods of time.
Defense officials said Friday’s operation was conducted under earlier established authorities focused on partnered operations with Somali and African Union troops.
The firefight illustrates the gargantuan challenges facing Somalia, which has been gripped by a quarter-century of civil war and is now grappling with with a severe drought and potential food crisis. In the wake of recent elections, the weak government is struggling to fend off the ongoing threat from al-Shabab, which aims to establish its own conservative Islamist state, and from a newer Islamic State presence.Workers who’ve waged a years-long struggle for a union at the Nissan auto plant in Canton, Mississippi are about to get some star power.
On March 4, Senator Bernie Sanders, NAACP President Cornell William Brooks, actor Danny Glover, and even a professional football player or two are expected to show up in solidarity with the workers.
The rally will certainly boost the profile of a campaign that has already mobilized faith, civil rights, and student groups in support of the plant’s 5,000 employees, about 80 percent of whom are African American. But major labor battles like this one are not won in a day.
Leading the campaign’s day-to-day work in the trenches is Sanchioni Butler. A United Auto Workers employee since 1988, Butler relocated to Mississippi in 2008 and has been the lead organizer for the Nissan workers in Canton for several years.
In this challenging position, Butler has learned many valuable lessons, especially about organizing black workers in the part of our country where barriers to unionization are highest.
A key lesson, Butler says, is the need to “leave all egos at the door.” In an interview for the Institute for Policy Studies report And Still I Rise, Butler explained that “You can’t come to the South with an attitude of, ‘I’m coming to save someone.’ You can’t be judgmental. You can’t be a person who is going to look down or criticize, judge, or have a savior attitude. Organizers need to listen.”
One thing Butler has heard a lot about is the Japanese firm’s efforts to demonize the UAW. Despite the fact that Nissan plants in other countries are unionized, Canton workers say management there has used various union-busting strategies, including interrogations and surveillance of workers, as well as threats to close the plant if they vote for the union.
How has Butler worked to overcome these scare tactics?
“As an organizer, I try to find out a little bit about the workers and what they care about,” Butler explains. “Most women are passionate about their children. They might not have had an education, so they’re passionate about paying that opportunity forward for their kids. So I try to help them see that organizing can help them provide for their children.”
While the company claims they pay some of the highest wages in the state, critics point out that Nissan’s wage levels are significantly below US auto industry norms. One major reason is the firm’s heavy use of temporary labor. By some estimates, as many as 40 percent of the Canton plant’s workers are hired through employment agencies and the vast majority of these temporary workers are African American.
According to the UAW, Nissan’s temp workers were earning $12 per hour on average in 2013, about half the pay of higher-level workers employed directly by the company.
On top of pay and benefits complaints, workers at the Canton plant also have concerns about their safety on the job. In 2016, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration cited Nissan for two violations in this facility — for not covering or providing guardrails for open pits and for water and oil on the factory floors.
Meanwhile, Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn has been keeping a huge chunk of the firm’s expanding profits for himself. Once known in France as “le cost killer” for slashing of tens of thousands of jobs, the auto exec pocketed nearly $10 million per year in 2015 and 2016 from the Japanese firm. Ghosn, who has taken home an additional multi-million-dollar paycheck as the head of Renault, will step down as Nissan CEO on April 1 to focus on the firm’s strategic partnerships with Renault and Mitsubishi.
In 2001, Ghosn personally intervened to block a UAW organizing drive at a Smyrna, Tennessee plant. In a video shown to workers just before the vote, the executive used veiled threats to suggest he would shut down the plant if it went union.
To ramp up pressure on Nissan to end such voter suppression, the UAW and their allies will follow up on their celebrity-studded rally with additional actions, such as leafleting at the company’s dealerships.
For Butler, the fight in Canton is about her legacy as a labor activist. “I want to lay the groundwork for my daughter and granddaughter, so that other people will pick up the torch and continue. I want a victory at Nissan that opens the floodgates to even more African American workers being unionized.”THE WORLD's ten most expensive cities are all found in Australia, Asia and Western Europe, according to the bi-annual cost of living index from the Economist Intelligence Unit, our corporate sibling. Singapore retains the top spot, while weak inflation and the yen's devaluation have pushed Tokyo and Osaka to 11th and 16th place respectively. Seoul has risen from 50th place five years ago to joint ninth at the end of 2014. Asia is also home to many of the world's cheapest cities: Karachi and Bangalore are the joint cheapest locations among the 133 cities in the survey, and five of the six cheapest cities surveyed are in Pakistan and India. Caracas’s descent from top ten to bottom five is due to the survey’s use of an alternative exchange rate. The cost of living in New York has risen by about 23% over the past five years.
Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks.Hello D3 Go! Forum Users -
If you are still having trouble updating your birth date on your forum profile, then please follow the steps listed in the below discussion thread.
Please copy and paste this URL for details --> https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/72653/new-forum-terms-of-service-steps-to-update-profile
It is very important that all users complete this process, otherwise they will unfortunately be unable to actively participate in the forum on their current account.
Thank you!
Marvel Puzzle Quest 4th Anniversary Details *Updated (10/10/17) Brigby ADMINISTRATORS Posts: 6,408 Site Admin
MPQ's 4th Anniversary is almost here, so check out the information below for all the details!
Marvel Puzzle Quest 4th Anniversary Starts at 12:00pm EDT October 5th
Ends at 3:00am EDT on October 16th
Anniversary Events General
Double Iso-8
Double Iso-8 Anniversary Vault tokens
Everyone gets a free Anniversary Vault token at the start of the Anniversary Story Events
The X-Men vs. Apocalypse
Starts 12:00pm EDT 10/5
Honor Among Thieves
Starts 7:00am EDT 10/8
Simulator (X-Men Edition)
Starts 7:00am EDT 10/12 The X-Men vs. Apocalypse
Details
Alliance Boss Event
One Boss mission and five Supporting Character missions Apocalypse (En Sabah Nur)
Apocalypse cannot be Stunned or sent Airborne
Apocalypse cannot be Stunned or sent Airborne The Four Horsemen
Passive Black Power
Apocalypse calls forth his four horsemen at the start of the battle
The Horsemen cannot be matched away or destroyed by normal means
Famine
Destroys the player's AP.
This tile is destroyed when the player has enough AP in their strongest color
War
Player's matches deal less damage.
This tile is destroyed when the player has dealt enough damage.
Pestilence
Creates Attack tiles for Apocalypse.
New tiles have a chance to become Attack tiles for Apocalypse.
This tile is destroyed when there aren't any Special tiles on the board for Apocalypse.
Death
When another Horseman is destroyed, creates a countdown tile that downs the character in front.
This tile is destroyed when it is the last Horseman tile on the board
The Strong Will Survive
Red Power
Deals damage to the lowest level enemy
Rejuvenate
Passive Yellow Power
At the start of the turn, if there are any Horsemen on the board, return Apocalypse to full health. Mission Rewards
Supporting Character
Supporting Character 1,000 Iso-8
Boss
Command Point
1,000 Iso-8
500 Iso-8
Command Point
1,000 Iso-8
Command Point
500 Iso-8
Random Boost Alliance Rewards
Round 1 - 90,000 (Anniversary Token)
Round 2 - 150,000 (Gambit (Modern) Black Cover)
Round 3 - 390,000 (Gambit (Modern) Red Cover)
Round 4 - 985,000 (Gambit (Modern) Purple Cover)
Round 5 - 1,970,000 (X-23 (All-New Wolverine) Purple Cover)
Round 6 - 3,000,000 (X-23 (All-New Wolverine) Red Cover)
Round 7 - 4,400,000 (X-23 (All-New Wolverine) Green Cover)
Round 8 - 5,900,000 (Mes Amis Legendary token) Individual Rewards
5,000 Points - Anniversary Token
10,000 Points - 200 Iso-8
20,000 - Power Boost
31,500 - Health Pack
52,700 - Stockpile
80,000 - 280 Iso-8
112,400 - Wolverine (Astonishing X-Men) Red Cover
149,000 - 280 Iso-8
189,000 - Anniversary Token
234,000 - 280 Iso-8
281,500 - Quicksilver (Pietro Maximoff) Green Cover
332,000 - 500 Iso-8
385,000 - 25 Hero Points
441,500 - 500 Iso-8
500,000 - Quicksilver (Pietro Maximoff) Blue Cover
553,500 - 1,000 Iso-8
627,000 - 25 Hero Points
711,000 - Anniversary Token
802,500 - 2,000 Iso-8
900,000 - Mes Amis Legendary Token Versus Events Class of 2017
Starts 8:00pm Edt 10/5
Let's Be Frank
Starts 8:00am EDT 10/8
Danger Room
Starts 8:00pm EDT 10/10
This will be an all-new X-Men themed Versus tournament that features Hazard tiles.
Hazard tiles will sometimes drop onto the board from the top, and they will either destroy an entire row or column (listed on the tile itself)
RRRAAAWWWR!
Starts 8:00pm EDT 10/12 Deadpool's Daily Quest Sweet
Starts 6:00am EDT 10/5
Crash of the Titans
Devil Dinosaur (Gigantic Reptile)
Savory
Starts 6:00am EDT 10/12
Crash of the Titans
Devil Dinosaur (Gigantic Reptile)
Rewards a Fan Favorite Legendary Token Cover Stores and Vaults Anniversary Vault
The Anniversary vault has 100 items, and its contents can be found below.
3 Fan Favorite Legendary Tokens
9 random Devil Dinosaur (Gigantic Reptile) covers
7 random 4-Star covers
3 Hero Point items
2,900, 1,000, and 600
11 Iso-8 items
1 10,000
6 3,500
4 1,000
27 random 3-Star covers
40 random 2-Star covers Remy Lebeau Limited Vault
40 Items
1 Mes Amis token
1 random 4-Star cover
3 Gambit (Modern) covers (1 of each)
6 Heroic tokens
4 2,500 Iso-8
6 1,000 Iso-8
5 500 Iso-8
14 random 2-Star covers Fan Favorite Legendary Store
Available for the entire duration of the Anniversary
Tokens can be purchased for 25 Command Points
Reward from Crash of the Titans mission that starts October 10th
8 5-Stars at 15%
Black Bolt (Inhuman King)
Black Panther (Civil War)
Black Widow (Natasha Romanoff)
Doctor Strange (Sorcerer Supreme)
Jean Grey (Phoenix)
Silver Surfer (Skyrider)
Thanos (The Mad Titan)
Wolverine (Old Man Logan)
12 Fan Favorite 4-Stars at 42.5%
Agent Coulson (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.)
Blade (Modern)
Captain Marvel (Carol Danvers)
Deadpool (Uncanny X-Force)
Iceman (All-New X-Men)
Jean Grey (All-New X-Men)
Luke Cage (Power Man)
Medusa (Inhuman Queen)
Moon Knight (Marc Spector)
Peggy Carter (Captain America)
Professor X (Charles Xavier)
Wolverine (X-Force)
All other 4-Stars at 42.5% Mes Amis Legendary Store
Available for the entire duration of The X-Men vs. Apocalypse
Tokens can be purchased for 25 Command Points
Reward from top round reward and top progression reward in The X-Men vs. Apocalypse
3 5-Stars at 15%
Gambit (Classic)
Jean Grey (Phoenix)
Wolverine (Old Man Logan)
12 Latest 4-Stars at 42.5%
All other 4-Stars at 42.5% Powered-Up List Fan Favorites
October 5th to the 11th
4-Stars
Blade (Modern)
Captain Marvel (Carol Danvers)
Deadpool (Uncanny X-Force)
Medusa (Inhuman Queen)
Wolverine (X-Force)
3-Stars
Deadpool (It's Me, Deadpool!)
Doctor Strange (Stephen Strange)
Iron Man (Model 40)
Kamala Khan (Ms. Marvel)
Thanos (Modern)
2-Stars
Daken (Dark Avengers)
Storm (Classic)
1-Star
Hawkeye (Classic)
Juggernaut (Classic) Class of 2017
October 12th to the 18th
4-Stars
Agent Coulson (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.)
Gamora (Awesome Mix Volume 2)
Iron Fist (Danny Rand)
Rocket & Groot (Awesome Mix Volume 2)
Sand Man (Flint Marko)
3-Stars
Elektra (Assassin)
Hawkeye (hawkguy)
Human Torch (Classic)
She-Hulk (Modern)
Star-Lord (Peter Quill)
2-Stars
Magneto (Marvel NOW!)
Wolverine (Astonishing X-Men)
1-Star
Storm (Modern)
Venom (Dark Avengers) Hi Everyone,MPQ's 4th Anniversary is almost here, so check out the information below for all the details!The Anniversary vault has 100 items, and its contents can be found below. 0To help you navigate all of Scott and Kimberly’s recommended study tools and resources — from Catholic apologetics questions to faith and family concerns, the materials that they have found useful and that they frequently recommend are categorized as follows:
Dr. Hahn’s Articles
A collection of Dr. Scott Hahn’s articles on Sacred Scripture published in various scholarly journals and collections including the St. Paul Center’s own annual journal, Letter & Spirit.
Apologetics
Apologetics is the critical work of explaining – and defending – the Catholic faith. Great Catholic apologists are doing great work on the worldwide web and we want to raise the banner about them and provide you with some of their best work, along with other material we’ve found valuable.
Liturgy & Prayer
Liturgy & Prayer, covering the official church teachings and pastoral statements on the liturgy, sacraments and the mass; theology of liturgy, eastern rites, preaching, and hymns; how to pray the rosary, liturgy of the Hours, and the liturgical seasons.
Scripture
Scripture Resources: translations, introductions, biblical theology themes and issues; the church and the bible, catholic documents, interpretation issues and principles; historical and literary study; bible study, non-biblical texts, new testament and old testament history and background.
Homily Helps
These short reflections on the Sunday Mass Readings are used by thousands of priests and deacons around the world as a starting place for preparing homilies. Dr. Hahn will help you see how the readings fit together, how the promises of the Old Testament are fulfilled by Christ in the New. Whether you read them or listen to the radio version, they are a great way to prepare for the Liturgy of the Word.PRESCOTT, Ariz. – A 102-year-old Prescott, Arizona, woman born before women gained the right to vote in America has cast her ballot early and voted for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
Jerry Emmett is urging other Arizonans to follow her lead and use the state’s early voting system.
Emmett made headlines in July at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia where she carried a blue-and-white sign that read “Centenarian for Hillary.”
WATCH: Hillary Clinton proud Alicia Machado didn’t let Trump ‘decide her value’
As an honorary delegate for Arizona, she announced the state’s delegation was casting 51 of its 85 votes for Clinton for president.
Emmett remembers seeing her mother go to vote for the first time after the 19th Amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote was ratified in August 1920.
The retired educator says she’s been waiting her whole life to cast her ballot for a woman and has been eager to vote for Clinton, who would be the nation’s first female president.The more and more we use our smartphones, the more important it becomes that we lock our phones, but we need a quick way to do it. Entering a password or swipe pattern is not efficient. Motorola recently implemented a fingerprint reader with the Atrix, but I have not used it to comment on if it works well. They don’t appear to be implementing it on other devices, but I like the concept.
Another concept is facial recognition. An app called Visidon Applock lets you protect user-selected apps from opening unless it recognizes your face. If for some reason it does not work there is a password that you can enter to bypass it. The one limitation is that you need a front-facing camera to snap your picture. In theory this seems excellent, but for now there seems to be some bugs as some people have been able to bypass it.
This is an app worth keeping an eye on though because it will get refined. As it gets refined I would like to see the option to be able to not just limit it to apps, but have a choice to lock your entire phone. This way everything is locked. I can see why this not be an option for now, since some bugs need to be worked out.
I also like this concept for not just privacy from the people around you, but for losing your phone. Yes, you can install apps that let you wipe your phone, but this makes more sense. If nobody can get in your phone that is the best way. You may not even realize instantly that you lost your phone, not to mention you may not even remember the command you have to text to your phone to lock or wipe it.
Check out the video and hit the QR code below or source link for the Android Market
[via android market]Women are more religious than men and are more likely to pray every day - and they may even be born that way.
A study has found British women are nine per cent more likely than their male counterparts to give thanks to God every day.
Women are five per cent more likely to go to church every week and are more likely to say that religion is'very important' to them.
A study has found that British women are nine per cent more likely than their male counterparts to give thanks to God every day. Women are five per cent more likely to go to church ever week more likely to say that religion is'very important' to them
Experts said there was strong evidence that the difference between the genders was because women were born more religious.
Scientists have yet to discover a 'God gene' but said differences at a genetic level appeared to play a big role.
The results were part of a report called 'The Gender Gap in Religion' from Pew, a respected US-based research institute.
The researchers carried out surveys and used existing data on of countries around the world to compare how men and women see faith.
The figures from the UK showed 23 per cent of women said they prayed every day compared to 14 per cent of men.
The results were part of a report called 'The Gender Gap in Religion' from Pew. The figures from the UK showed 23 per cent of women said they prayed every day compared to 14 per cent of men. When asked if religion was'very important' to them, 25 per cent of women said yes compared to 18 per cent of men
When asked if religion was'very important' to them, 25 per cent of women said yes compared to 18 per cent of men.
Some 15 per cent of women said they went to church every week versus 10 per cent of men.
Pew also asked about atheism and found that 56 per cent of men did not believe in God compared to 46 per cent of women.
David Voas, head of the Department of Social Science at University College London, who was consulted for the paper, said that societal factors alone did not explain the difference.
He said: 'There appears to be some fairly compelling evidence (for example from studies of twins) that genes do affect our disposition to be religious.
'And if that's the case, it's at least plausible that the gender gap in religiosity is partly a matter of biology.
WHY WOMEN ARE MORE RELIGIOUS THAN MEN - IS THERE A 'GOD GENE'? Scientists have yet to discover a 'God gene' but said differences at a genetic level appear to play a role Experts said there was strong evidence that the difference between the genders was because women were born more religious. Scientists have yet to discover a 'God gene' but said differences at a genetic level appeared to play a big role. David Voas, head of the Department of Social Science at University College London, who was consulted for the paper, said that societal factors alone did not explain the difference. But he said that it is unlikely there is a 'God gene' that women are more likely to have than men. He said: 'There appears to be some fairly compelling evidence (for example from studies of twins) that genes do affect our disposition to be religious. 'And if that's the case, it's at least plausible that the gender gap in religiosity is partly a matter of biology. 'If true, though, I doubt that it's because there's a 'God gene' and women are more likely to have it than men. 'It seems easier to believe that physiological or hormonal differences could influence personality, which may in turn be linked to variations in'spirituality' or religious thinking'. Professor Voas said that women could be drawn to Christianity over other religions because it 'presents itself as a religion of the powerless'.
'If true, though, I doubt that it's because there's a 'God gene' and women are more likely to have it than men.
'It seems easier to believe that physiological or hormonal differences could influence personality, which may in turn be linked to variations in'spirituality' or religious thinking'.
The trend in Britain was echoed around the world.
Out of 81 countries surveyed in one part of the research, women reported greater levels of weekly prayer attendance in 30 places, most of which have Christian majorities or large Christian populations.
In 28 countries, mostly places with Muslim majorities or large Muslim populations, men reported greater weekly attendance than women, which was mostly due to cultural reasons.
The study found that in 63 countries around the world - Britain was not included in this part of the survey - men and women were just as likely to believe in heaven and hell.
Professor Voas said that women could be drawn to Christianity over other religions because it 'presents itself as a religion of the powerless'.
He said that for some that makes it 'appealingly feminine' but for others that makes it 'appallingly effeminate'.Gabriella Coleman’s history of |
one,” Hunter said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Staff Writer Matt Byrne can be contacted at 791-6303 or at:
[email protected]
ShareAttorney General Orders Crackdown On 'Sanctuary Cities,' Threatens Holding Funds
Enlarge this image toggle caption Win McNamee/Getty Images Win McNamee/Getty Images
The Justice Department is following through on an executive order to withhold as much as $4.1 billion in federal grants from so-called "sanctuary cities," generally defined as places where local law enforcement limit their cooperation with federal authorities on immigration enforcement.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions' appearance at the daily White House briefing is a signal that President Trump wants to move on to one of the issues he's most comfortable talking about — illegal immigration — and to shift the conversation away from health care, after his failure last week to get the GOP alternative to replace and repeal the Affordable Care Act through Congress.
While there is not a set definition of a "sanctuary" state or city, the Justice Department gives the example of states or cities refusing immigration agents' requests to hold immigrants who came to the country illegally. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has identified 118 such jurisdictions.
"Such policies cannot continue," Sessions said in Monday's briefing. "They make our nation less safe by putting dangerous criminals back on our streets."
Sessions said that in order to receive federal funds, state and local jurisdictions must certify they are complying with federal immigration laws. In addition, Sessions said that the Justice Department will take steps to "claw back" grants already awarded to noncompliant cities as well.
The announcement is in line with a January executive order that Trump signed shortly after taking office that directed the attorney general and the Homeland Security secretary to withhold such federal funds.
Several major cities could be affected by the Justice Departments' threat, including New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. After Trump's elections, mayors in those cities reaffirmed their status as sanctuary cities. After president's executive order on the issue, San Francisco sued the Trump administration over the orders, saying they violated the city's sovereignty under the 10th Amendment.
Sessions on Monday pointed to crimes allegedly perpetrated by immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally as a prime reason to enforce such policies, and argued that cities who fail to do so are putting their citizens at risk.
"DUIs, assaults, burglaries, drug crimes, gang crimes, rapes, crimes against children and murders," the attorney general said. "Countless Americans would be alive today — and countless loved ones would not be grieving today — if the policies of these sanctuary jurisdictions were ended."
As the New York Times has reported, a number of studies "have concluded that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the United States. And experts say the available evidence does not support the idea that undocumented immigrants commit a disproportionate share of crime."
Trump has campaigned with families whose loved ones were victims of crimes by immigrants, featuring speakers at the Republican National Convention and inviting several to his joint address to Congress last month.
Opponents of such crackdowns on sanctuary cities say the order undermines the ability of localities to build trust with its citizens and protect them appropriately.
"Pressuring local law enforcement to take on immigration responsibilities undercuts the very oath they take to'serve and protect' the entirety of their community," Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, told NPR after Trump's January executive order. "Smart law enforcement is built on intelligence gathering and trust, which are dramatically undermined once the cop on the corner is asking victims of crime about their immigration status."Police are looking for "a religious zealot" who distributed homophobic leaflets in Cambridgeshire and may have committed a "hate crime".
Anonymous leaflets saying homosexuality is "unnatural, corrupted, distorted and a sin", have been delivered to addresses in Cambridge and Ely.
Police said they had been contacted by several people upset by the leaflets.
Rev Colin Coward, who works for social inclusion, said they appeared to be the work of "a religious zealot".
A Cambridgeshire police spokesman said: "We have received a number of reports about the leaflets and are treating the matter as a hate incident.
"We are liaising with local and national partners about the leaflets and investigations are ongoing."
The document describes homosexual acts as "contrary to the natural law", the spokesman said.
'Very graphic'
Mr Coward, whose organisation Changing Attitude works for inclusion within the Church of England, was shown the text.
He said the ideas in the leaflet were "taking what's in the bible to an extreme and adding their own poisonous prejudice against lesbian and gay people. It's really toxic and nasty.
"Anybody who writes that kind of material is clearly a religious zealot."
Malcolm Green, who received a leaflet, told the BBC: "Having read the first few lines I wanted to see which religious organisation or other organisation was sending this out but there was absolutely no accreditation on it whatsoever.
"There was no way of getting back to the people with our views on their views."
Ely's mayor, Elaine Griffin-Singh, whose sister received a leaflet, said: "It's very graphic in its nature and must fall into the realms of unacceptable."Story highlights Connie Culp received the first near-total face transplant in the U.S. in 2008
Dallas Wiens underwent the nation's first full facial transplant in 2011
Wiens is now married to a burn victim
Since 2008, the United States has seen several landmark surgeries in face transplantation, giving people with severely deformed faces new lives through partially or totally different faces from donors.
Receiving a new face is anything but easy. The surgery requires long hours with many medical specialists collaborating to make it happen. The patient then has to adjust to the new face, biologically and psychologically.
There is a complex rehabilitation process where the patient learns how to eat, speak and make facial expressions again, said Dr. Maria Siemionow, director of plastic surgery research at the Cleveland Clinic.
"The surgical procedure itself of transplant is relatively standard," Siemionow said. "The major problem is the selection of the candidate -- who is and who is not the face transplant candidate."
For instance, doctors at the Cleveland Clinic would not consider someone who is totally blind because one of the requirements is to be able to exercise one's face in front of a mirror, "to make the face adjusted to the brain," she said about this still emerging field of surgery.
Here are the major publicly reported cases of facial transplants in the U.S.:
Connie Culp
Surgery: December 2008
A 22-hour operation at the Cleveland Clinic gave her most of a new face from a donor: Anna Kasper of Lakewood, Ohio.
"I can smell now," she told CNN in 2010. "I can eat steak, I can eat almost any solid foods -- so it's all getting better."
Siemionow, who led the surgery, said Thursday doctors at the hospital have been seeing Culp on a monthly basis since the transplant. She described Culp as "fully integrated back in her community." She is "a happy grandmother" with a boyfriend, and she is "very joyful."
Culp, now 49, is able to smile, frown and talk, and her speech is easily understood, Siemionow said. Before, Culp did not have a nose; now, she can breathe through it. Researchers have determined that Culp's brain accepts the new face, based on activity in key brain areas.
She is an advocate of organ donation and travels to deliver speeches about her experience.
"She's a very powerful personality to actually share her experience to help others," Siemionow said.
James Maki
Surgery: April 2009
James Maki destroyed the entire core of his face when he fell onto the electrified third rail at a Boston subway station on June 30, 2005. He also suffered severe burns on his arms and hands. His breathing was impaired, and he couldn't speak coherently. Eating was also impossible; he was fed through a tube in his stomach.
A team of surgeons and other specialists worked for 17 hours at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital to give him a new face from a donor. Maki, who wore dentures before the accident, also got new teeth during the operation. But the teeth didn't take and eventually began to break.
He's now in the process of getting eight false teeth implanted into his mouth, and he'll have a new set of dentures, too.
"I'm going to have all my teeth," Maki, 63, said Thursday. "I'm looking forward to eating a lot of things -- like I have to eat stuff that's really soft. Once I get the teeth in, I can eat whatever. Cashews. Whatever I like."
He says he can't wait to eat a rib-eye steak.
Maki is also making facial expressions again. He says he has his good days and bad days. He's taken up the game of bridge at his local senior center.
Dallas Wiens
JUST WATCHED Face transplant patient reflects on life Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Face transplant patient reflects on life 00:54
Surgery: March 2011
Dallas Wiens underwent the first full facial transplant in the United States. When Wiens was painting his church as a volunteer in November 2008, his head got too close to a high-voltage power line. He lost almost his entire face from the burns.
Doctors kept Wiens in a medically induced coma for 90 days. In March 2011, he received a new face in a 15-hour procedure at Brigham and Women's Hospital.
"When I woke up, and I was able to feel I had features again -- eyes and a nose and a mouth -- I even said out loud that this could not be medically possible," Wiens said in May 2011. "But here I am today."
Wiens recently married Jamie Nash, a woman who suffered burns on more than 70% of her body after a car crash.
"Our love is deep and strong, and together we will achieve greatness," Nash wrote on the Jamie Nash TXT L8R Foundation website.
Mitch Hunter
Surgery: April 2011
Mitch Hunter suffered significant injuries in a 2001 car accident, in which he received a severe shock from a high-voltage electrical wire.
The Indiana man was the second full-face transplant recipient in the United States.
A 14-hour surgery gave Hunter a nose, eyelids and facial animation muscles and nerves, Brigham and Women's Hospital said.
In most of his face, Hunter now has near-normal sensation. His speech has continued to improve.
"Mitch reports that he is very happy with both the aesthetic and the functional outcomes of his operation, and enjoys spending as much time as possible with his family and friends," the hospital said in a statement. "He recently has taken on active pursuits, including running and training for endurance races. He also has a job in his home state of Indiana and is planning to obtain a degree in information systems."
Charla Nash
Surgery: May 2011
Charla Nash was mauled by a friend's chimpanzee, leaving her without a nose, eyelids, lips or hands. Brigham and Women's Hospital surgeons performed a full facial transplant in a 20-hour procedure.
Initially, she also received two new hands through transplantation as well. A few days later, though, Nash became sick, and the hands were removed.
The first post-surgery pictures of her were released in August 2011.
She said at that time: "I will now be able to do things I once took for granted... I will have lips and will speak clearly once again. I will be able to kiss and hug loved ones. I am tremendously grateful to the donor and her family."
Richard Lee Norris
JUST WATCHED Face transplant recipient faces public Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Face transplant recipient faces public 01:30
Surgery: March 2012
Richard Norris from Virginia was a gun accident in 1997 that took away much of his upper and lower jaws, in addition to lips and nose. He needed a trachea tube to breathe. He wore a surgical mask for 15 years, hiding his deformities from the world.
A team of specialists at the University of Maryland Medical Center performed the procedure, which lasted 36 hours. The surgery involved replacing both jaws, as well as tongue, and skin and underlying nerve and muscle tissue, and an entire set of teeth. Essentially, his entire face was replaced except for his eyes and the back remnant of his throat.
Doctors said Norris' was the most extensive surgery of its kind.
Norris said in a statement in October, "I am doing well. I spend a lot of my time fishing and working on my golf game. I am also enjoying time with my family and friends."
The 37-year-old spoke at a University of Maryland fundraising gala on Saturday, his first public appearance since the surgery, according the a hospital spokesman.
"Thank you for the years spent preparing to give me a new life," he said, according to CNN affiliate WJZ
In memory of the deceased donor, he said, "Thank you, Joshua. We will always be grateful to you and your family for this gift of life."
Carmen Blandin Tarleton
JUST WATCHED Woman reveals her new face Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Woman reveals her new face 02:14
Surgery: February 2013
Carmen Blandin Tarleton became disfigured after her estranged husband doused her with industrial-strength lye. The lye burned more than 80% of her body, and the burns went all the way through her skin. Children would run away from her because of her appearance.
Tarleton was approved for a full facial transplant in December 2011, and it took 14 months to find a donor. The transplant surgery, performed by specialists at Brigham and Women's Hospital, took 15 hours.
Today, Tarleton is completely blind in one eye and partially blind in the other, but she is still able to live on her own in her apartment in Vermont.
She told CNN she especially looks forward to gaining the strength and coordination to kiss the man she calls "the love of my life."
"I can't pucker and feel yet," she said. "But I am looking forward to that day. I know that day will come."Last year’s event was a big landmark for us. In addition to being number 15, and a year in which many aspects of our event gained a level of maturity we’d not yet seen — it was also the year we, with the help of the worldwide swing community, brought back to life the music of Chick Webb, something that once seemed a distant fantasy. Hearing that music live at the event, and then seeing afterwards how bandleaders all over the world are working Webb’s music into their repertoire (in a way that was never before possible) has brought us the deepest joy.
So, if we were to view last year as an arrival, an end-goal to have reached, we would then be satisfied, and though nothing is ever perfect, we could feel reasonably proud while packing it up and being done.
But we don’t feel done. As crazy as it seems, we see year 15 as our new *starting* point. There’s so much more we want to do, especially since we now know that, with the support of the community, the sky is truly the limit.
DANCERS
I remember just a few years ago some pro dancers talking about how they didn’t think there was a new generation of pros in the making. At the time, I foolishly agreed. It’s obvious now to anyone with an internet connection that new talent is exploding worldwide at an unprecedented rate. Lindy Focus is thrilled to be on the constant search for inspiration and innovation, and to put those people in front of you as instructors, even while continuing to celebrate the wisdom of those who’ve already put in their time.
MUSIC (OBVIOUSLY)
This year we will bring to life a night of Jimmie Lunceford’s music, a person and a band we can’t wait to tell you more about. We will do what we always do - give a full night of the music of one historical bandleader, recreating in part the magic of an evening dancing in the swing era to a top band, but with the added joy and satisfaction of it having been a true community effort. In a few years, we hope to be able to present an entire event-long program of crowd-sponsored music, and to have created a library for all bandleaders that simply doesn’t currently exist. We will slowly, and with great determination, push firmly towards a future where this music and the musicians that play it aren’t just supported by an odd assortment of events and clubs scattering the globe, but where there is a living, breathing, and self-sustaining ecosystem in which musicians can make their living. And when the music thrives, so always will the dance.
HUMANS
One of the core beliefs of Lindy Focus is that we are part of an art community, a collection of creatives that puts the art before all else. But as this new community expands, ages, and matures, we’ve become ever more aware of each other as humans experiencing the journey of our lives, with all the ups and downs of the human condition woven in. We are learning to look out for each other. We are learning, sometimes in awkward, challenging, and downright ugly ways that we have a lot of learning still to do about the people we dance with, but also about the people we knowingly or unknowingly exclude from our scene. That change is hard. It requires sweaty work, careful thought, and mostly it requires heart, and the willingness to try and imagine the world through someone else’s eyes. Though some steps have been taken, it’s not yet time to pat ourselves on the back about this. But we are in it for the long haul if y’all are.
When Jonathan Stout introduced Sing, Sing, Sing at the end of Goodman night, he told the crowd, in essence, that, even though we love how the song makes us feel, we don’t want to play it “just because”. It has to mean something. So I ask you: does it mean something? Does our participation in these art forms amount to something beyond it's immediate entertainment value? If you were in the room, you probably have an answer to that question. If you were not in the room, or if you remain a cynic, we open the door and give you a fresh invitation to enter, and check it out.
If you have looked at this community from the outside and said “that’s not for my type of person”, still we invite you in. We will try to be better at all the things that make you feel that way.
And if you have quit the scene because you grew weary of it’s failures, we also invite you back in. We’re working on … well, we’re working on everything.
…Because it does mean something. We’re building a future out of the past. Sometimes that construction can be hard to watch, but at the end of the day, we’ve laid a few more bricks.
Lindy Focus wants to thank everyone who’s put any blood, sweat, tears, grunts, shouts, squeals or sobs into that effort. Stick with us, and let’s see what we can build together.Canadian rock icons Rush have always been connected to Hamilton – from family ties to formative shows just before the band’s career took flight.
Guitarist Alex Lifeson’s cousin Jed is downtown’s renowned “dancing guy,” and the band played a six-night stand at a basement bar called Duffy’s Rockpile near Gore park back in the early 70s just after releasing their first album.
But did you know the city also helped inspire one of Canadian music’s biggest hits?
CBC Music sat down with Hamilton-born drummer/lyricist Neil Peart as part of the website’s “Rush week”and asked him to provide some context for their picks for the 10 best Rush songs of all time.
The Spirit of Radio from 1980s Permanent Waves made the list. Peart says the song was inspired by driving on the Escarpment and listening to Toronto radio station CFNY 102.1.
“We were working at a farmhouse out in the country in western Ontario and commuting home on weekends,” he said. “I remember coming home very late and CFNY Radio was on the air, and as I was cresting the escarpment with all of the lights below of Hamilton and the Niagara Peninsula, where I lived at the time, with a fantastic combination of music that was on at the time.
CFNY’s motto at the time was “the spirit of radio.” Obviously, it stuck with him.
“The song itself, musically, is switching between radio stations, with a reggae section at the end, the second verse is new waves, I’m playing like a punk drummer there, and that was all intentional,” Peart said. Considering Hamilton’s renowned punk scene at the time, it wouldn’t be a stretch to think that influenced Peart too.
For more on Rush as CBC Music celebrates the 40th anniversary of the band’s self-titled debut, visit the CBC Music website.The actor and his Sherlock co-star, Louise Brealey, will be joined by other celebrities for live readings of letters written by correspondents including Virginia Woolf, Gandhi and Castro
Benedict Cumberbatch is to be reunited with his on-screen love interest Louise Brealey – aka “Molly” from Sherlock – in a new stage project called Letters Live, which will take place in London at the end of this month.
Letters Live was created and developed by the independent publishing house Canongate and is dedicated to the art and ethos of letter writing. For the show, celebrities read “correspondence deserving of a wider audience” in front of a live crowd. Letters include Virginia Woolf’s suicide note, Gandhi’s missive for peace to Hitler, a recipe for drop scones sent by Queen Elizabeth II to President Eisenhower, a telegram from the sinking Titanic, and a letter from Fidel Castro to “my good friend Roosvelt” – complete with misspelt name.
Inspired by Shaun Usher’s anthology and blog; Letters of Note, as well as Simon Garfield’s To The Letter, the events will take place over five nights at the art deco Freemasons’ Hall in Covent Garden. Each show lasts two hours and will feature up to nine performers.
Cumberbatch and Brealey will read individually, as well as together from My Dear Bessie: A Love Story in Letters, an anthology of letters written during the second world war between North Africa-posted RAF man Chris Barker and his former colleague Bessie Moore. Other big names from the stage, screen, music, art and literary worlds are expected to drop in, with Sally Hawkins, Caitlin Moran, Matt Berry, Andrew O’Hagan, and musician Tom Odell already confirmed.
Cumberbatch has been a regular at previous Letters Live events, the first of which took place in December 2013 at the Tabernacle in London. Shows were also held at last year’s Hay festival, as well as at Edinburgh international book festival and the Southbank Centre’s world book night, where Viv Albertine, Russell Brand, Stephen Fry and Andrew Motion were among the stars who read a collection of letters from, among others, Chopin, Charles Bukowski, Ted Hughes, Abraham Lincoln and Elvis Presley.
This year, for the first time, the organisers have teamed up with film and television production company SunnyMarchto make recordings of celebrity readings available for public viewing on the event’s website.
Jamie Byng, publisher at Canongate and one of the directors of Letters Live, said that the idea for the event was formulated after he organised a night around Colin Firth’s The People Speak: Voices That Changed Britain, an anthology of famous speeches. “We did this great event at the Tabernacle [where celebrities read famous speeches] and it was amazing, so we decided to something similar with letters, because they lend themselves every bit as well to live readings as speeches do,” he said.
“To me a joy has been the matching of letters with performers. At the first Letters Live event, Benedict read the Alan Turing letter, and at that time I knew he was going to play him in the film, so it was a nice in-joke.”
Cumberbatch said in a statement: “Letters Live makes us pause and imagine the lives behind the letters read and the circumstances of their origin. The relationship between the audience, reader and writer on a Letters Live night helps deepen our understanding of these inspiring artefacts of the human condition. They are windows into the love, beauty, pain, and humour of their creators and recipients. It’s a privilege to read this most ancient of communications live to an audience.”
Letters Live takes place from 31 March to 4 April and will raise money for literacy charities the Reading Agency, First Story and Ministry of Stories.Especially, kids love to play in outside. One of their favorite spaces is local dark. As a guardian, we always want to give the entertainment to our children. Going to the outside in the same park can be boring for them. If you’re looking for a fun park experience for your kids, our amazing tree houses are an excellent option for you and your family.
However, cool tree houses for kids are a fantastic addition to backyard design. This house is really entertaining to kids.
Every child dreams of having his amazing tree houses in the backyard. This place becomes their world.
But before you fulfill the dream for your child, you need to consider these
5 tips to build amazing tree houses.
Remember, safety comes first.
1.Choose the right tree
The success of your house is in choosing the right tree. Try to make a tree that is already old but healthy. The thick of branches is enough to support the weight of the house. The most recommended trees are maple, oak, hemlock, and spruce.
2.Take into account weight and stability
You should build the platform as close to the trunk by adding diagonal support to ensure that it supports uneven loads. In addition, the load should be supported at the base of the tree and not on one side. If you live in a place where the winds are strong, take care to build the house in the lower part of the tree.
3.Level the floor
If you make the level floor, you will save yourself from another problem. Ideally, place beams through the branches and between trunks of different trees.
4.Uses flexible brackets
Especially if you build the house on more than one tree, it is very important to use supports that will allow the trees to move and balance naturally. In addition, try to use lag bolts and not through bolts, because they will decrease the risk of your tree. We want the house to last a long time, do not we?
5.Talk to your neighbors and find out about the regulations
It is important that you do not exceed the square foot limit allowed in the area where you live. In addition, if your home will be seen from the neighbor’s backyard and will cover a view of the one he enjoys. Is there any discussion between you? You’d better check it out.
10 amazing tree houses ideas
1.Tree Pod Backyard Hanging Tree House
This fantastic house has very easy and quick set-up. It will bring a lot of fun and love for your kids. You don’t need to have any hammer or nail to adjust this tree house in the backyard. It’s a very cool product. You just need ropes to hang it. Check it now on Amazon.
2.The Little Blue Tree House
This house is absolutely fantastic. You can easily place it in any wooded area with its pop color. If you wish it for an adult hangout, you can take advantage of it as it will fill up both requirements. The house will amazedly double your kid’s happiness.
3.The Pirate Tree House
Do you own any pirate tree house? But I did it for my kids’ fun! This house is great for you. It has plenty of room to move around inside. 3 to 5 people can easily accommodate there. It’s fully safe for kids who are more than two years. Kids can view nature and have a lot of fun.
4.The Simple Tree House
The best tree house is the basic one. It’s really perfect for your kids’ playing. The tree house is an open one. It can also be used for adult social gatherings. If you come to the safety, just tell your child to climb with the help of a ladder. Anyway, kids will love the house though it’s a simple one.
5.The Tree House with a Deck
This coolest tree house is a great place to get social gatherings for all kind of people. The inside of the room is large enough to store 2 or 3 couple of people or more. You will also find that there is a big deck which will fully cover it. As it’s summer now, nice summer gatherings you can pass there.
6.The Lean-To Tree House
This gorgeous house recollects me of a lean-to. It includes 4 walls and a slanted roof. The roof has a gap between the walls for ventilation purposes. This is another modern tree house which can be great for your kids but it is not perfect for adult use. If your little one becomes crazy about it, you should give a close consideration to it.
7.The Matching Tree House
This incredible tree house is absolutely loveable. If you are really a great lover of nature, this fantastic house is perfect for you. It will enrich the charm of your backyard. You can learn adventure through this tree house.
8.The Tree Fort
This is a kind of small tree fort. Kids of all ages can enjoy playing on it. There is also pulley system where you can store all pieces of toys. Besides, your kids can enjoy a lot of fun there.
9.The A-Frame Tree House
The A-frame tree house is a traditional style tree house or a kind of aristocratic one. If you want to give your kids a traditional childhood memory that includes having dirty, playing outside and playing in the tree house, this conventional tree house can be a nice option.
10.The Picket Tree Fort
It looks like it has a picket separation or a privacy kind of fence around the sides or back sides of it. Besides, it doesn’t have any coverage and it’s similar to a tree deck. Kids will enjoy a lot!
Warnings
The reclaimed wood is environmentally friendly but may not be as strong as new wood. Be cautious when picking up reclaimed wood and do not use it for any of the weight-bearing parts in your amazing tree houses.
Never climb on the roof of your house in the tree.
You never leave the house in the tree to the ground. Always use the ladder.
Comments
commentsDonald Trump flew to Texas on Tuesday to view the trail of destruction from tropical storm Harvey that has killed at least 18 people, displaced tens of thousands and defied conventional measurements.
But Houston was braced for fresh damage as a vital dam began overspilling and more rain was forecast in the continued onslaught from one of the worst natural disasters in US history. On Tuesday evening, the city’s mayor, Sylvester Turner, announced a curfew between midnight and 5am “to ensure public safety” and “prevent potential criminal acts”.
Quick guide Tropical storm Harvey and climate change Show Hide Is there a link between the storm and climate change? Almost certainly, according to a statement issued by the World Meteorological Organization on Tuesday. “Climate change means that when we do have an event like Harvey, the rainfall amounts are likely to be higher than they would have been otherwise,” the UN organisation’s spokeswoman Clare Nullis told a conference. Nobody is arguing that climate change caused the storm, but it is likely to have made it much worse. How did it make it worse? Warmer seas evaporate more quickly. Warmer air holds more water vapour. So, as temperatures rise around the world, the skies store more moisture and dump it more intensely. The US National Weather Service has had to introduce a new colour on its graphs to deal with the volume of precipitation. Harvey surpassed the previous US record for rainfall from a tropical system, as 49.2 inches was recorded at Mary’s Creek at Winding Road in Southeast Houston, at 9.20am on Tuesday. Is this speculation or science? There is a proven link – known as the Clausius-Clapeyron equation – that shows that for every half a degree celsius in warming, there is about a 3% increase in atmospheric moisture content. This was a factor in Texas. The surface temperature in the Gulf of Mexico is currently more than half a degree celsius higher than the recent late summer average, which is in turn more than half a degree higher than 30 years ago, according to Michael Mannof Penn State University. As a result there was more potential for a deluge. Are there other links between Harvey and climate change? Yes, the storm surge was greater because sea levels have risen 20cm as a result of more than 100 years of human-related global warming. This has melted glaciers and thermally expanded the volume of seawater.
However, the curfew did not apply to “flood relief volunteers, those seeking shelter, first responders, and those going to and from work”.
Trump and Melania, the first lady, touched down on Tuesday morning for briefings on relief and response. The couple avoided Houston and the other hardest hit areas amid concerns that the logistics could hamper relief efforts.
Trump has been active on Twitter and is eager to avoid comparisons with George W Bush, who was much criticised for his response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans a decade ago.
Play Video 2:44 Tropical storm Harvey: the story so far – video report
The president said in Corpus Christi: “It’s a real team and we want to do it better than ever before. We want to be looked at in five years, in 10 years from now as, ‘This is the way to do it.’ This was of epic proportion. Nobody’s ever seen anything like this and I just want to say that working with the governor and his entire team has been an honour for us.”
He added: “We won’t say congratulations. We don’t want to do that. We’ll congratulate each other when it’s all finished.”
Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, expressed gratitude. He said: “About 10 days in advance of the hurricane, even coming in to the Corpus Christi area, members of the president’s cabinet and the president himself were in contact with me and my office pre-preparing for this catastrophe coming our way.”
Trump came out of the Annaville firehouse and got up on a ladder between two fire trucks. “Thank you,” he said to applause. “We love you, you are special, we are here to take care of you. It’s going well.” He then held up the Texan flag to loud cheers.
“What a crowd, what a turnout,” he added.
Later, Trump visited the Texas department of public safety where according to a pool report there was a sizable anti-Trump demonstration, with signs saying “Nyet” and “Impeach little hands”.
Wearing cap and raincoat, Trump told scores of disaster responders: “I will tell you, the whole country and the whole world is really seeing and gaining such respect for everybody. The job you have done is incredible, what we have done is under circumstances, I said before, the word ‘epic’ and ‘historic’, these are words used to describe this monster known as Harvey, but the job you have done is special.”
Accompanied by the housing and urban development secretary, Ben Carson, Trump could not resist passing comment on the name Harvey.
“Probably there has never been anything so expensive in our country’s history, we’ve never done anything so historic in terms of damage and in terms of ferocity as what we’ve witnessed with Harvey. It sounds like such an innocent name, Ben, right, but it’s not innocent.”
Harvey made landfall near Corpus Christi on Friday evening as a category 4 storm with 130mph winds. It has since been downgraded to a tropical storm but has set a new US record for rainfall from a tropical system, with some parts of Houston recording more than 40in (100cm) of rain and Cedar bayou, near Mont Belvieu, 33 miles east of Houston hitting 51.88in (132 cm) as of 3.30pm on Tuesday.
On Tuesday, boat crews raced to carry out dramatic rescues of residents stranded by “unprecedented” flooding in Houston, America’s fourth biggest city, and take them to shelters. Homes and other buildings in and around near Houston are semi-submerged, and major roads resemble rivers. The worst could be yet to come.
A pair of 70-year-old reservoir dams that protect downtown Houston and a levee in a suburban subdivision started overflowing. Jeff Lindner, a Harris County meteorologist, said water levels in the Addicks reservoir have reached 108ft and warned that neighbourhoods in the spillway zone would begin to see street and possibly structural flooding.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest A man walks with belongings after being rescued from a flooded neighborhood in Houston. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
“We have never faced this before, we have uncertainty in how the water is going to react as it moves out of the spillway and into the surrounding area,” he said on Tuesday. “We are trying to wrap our heads around what this water will do.”
Linder named six subdivisions that appeared most at risk and told residents: “If you want to leave, now is the time to leave. The reason being, once the water comes into the street you’re not going to be able to leave.”
Another major dam and reservoir nearby, Barker, is also enduring exceptionally high water levels and some residents nearby are under voluntary evacuation orders and facing the possibility that their roads could be rendered impassable just as the storm’s precipitation appears to be decreasing in intensity.
Officials in Brazoria County said the levee at Columbia Lakes, just south of Houston, has been breached and tweeted a red warning sign that said: “GET OUT NOW!!” Trump retweeted it on his own feed. The levee was later fortified, but officials said they did not know how long the work would hold. A mandatory evacuation in some parts of the county was ordered two days ago.
The Houston region’s dramatic population growth – about a million new residents in the past decade – has seen extensive construction of new houses, offices and apartment complexes built around the dams in what once was empty grassland.
Houston police chief Art Acevedo told reporters that emergency personnel have conducted more than 3,500 rescues since Harvey’s floodwaters began overtaking the city.
Trump's rollback of flood protections risks further Houston-style calamity Read more
He also said armed robbers were arrested overnight and a “handful” of looters were also taken into custody. He warned that he will lobby judges and prosecutors to secure the most severe punishment Texas law allows. “This is Texas,” he said.
Acevedo told the Associated Press: “We know in these kinds of events that, sadly, the death toll goes up historically. I’m really worried about how many bodies we’re going to find.”
More |
drafts. Not necessarily because Bouie’s argument is unlike the ones we’ve heard already; but because it refuses to strip Trumpism from its context. And what is that context? The eighth-straight year in which an African-American man by the name Barack Hussein Obama is president.
Here’s how Bouie sees it. Globalization and the GOP’s embrace of white identity politics have both “been in play for years,” he writes, correctly. So the relevant variable here is almost certainly something else. And considering this is American politics we’re talking about, that something else is — you guessed it — race:
Advertisement:
Race plays a part in each of these analyses, but its role has not yet been central enough to our understanding of Trump’s rise. Not only does he lead a movement of almost exclusively disaffected whites, but he wins his strongest support in states and counties with the greatest amounts of racial polarization. Among white voters, higher levels of racial resentment have been shown to be associated with greater support for Trump. All of which is to say that we’ve been missing the most important catalyst in Trump’s rise. What caused this fire to burn out of control? The answer, I think, is Barack Obama.
Now, before anyone starts righteously thundering about all the ways in which President Obama has been a centrist, neoliberal sellout, know this: Generally speaking, Bouie does not disagree. It’s not Obama’s policies that have led to Trump; on the substance, Obama is, Bouie writes, “no radical” and “well within the center-left of the Democratic Party.”
But the “symbolism,” as Bouie puts it, of an Obama presidency? That’s something considerably different. Bouie writes:
In a nation shaped and defined by a rigid racial hierarchy, his election was very much a radical event, in which a man from one of the nation’s lowest castes ascended to the summit of its political landscape. And he did so with heavy support from minorities: Asian Americans and Latinos were an important part of Obama’s coalition, and black Americans turned out at their highest numbers ever in 2008.
The point here is not to say that all Trump backers have a viscerally negative reaction to African-Americans, though it’s undoubtedly the case that many of them do. The point, rather, is that Obama’s ascension — as well as his success and, perhaps most importantly, his endurance — is perceived by Trumpists as a threat to one of their last sources of stability and comfort. Namely, the privilege of being white.
And we’re not talking about the ill-defined, amorphous version of “privilege” that gets turned into click-y listicles for BuzzFeed. This is not about the privilege of not having to worry on Halloween that an acquaintance of yours will wear a costume that you find personally offensive. This is a concrete, tangible kind of privilege, the kind of privilege that provided material security:
Advertisement:
In the recent past, holding the favored spot in our racial hierarchy brought benefits. As historian and political scientist Ira Katznelson details in “When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America,” being white was traditionally a pathway to middle-class security, the key that won access to vital mortgage and education programs, as the federal government worked to build a white middle-class in the middle part of the 20th century. Even after the civil rights movement and the end of formal discrimination against black Americans, it was still true that being white and middle-class offered protection from the worst of our economy’s ravages. Drugs, ghettos, and dependency existed among whites in pockets of the country, but they were popularly understood as black and Latino problems, not white ones. Now, that isn’t true. Now, middle-class whites face addiction and dependence, which adds a racial element to economic anxiety, as the security provided by whiteness no longer exists for many Americans.
This is the America that Trump supporters have come to know; it’s the America they want to escape and make “great” again.
It’s a world in which one of the most deep-seated assumptions of American society — that there is an unspoken social hierarchy in America, one in which white, straight, and Christian Americans are always on top — was all that many people had left. And now that it’s gone, now that Obama succeeded in “fundamentally transforming” the country as they knew it, these people are yearning for someone who will bring it back.
Perhaps these people would be equally hysterical if we were nearing the end of a Hillary Clinton presidency (it’s not like patriarchy isn’t a part of what shaped American society, too). It’s possible. But I doubt it.Supporters of LGBT rights react outside the Taiwanese parliament in Taipei after hearing the constitutional court’s ruling on May 24, 2017. (Ritchie B. Tongo/European Pressphoto Agency)
Taiwan’s Constitutional Court on Wednesday ruled in favor of allowing same-sex marriage, paving the way for the island to become the first place in Asia to legalize same-sex unions and cementing its status as a beacon for LGBT rights.
The court in Taipei found that the island’s Civil Code, which states that only a man and a woman can marry, violated constitutional guarantees. It gave the legislature two years to amend the Civil Code.
The decision is a victory for Taiwan’s LGBT activists, who have fought for decades for marriage equality, inspiring similar struggles across Asia and elsewhere.
Wayne Lin, chairman of the nongovernmental Taiwan Tongzhi Hotline Association, called the ruling a “milestone” for the island.
It is also a milestone for the region, gay rights activists said. “Without a doubt, Taiwan is walking in front of other Asian countries on this,” said Ying Xin, executive director of the Beijing LGBT Center. “This is significant for all of Asia.”
Supporters show their cellphone lights in the colors of the rainbow during a rally on May 24, 2017, after Taiwan's constitutional court ruled that same-sex couples have the right to legally marry, the first such ruling in Asia. (Tyrone Siu/Reuters)
[A backlash against same-sex marriage tests Taiwan’s reputation for gay rights]
Taiwan has long been seen as a leader on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights. While Indonesia arrests and beats gay people, Singapore criminalizes gay sex and China cracks down on LGBT organizing, Taiwan has taken steps toward equality.
Gender and sexual minorities in Taiwan still face stigma and discrimination, but school textbooks extol equality, gays and lesbians serve openly in the military, and Taipei’s annual gay pride parade draws revelers from across the world.
Taiwanese often attribute the relatively tolerant atmosphere to the island’s cultural mix, which includes indigenous groups, Dutch and Japanese colonizers, and folk practices carried across the Taiwan Strait from mainland China.
But a bitter backlash to the groundswell of support for marriage equality has tested Taiwan’s reputation for tolerance.
Over the past year, religious groups mobilized against marriage equality, claiming that same-sex marriage threatens children and families.
Led by church groups, anti-gay rights campaigners have resorted to inaccurate tropes about homosexuality, trying to link marriage rights to incest, bestiality and AIDS. At one point, one group warned that a same-sex marriage law would mean that “it’s possible to marry a Ferris wheel.”
An opponent of same-sex marriage holds a sign on May 24, 2017, reading: "Same-sex marriage is unwelcome in Taiwan." (Chiang Ying-Ying/AP)
Part of the opponents’ strategy was to argue that protecting the rights of gender and sexual minorities is Western, that marriage equality threatens what it means to be Chinese or Taiwanese. (Taiwan is self-governing, but China considers it a part of its territory.)
[Taiwan was already diplomatically isolated. Now Beijing wants to make things worse.]
At the last major court hearing on marriage equality, Taiwan’s justice minister, Chiu Tai-san, claimed that same-sex relationships are a “newly invented phenomenon,” unlike “social norms and mechanisms formed by the people of our nation over the past thousand years.”
He also asked the court to consider how legalizing same-sex marriage might complicate the rites of ancestor worship. “What are we going to write on the ancestral tablets if same-sex marriage is legalized?” he asked.
LGBT campaigners dismiss the notion that marriage rights are un-Chinese or un-Taiwanese — and think the ruling will bolster their fight more broadly.
“China and Taiwan speak a common language,” said Li Maizi, a prominent Chinese feminist and LGBT activist. “This will inspire the LGBT movements’ push for gay marriage.”
Matthew Huang, founder of an LGBT group in the Chinese city of Chengdu, said simply, “It’s hope.”
In Taipei, activists will now turn their attention to influencing how legislators interpret the ruling and what that means for same-sex couples and families.
There is some fear among campaigners that lawmakers will appease opponents of same-sex rights by creating a special category for same-sex unions. In a news release issued after the ruling, Lin urged lawmakers to move without “hesitation” to amend the Civil Code to guarantee full equality.
For now, supporters of same-sex marriage are celebrating with a new, engagement-inspired slogan: “Taiwan says yes!”
Shirley Feng, Concong Zhang and Luna Lin in Beijing contributed to this report.
Read more:
Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world
Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign newsOpinion
New stadiums: Where the kids aren’t
Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close New stadiums: Where the kids aren’t 1 / 5 Back to Gallery
The longtime San Francisco 49ers season ticket holders who were priced out of the Santa Clara era weren’t the only ones missing from last Sunday’s inaugural football game at Levi’s Stadium. For anyone who has been going to sporting events for many years, something else was conspicuously lacking in the crowd at the $1.3 billion palace next to the Great America amusement park.
Children.
Long gone are the days when one of the signature scenes of an American sporting event was a parent taking a child — or two or three — through the turnstiles. Children were few and far between at Levi’s, and for understandable reason: season tickets at even the extremities of the sun-seared top eastern deck require seat licenses starting at $2,000, not counting the $131 cost of a seat for prime games, or parking and concessions.
The cost goes up from there. Way, way up.
I can’t begrudge the 49ers for optimizing revenue in a largely privately financed stadium. They didn’t start this trend, and it’s coming soon to that new Warriors arena in San Francisco. Far better for these teams to cater to the fat cats and to vacuum out the wallets of the fanatics than to put a general burden on taxpayers who may or may not care about a Gore who never served as vice president of the United States.
But about that absence of children:
Does it matter to the professional sports leagues — especially the NFL and NBA, where tickets for premium seats exceed triple digits — that attendance is less and less often a family affair? Will it come back to haunt these sports when today’s youths reach their 20s and 30s and think of sports as something to be experienced in the living room while noodling on the iPad or its future equivalent? Will the games seem quite as compelling if the passion in the stands — now passed from generation to generation — is no longer there?
I put the question to Carmen Policy, former executive from the team’s glory years who later became president and CEO of the Cleveland Browns expansion franchise. He agreed: The dearth of kids at NFL games is a growing problem.
“I think it’s terrible,” Policy said. “And we’re not paying any attention to it.”
I have a theory that many of the fans who like to see games in person — such as me — were introduced to the grandstands at an early age. Tickets always seemed easily accessible. One of my father’s workmates was a 49ers season ticket holder at Kezar Stadium who enjoyed the company of an appreciative 6-year old who didn’t yet know the definition of a first down or the pronunciation of Packers (”Packlers,” I said until repeatedly corrected). My uncle, who owned an Oakland welding business but had absolutely no interest in football, bought six season tickets to the Raiders games at Frank Youell Field out of a sense of civic obligation, and unloaded them to family and friends. My dad took me to more sporting events than I can count, including San Francisco Warriors games at Civic Auditorium with discount coupons I clipped from Bob Ostrow salami wrappers.
I still have a ticket from the first Raider game at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum on Sept. 18, 1966. Price: $5.50. That works out to about $40 in today’s dollars, or enough to get you into one of the outer parking lots at Levi’s.
Good times, generating so many distinct sayings and rituals, which I created anew with my own child.
Policy has heard a thousand similar stories.
“So many of the memories that people talk to me about relative to the 49ers were: 'I went with my dad.’ 'I went with my uncle.’ 'My mom and dad would take me and my brother.’ And a lot of women shared the experience of having that moment with their fathers... and their mothers, too, but for some reason it always used to be all the more important ot be their with their fathers, experiencing something that their dads obviously cared a lot about. And the were part of it. The sense was, it brought them closer.
“And now... they are 49ers fans,” said Policy.
Roger Noll, a Stanford economist who focuses on the business of sports, noted that young people today “play sports as much as my generation did” but are less likely to attend games or even watch them on television.
“In 25 years, when a majority of the adult population will have grown up on high-speed Internet, will the interest in major league sports be as high?“ Noll asked. “I suspect this is the biggest challenge for sports.“
Professional sports is facing a quandary: The home viewing experience has been greatly enhanced by high-definition television and the ability to follow multiple games or engage in social media at the same time. Levi’s Stadium offers answers to those who might be tempted to stay home: padded seats in the priciest locations, enormous video screens with remarkable clarity and brightness, wide concourses with myriad upscale food and drink choices. I even spotted a video game kiosk last Sunday that was attracting a gathering crowd as the 49ers-Broncos game devolved into a blowout.
Yet part of what makes the game so appealing is the atmosphere, the emotion and sense of urgency in the crowd: Technology brings you there. But what if there is no there there?
“We’re building our monuments in a way that precludes (families with children) from coming instead of making the door easy to open,” Policy said. “I think it’s something that we’re really, really dropping the ball on.”
John Diaz is The San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial page editor. E-mail: jdiaz@sfchronicle.com On Twitter: @JohnDiazChron
The next-generation stadiumMr Taylor said he took the drastic action to make a point A man has sawn his car in half with an angle-grinder in protest at it being clamped outside his home. Ian Taylor, from Tredworth, Glos, said the untaxed Ford Fiesta was parked on his drive with only part of a rear wheel poking out on to the pavement. The 40-year-old builder said the vehicle was going to be scrapped anyway, but he wanted to make a point. A spokesman for NCP Services said half of the car was parked on the road and should therefore have been taxed. 'Jobsworths' Mr Taylor bought the Fiesta for his stepson with the intention of restoring it, but it was beyond economical repair. "I told [my stepson] not to bother, so we parked it up, we were going to get rid of it. I came home from work the other day and it'd been clamped," he said. Mr Taylor said he made several efforts to explain that the car had a SORN (Statutory Off Road Notification) certificate verifying it had not been driven on the road and that it had been parked on his drive. "We tried to talk to [NCP]. I said, 'you're not taking it'. I got my cutter and cut it in half," he said. "[I'm] happy I got one over on them. They're jobsworths, for the sake of an inch and a half on the path." James Pritchard, communications manager for NCP Services, said clamping staff had photographs to prove that half the car was on the public pavement. "We were astonished at the reaction this gentleman had to the fact we put a clamp on his car. Fortunately, the only damage was done to his car and as far as our people are concerned we stand by what they did
James Pritchard, NCP Services "It was a remarkable incident which highlighted some of the problems my colleagues face while they're doing what is a very important job in ensuring that motorists tax their vehicle," he said. "And in cutting his car in two, he managed to put both himself at risk and also a number of bystanders - along with ourselves, the police had to be called and the fire brigade, as he set fire to the car while cutting it in two. "Fortunately, the only damage was done to his car and as far as our people are concerned we stand by what they did." Cannot play media. Sorry, this media is not available in your territory. Advertisement
E-mail this to a friend Printable version Bookmark with: Delicious
Digg
reddit
Facebook
StumbleUpon What are these?Embedded Google OAuth is going to break
Greg Worrall Blocked Unblock Follow Following Apr 5, 2017
Update: Xamarin users who use the built-in auth will also be affected.
As of the 20th April 2017, Google will break your application’s Google OAuth if you’re relying on a UIWebView/WKWebView implementation on iOS or an WebView UI element on Android.
Just to clarify, you shouldn’t be doing this anyway, it’s a really hacky approach and as soon as Google had actual support for iOS and Android, developers should have instantly switched to an official approach 🙈
No one seems to be talking about it, but it’s going to have a relatively big impact on a lot of services. If this isn’t patched as soon as possible, they’re going to lose a lot of potential users.
The impact of this is going to be fairly widespread, a lot of services have never added support for the official approach so they’re going to be affected as of the 20th.
Google announced they were going to do this last August, but it slipped under a lot of people’s radars.
A few notable companies that will be affected by this if their team’s forget to update in the next fortnight are Pocket, Airbnb, and Quora.
If you run an iOS or Android app that relies on an embedded browser for Google OAuth, you should immediately hop into your IDE and implement the official approach, else if this is left unattended to, you’re going to lose a lot of potential users 👎
If you spot an application out in the wild that displays this behaviour, please notify their team of the problem as soon as possible, perhaps even link them to this article, just so that no one is left confused when their conversion rate drops unexpectedly.What are the traditional sums-and-products data structures he is referring to?
In type theory, regular data structures can be described in terms of sums, products and recursive types. This leads to an algebra for describing data structures (and so-called algebraic data types). Such data types are common in statically typed functional languages, such as ML or Haskell.
Products
Products can be thought of as the type-theoretic view of "structs" or "tuples".
Formally, PFPL, Ch 14:
The binary product of two types consists of ordered pairs of values, one from each type in the order specified. The associated eliminatory forms are projections, which select the first and second component of a pair. The nullary product, or unit, type consists solely of the unique “null tuple” of no values, and has no associated eliminatory form.
Sums
Sum types express choice between variants of a data structure. Sometimes they are called "union types" (as in C). Many languages have no notion of sum types.
PFPL, ch 15:
Most data structures involve alternatives such as the distinction between a leaf and an interior node in a tree, or a choice in the outermost form of a piece of abstract syntax. Importantly, the choice determines the structure of the value. For example, nodes have children, but leaves do not, and so forth. These concepts are expressed by sum types, specifically the binary sum, which offers a choice of two things, and the nullary sum, which offers a choice of no things.
Recursive types
Along with products and sums, we can introduce recursion, so a type may be defined (partially) in terms of itself. Nice examples include trees and lists.
data List a = Empty | a : List a data Tree a = Nil | Node a (Tree a) (Tree a)
Algebra of sums, products and recursion
Give a type, say Int, we can start building up a notation for algebraic expressions that describe data structures:
A lone variable:
Int
A product of two types (denoting a pair):
Int * Bool
A sum of two types (denoting a choice between two types):
Int + Bool
And some constants:
1 + Int
where 1 is the unit type, ().
Once you can describe types this way, you get some cool power for free. Firstly, a very concise notation for describing data types, secondly, some results transfer from other algebras (e.g. differentiation works on data structures).
Examples
The unit type, data () = ()
A tuple, the simplest product type: data (a,b) = (a,b)
A simple sum type, data Maybe a = Nothing | Just a
and its alternative,
and a recursive type, the type of linked lists: data [a] = [] | a : [a]
Given these, you can build quite complicated structures by combining sums, products and recursive types. E.g. the simple notation for a list of products of sums of products: [(Maybe ([Char], Double), Integer)] gives rise to some quite complicated trees:
ReferencesDAYTON (WRGT) – Three juvenile suspects are still at large after reportedly stealing a truck from a woman on Oxford Avenue.
The victim said she was trying to get to Good Samaritan Hospital October 7 around 8 p.m. when her GPS died, prompting her to pull into an alleyway just off Oxford to try to figure out where to go.
Three juveniles approached her truck at this point, according to the police report. She said she had her windows down and could not roll them up in time to stop the juveniles from talking to her.
The woman told police one suspect handed her a slip of paper with his phone number written on it and said, “I sell weed, wanna buy some weed”.
Another suspect reportedly put a black revolver to her head at that point and said, “Don’t move, give me everything you got”.
The first suspect reached into her truck at that point and took her keys and while the second one took her coral purse, according to the Dayton police report.
She then told police she waited until her nerves were calmed before getting out of the truck to follow the suspects. In the alley, she located her purse, but told police a prescription for Xanax she had filled earlier that day was taken from it.
At that point, she reportedly called AAA and her husband to tell them what happened. When AAA arrived on scene, the victim attempted to get back to her truck with them only to find it was stolen.
Police arrived on scene around 9 p.m. and took the report from her, including suspect information.
She described the first suspect to police as a black male juvenile of medium build and about 5’10” tall, wearing a black shirt, pants and baseball hat.
The second suspect was also a black male with a small build, about 6’ tall with small facial features, short black hair and pants and a grey hoodie, according to the police report.
The third was described as a black male juvenile of medium build with an under bite.
Officers did search the area after arriving on scene, but were reportedly unable to find anything that would help further their investigation.Protected forested areas in Brazil, Costa Rica, Indonesia and Thailand have prevented the release of more than 1,000 million additional tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, an economic service provided by nature worth at least $5 billion, according to new research by Georgia State University economist Paul Ferraro with alumnus Merlin M. Hanauer and colleagues.
In an article published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the authors use this finding to show how conservation research methodology is improved by joining its two distinct and largely independent branches: research that models and maps ecosystem services and research that empirically measures how human behaviors are affected by actual conservation programs.
Their goal is to improve conservation planning by studying the impacts of public policies on the supply of other valuable ecosystem services that benefit humans -- like pollination, water quality and quantity, and biodiversity. Hard evidence about policy impacts helps aid conservation planners in obtaining the greatest return on scarce public funds.
"Nature provides all these free ecosystem services, but we don't have a good picture of how useful our policies are at protecting the supply of these services," said Ferraro, a professor in Georgia State's Andrew Young School of Policy Studies. "Scientists need to move beyond hypothetical scenarios and conduct impact evaluations of real-world policies aimed at delivering these services. So we brought together the scientific modelers with social scientists who empirically evaluate policies in place now."
When a law's potential impacts are modeled only on a computer, the human behavior in these models is simplistic, he explained.
"Without an evidence base for the impacts of real policies," he said, "the insights from modeling and valuation are not as useful to decision makers as they could be. But when we measure how such policies change human behavior, we have a better idea of their impact on environmental services. It is why, for example, we have human drug trials; a computer model can't do it.
"In our field, we don't have computer models of humans and nature that are good enough to predict what would happen with a proposed conservation policy or program. By estimating the impacts of the policies and programs in effect now we can more realistically measure the future impact of new policies and programs."
Decision makers and ecosystem scientists want a strong evidence base from which to guide their conservation actions, the authors noted.
"With stronger evidence and theories about how conservation programs affect natural and human systems, scientists, policymakers and practitioners can determine how to best design policies for enhancing human welfare, while conserving species and habitats," Ferraro said.Pointing to the Cameron government’s growing impatience over student protests, British officials have reportedly moved against 12-year-old Nicky Wishart, henceforth known as the Notorious Nicky of Oxfordshire, threatening him with arrest for threatening the public peace.
Nicky’s crime was to complain on Facebook about an upcoming plan to close his local youth centre, because “it’s a fantastic place to go and there isn’t much else for us to do round here,” and a plan to protest in front of his local MP’s office, which in this case is Prime Minister David Cameron’s office, sparked harsh police action.
Notorious Nicky was pulled from his class by police and warned that he was under investigation by the Anti-terrorist squad. He was repeatedly warned by the police that he ought not attend the protest and that police intended to hold him personally responsible for anything that happened at the protest. They also warned him that armed police would be on hand in case the protesters got out of hand. They also warned him that they would be monitoring his future Facebook postings.
Nicky’s mother was called by the school and told that police had “taken an interest in something Nicky’s posted on FB,” but was not allowed to be present at the police interrogation of her child.
The protest went off without a hitch, however, with a dozen students being watched menacingly by six police officers. Police insisted the “warning” to Nicky was appropriate and to “ensure his safety.” Nicky’s school said they are dealing with the matter “internally.”Monday night on “CNN Tonight,” supporter of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, billionaire Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, said Clinton did nothing wrong because the person who set up her email should have set up “filters and alerts that said any email that came with a classified header.”
Cuban said, “No, I really don’t. I think she — look, if you’re not technical, which she obviously is not, she didn’t know how to get her email on her PC. What’s — and someone — you say, I want to do personal email. Well, first of all, it’s 2008 and back then Gmail was still in beta, and it was in the clear meaning it wasn’t protected by default. And so you go — look, I was in this business. My first career, my first company, all I did was install local area networks and messaging and email systems and I had my own personal server in my office until about 2010, and so I’ve been through this whole process. And so she talks to the admin who is responsible, she doesn’t know any better, and takes his or her advice.”
“I think it was a he,” he continued. “And it just so happens that he was given immunity by the Justice Department so we haven’t had a chance to hear any of this. But for that personal server, if that admin had done his job like I had done my job doing the same thing, I would have set up filters and alerts that said any email that came with a classified header or any of the determined classified markings like the little ‘c’ Director Comey mentioned, pop it out, right? You know, create an alert that says this shouldn’t be on this system and deal with it so that you don’t, you know, consume it in this way. But the administrator didn’t do it and she didn’t know to do it because the whole time she had a very specific process in place. If it is classified, print it out and let me deal with it in hard copy, which is why she had complete confidence to say, ‘I never dealt with anything marked classified.'”NEW YORK (Reuters) - A bidder agreed to pay $1.68 million for a steak lunch with billionaire investor Warren Buffett in a charity auction completed Friday night, according to eBay Inc’s website, where the bidding took place.
Hedge fund manager Zhao Danyang (L) and his son Zhao Ziyang (age 5 1/2) stand with billionaire investor Warren Buffett after placing the winning bid in a charity auction for lunch with Buffett in New York, June 24, 2009. REUTERS/Chip East
The winning bid in the 10th annual fund-raiser fell short of last year’s record $2.11 million, paid by Hong Kong-based investor Zhao Danyang. The starting price was $25,000.
The identity of the winning bidder could not immediately be determined. EBay was not immediately available for comment. A call to Buffett was not immediately returned.
As in recent years, the winner and up to seven friends may dine with the world’s second-richest person at the Smith & Wollensky steakhouse in New York.
Zhao, who runs the Pureheart China Growth Investment Fund, had his lunch with Buffett on Wednesday.
The auction benefits the Glide Foundation, a nonprofit in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district that offers housing, job training, health and child care, and meals for the poor.
Bidding activity accelerated toward the end of the auction, much as in past years, with the top bid rising from $810,000 over the last 2 hours.
Observers had speculated that the global recession would keep the winning bid below last year’s record.
The winning bid is the second highest ever paid for the lunch. Winning bidders agreed to pay $650,100 in 2007 and $620,100 in 2006.
The nine previous auctions had raised more than $4.2 million for Glide. Among the previous winners was the hedge fund manager David Einhorn, who bid $250,100 in 2003.
Buffett, 78, built his fortune through Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire Hathaway Inc, an insurance and investment company that has close to 80 businesses and tens of billions of dollars of investments.
In 2006, Buffett pledged most of his net worth to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and four family charities. Forbes magazine in March estimated his fortune at $40 billion.
The auctions began in 2000 after Buffett was introduced to Glide by his first wife, Susie. The first three auctions were held live. Winning bids soared when they moved online in 2003.England prop Mako Vunipola's participation in the Six Nations Championship is in doubt.
Vunipola suffered suspected ligament damage in his left knee after being forced off in Saracens' European Champions Cup win at Sale last weekend.
The 25-year-old is expected to see a specialist in the next fortnight when the swelling on the knee subsides.
But Press Association Sport understands that his club Saracens have put a time frame on Vunipola's potential absence as between four to 12 weeks.
If a scan highlights minimal damage, then Vunipola should be fit for England's Six Nations opener against France at Twickenham on February 4.
But a more serious injury could rule Vunipola out of the entire tournament and prevent him from being part of England's title defence.
That would be a huge blow for England coach Eddie Jones as the 39-times capped Vunipola has played a major part in the team's success during 2016.A woman carries a photograph as she mourns her family members suspected to be missing following a landslide when a mound of trash collapsed on an informal settlement at the Koshe garbage dump in Ethiopia's capital Addis Ababa, March 14, 2017. REUTERS/Tiksa Negeri
ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - The death toll from a landslide at a dump in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa has reached 113, officials said on Wednesday, as the government declared three days of national mourning.
Flags flew at half mast to mark the disaster that occurred at the 50-year-old Reppi dump on Saturday evening.
“The total number of dead has reached 113, of which 38 are male and 75 are female,” said Dagmawit Moges, a spokeswoman for the city.
“At least 80 other residents are missing,” said Temesghen Abraham, a resident at the landfill. “We expect to find their corpses buried here.”
The first funerals were held on Tuesday at the nearby Abune Aregawi Church, attended by hundreds of grief-stricken family members.
“Searches are taking place and the number could rise,” Moges said.
Hundreds of people live on the dump, the city’s only landfill site. Some of the victims scavenged for food and items that could be sold, such as recyclable metal. The landslide destroyed dozens of homes.
Ethiopia is one of Africa’s fastest growing economies, but the drive to industrialize has also stoked discontent among those who feel left behind.
In October, the government imposed a national state of emergency after more than 500 people were killed in protests in Oromiya region as anger over a development scheme sparked broader anti-government demonstrations.Rio Guanajibo - Rio Guanajibo at a Glance - near Hormigueros Rio Rosario - Rio Rosario at a Glance - near Hormigueros Rio Grande De Loiza - Rio Grande De Loiza at a Glance - at San Lorenzo - at Caguas Lago Loiza - Lago Loiza at a Glance - near Trujillo Alto Rio Gurabo - Rio Gurabo at a Glance - below El Mango - at Gurabo Rio Piedras - Rio Piedras at a Glance - at El Senorial - at Hato Rey
Rio Coamo - Rio Coamo at a Glance - at Coamo Rio Cibuco - Rio Cibuco at a Glance - below Corozal - at Vega Baja Rio Culebrinas - Rio Culebrinas at a Glance - near Moca - near Aguada Rio De La Plata - Rio De La Plata at a Glance - at Aibonito - at Comerio - below La Plata Dam - near Toa Alta Lago Dos Bocas - Lago Dos Bocas at a Glance - at Utuado Rio Grande De Arecibo - Rio Grande De Arecibo at a Glance - below Utuado - above AreciboWhat does a government do when it wants to choose its own opposition? Simple: it disqualifies the politicians it really doesn’t want to see win. This doesn’t just set the stage for winning at the battle in the ballot boxes. It cuts down to size some leaders who threaten its power.
Henrique Capriles, a former presidential candidate and governor of Miranda, has recently been added to a long list of opposition leaders disqualified from running for office.
After months of rumors, Capriles announced the news on Twitter, just a day after a massive demonstration in Caracas showed a strong and united opposition.
This leaves Capriles out of any regional or presidential election in the near future, after he was announced as Primero Justicia’s standad-bearer.
That year was crucial for chavismo: they were still reeling from the 2007 referendum loss and they were in no mood for electoral setbacks.
There’s nothing new there. Chavismo’s been disqualifying politicians it feels threatened since way back in 2008, when it did it to Leopoldo López.
It’s easy to see why. Think of a chavista, Leopoldo is the opposite: handsome, with an exquisite political breeding, a Harvard guy, he’s even related to Simón Bolívar.
Before reaching the age of 30, Leopoldo had already been elected as the mayor of Chacao. Despite his sifrinito look, he was winning a following among working class Venezuelans. Definitely enough to raise government alarm bells. In 2008, he was re-elected as mayor of Chacao with 81% of the vote, and he was going for the Alcaldía Mayor with a lead in the polls.
Until now, Maduro prefers to keep Leopoldo away from streets since perception of his own image might not go worse, after all.
That year was crucial for chavismo: they were still reeling from the 2007 referendum loss |
the last several thousand years.
Your 13th-century peasant
ancestors rarely paid money for food, shelter, clothing, or entertainment (much
less in a hunter-gatherer tribe). People were self-sufficient in all these
things or, more likely, depended on elaborate gift networks, sharing, and
reciprocity. Of these things is community built. Today, we pay strangers to
meet most of our physical and cultural needs. You probably don't know the
person who grew your food, wove your shirt, built your house, or sang the songs
on your iPod. Abetted by technology, the commodification of formerly
non-monetary goods and services has accelerated over the last few centuries, to
the point today where very little is left outside the money realm. The vast
commons, whether of land or of culture, has been cordoned off and sold — all
to keep pace with the exponential growth of money. This is the deep reason why
we convert forests to timber, songs to intellectual property, and so on. It is
why two-thirds of all American meals are now prepared outside the home. It is
why herbal folk remedies have given way to pharmaceutical medicines, why child
care has become a paid service, why
drinking water is now the number one beverage sales growth category.
The imperative of perpetual growth
implicit in interest is what drives the relentless conversion of life, world,
and spirit into money. Completing the vicious circle, the more of life we
convert into money, the more we need money to live. Usury, not money, is the
proverbial root of all evil. Inducing competition and replacing personal
relationships with paid services, it rends the fabric of community.
Community is closely linked to
gift-giving; when anthropologists seek to understand a culture, they trace the
flow of gifts. Unlike money transactions, in which no obligations linger after
the transaction is completed, the giving
of a gift creates a tie (which is the literal meaning of "obligation").
When gifts circulate, the community bonds. Lending money at interest is utterly
contrary to the spirit of the gift. For one thing, a cardinal feature of an
authentic gift is that we give it unconditionally. We may expect to be gifted
in return, whether by the recipient or another member of the community, but we
do not impose conditions on a true gift, or it is not really a gift.
More importantly, a universal
characteristic of a gift is that it naturally increases as it circulates within
a community, and that this increase must not be kept for oneself, but allowed
to circulate with the gift. Interest amounts to keeping the increase on the
gift for oneself, thereby withholding it from circulation in the community,
weakening community for the benefit of the individual. It is no accident that many
societies prohibited usury among themselves but allowed it in transactions with
outsiders, who could not be trusted to recirculate a true gift back into the
community. Hence the prohibition in Deuteronomy 23:20: "Unto a stranger
you may lend upon usury, but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon
usury."
The ramifications of this
injunction when combined with Jesus' teaching that all men are brothers are
obvious: interest is forbidden entirely. This was the position of the Catholic
Church throughout the Middle Ages, and is still the rule in Islam today.
However, starting with the merger of Church and state and accelerating with the
rise of mercantilism in the late Middle Ages, pressure mounted to resolve the
fundamental tension between Christian teaching and the requirements of
commerce. The solution provided by Martin Luther and John Calvin was to
separate moral and civil law, maintaining that the ways of Christ are not the
ways of the world. Thus spirit became further separated from matter, and religion
retreated another step toward worldly irrelevancy.
Abandoning the prohibition on
interest was a key step in religion's complicity in the desacralizing of the
world. After all, it is interest that drives the conversion of all that is
sacred about the world — its beauty, uniqueness, and living relationships —
into something profane. Why do we intuitively know money is profane? Because it
is the one great exception to the irreducible uniqueness of all beings.
In my
last Reality Sandwich essay, I described how each drop of water, even each
electron, is unique and sacred. But not so each dollar. Money is by design
standard, generic. Your dollar is the same as my dollar. Money today lacks even
a unique serial number: It is bits in a computer, an abstraction of an
abstraction of an abstraction. A forest is unique and sacred; not so the money
from its clearcutting. Convert two distinct forests into money and they become
the same. Applied to cultures, the same principle is fast creating a global
monoculture where every service is a paid service.
When money mediates all our
relationships, we too lose our uniqueness to become a standardized consumer of
standardized goods and services, and a standardized functionary performing
other services. No personal economic relationships are important, because we
can always pay someone else to do it. No wonder, strive as we might, we find it
so hard to create community. No wonder we feel so insecure, so replaceable. It
is all because of the conversion, driven by usury, of the unique and sacred
into the monetized and generic.
Because money is identified with
Benthamite "utility" — that is, the good — this entire process is
considered rational in traditional (neoclassical) economic theory. Quite
simply, whenever anything is monetized, the world's "goodness" level
rises. The same assumption appears in the euphemism "goods" to
describe the products of industry. The very definition of a "good" is
anything exchanged for money. In other words, Money = Good. Got that?
By definition, when we buy bottled
water instead of tap water too polluted to drink, that is good. When we pay for
day care instead of caring for our babies at home, that is good. When we buy a
video game instead of playing outdoors, that is good.
In terms of conventional economics, it may actually be in an
individual's rational self-interest to engage in activities that render the
earth uninhabitable. This is potentially true even on the collective level:
given the exponential nature of future cash flow discounting, it may be more in
our "rational self-interest" to liquidate all natural capital right
now — cash in the earth — than to preserve it for future generations. After
all, the net present value of an eternal annual cash flow of one trillion
dollars is only some twenty trillion dollars (at a 5% discount rate).
Economically speaking, it would be more rational to destroy the planet in ten
years while generating income of $100 trillion, than to settle for a
sustainable level of $3 trillion a year forever.
If this seems like an outlandish fantasy, consider that it
is exactly what we are doing today! According to the parameters we have
established, we are making the insane but rational choice to incinerate our
natural, social, cultural, and spiritual capital for financial profit.
Amazingly, this end was foreseen thousands of years ago by the originator of
the story of King Midas, whose touch turned everything to gold. Delighted at
first with his gift, soon he had turned all his food, flowers, even his loved
ones into cold, hard metal. Just like King Midas, we too are converting natural
beauty, human relationships, and the basis of our very survival into money.
Yet
despite this ancient warning, we continue to behave as if we could eat our
money: David Korten once spoke of an East Asian minister who said his country's
forests would be more valuable clearcut, with the money put in the bank to earn
interest. Apparently, the effects of destroying the planet are of little
concern to economists. William Nordhaus of Yale proclaims, "Agriculture,
the part of the economy that is sensitive to climate change, accounts for just
three percent of national output. That means there is no way to get a very
large effect on the US
economy." Oxford economist
Wilfred Beckerman echoes him: "Even if net output of agriculture fell by
50 percent by the end of the next century, this is only a 1.5 per cent cut in
GNP."
Must we, like King Midas, find ourselves marooned in a cold,
comfortless, ugly, inhospitable world before we realize we cannot eat our
money?
Because it builds exponentially, interest feeds a linearity
that puts humankind outside of nature, which is bound by cycles. Subtly but
inexorably, it drives the assumption that human beings exist apart from natural
law. As well, interest drives a relentless anxiety by demanding always more,
more, more, propelling the endless conversion of all wealth into financial
capital. Part of this anxiety is encoded in the very word,
"interest," which implies that self-interest too is bound up in
ever-lasting increase.
Interest is a necessary counterpart to the mentality of
externalization. Like interest, externalization involves a denial of nature's
cyclicity by treating it as an infinite reservoir of resources and an infinite
dumping ground for waste. Interest is also akin to fire, the foundation of
modern technology. To keep it going requires the addition of ever more fuel,
until the whole world is consumed, leaving but a pile of dollars or ash.
Money is a most peculiar kind of property, for unlike physical
inventories of goods, "rust doth not corrode nor moths corrupt" it.
Cash does not depreciate in value; on the contrary, in its modern, abstracted
form of bits in a bank's computer, it grows in value as it earns interest. Thus
it appears to violate a fundamental natural law: impermanence. Money does not
require maintenance like a plot of farmland to maintain its productivity. It
does not require constant rotation of stock like a store of grain to keep it
fresh. No accident, then, was money's early and enduring association with gold,
the metal most famously impervious to oxidation. Money perpetuates the
fundamental illusion of independence from nature; financial wealth endures
without constant interaction with the environment. Other forms of wealth are bothersome,
because they require a continuing relationship with other people and the
environment. But not money, which is now wholly abstract from physical
commodities and thus abstract as well from natural laws of decay and change.
Money as we know it is thus an integral component of the discrete and separate
self.
It is a curious fact that most people are extremely
unwilling to share their money. Even among relatives, sharing money is bound by
strong taboos: I know countless poor families whose brothers, cousins, or
uncles' families are very wealthy. And how many friendships have disintegrated,
how many family members have shunned each other for years, over issues of
money? Money, it seems, is inextricably wrapped up in the very essence of
selfishness — a clue to its deep association with self. Hence the intense
sense of violation we feel upon getting "ripped off" (as if a part of
our bodies were being removed) when from another perspective all that has
happened is pieces of paper changing hands or bits turning on and off in a bank
computer.
We do not usually share our money because we see it almost
as part of our selves and the foundation of our biological security. Money is
self. Meanwhile, conditioned by science and the origins of separation
underlying it, we see other people as essentially just that, "other."
Mixing these two realms invites confusion and conflict. The problem is, the
more of life we convert to money, the more territory falls into one of these
dichotomous realms, mine or yours, and the less common ground there is to share
life and develop unguarded relationships. The conversion of life to money
reduces everything to an economic transaction, leaving us the loneliest people
ever to inhabit the planet. The propertization of the whole world means that
everything is either mine, or someone else's. No longer is anything in common.
The violation we feel at being ripped off is much akin to
the violation an indigenous hunter-gatherer must feel at witnessing the
destruction of nature. When "I" is defined not as a discrete
individual but through a web of relationships with people, earth, animals, and
plants, then any harm to them violates ourselves as well. Even we moderns
sometimes feel an echo of this violation when we see the bulldozers knocking down
the trees to build a new shopping center. That is because our separation from
the trees is illusory. The buried connectedness can be resisted through
ideology, narcotized through distractions, or intimidated through the
invocation of survival anxiety, but it can never die because it is germane to
who we really are. The love of life that Edwin Wilson has named biophilia, and
our natural empathy toward other human beings, is ultimately irrepressible
because we are life and life is us.
The regime of separation has deadened us to the
self-violation inherent in the despoliation of the planet and the degradation
of its inhabitants. In an attempt to compensate for our lost sense of
beingness, we transfer it to possessions and particularly to money, setting the
stage for disaster. How? Because money (bearing interest) is an outright lie,
encoding a false promise of imperishability and eternal growth. Identified with
self, money and its associated "assets" suggest that if we stay in
control of it, the self might be maintained forever, impervious to the rest of
the cycle that follows growth: decay, death, and rebirth.
Obviously, there is a problem when something that does not
decay but only grows, forever, exponentially, is linked to commodities which do
not share this property. The only possible result is that these other
commodities — social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital — will
eventually be exhausted in the frantic, hopeless attempt to redeem the
ultimately fraudulent promise inherent in money with interest.
They are almost exhausted already. What more of community or
of nature can we still commoditize, before the very basis of life and sanity
crumbles? All of today's crises originate in the conversion of natural, social,
cultural, and spiritual capital into money. Yet even usury is not the deepest
root. It is not an accidental feature of our system that, if only someone
had made a wiser choice, could be different. It is implicit in our
Newtonian-Cartesian cosmology in which, by definition, more for me is less for
you. As this cosmology rapidly becomes obsolete, we can glimpse an emerging new
money system embodying a very different conception of self and world. Until we
transition to it, there is no hope that the current conversion of social,
cultural, natural, and spiritual capital into money will ever abate. Under an
interest-based money system, it is inevitable that we will cash in the earth.
In Part 2 of this essay, I will describe what the currency
of Reunion will look like. When it reflects the new
human identity and relationship to nature that is emerging from the present
convergence of crises, money will have the opposite effects it has today. It
will be a force for sharing, not competition; for generosity, not greed; for
community, not division; for conservation, not liquidation. Can you imagine a
world where money is the ally of all our best impulses? That is the promise of
the new money I will describe in Part 2.
Photo by TW Collins courtesy of Creative Commons LicenseBitcoin Is Gemini Making Enemies Already?
It’s been seven months since the grand opening, and digital currency exchange Gemini already seems to be making a few enemies.
Also read: Decred: The New Kid on the Digital Currency Block
Gemini is the brainchild of Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. Earning fame through their lawsuit against Facebook mogul Mark Zuckerberg, they have gone on to build solid names for themselves in the arena of bitcoin and digital currency.
Gemini has many benefits, a big one being that it qualifies as a fiduciary and offers FICO insurance like a standard financial institution. In light of cyber-attacks on fellow platforms such as Bitstamp, Gemini offered the security that several Bitcoin enthusiasts were looking for, but simply couldn’t find. The company opened up to individuals and businesses in 26 states, and it seemed things were off to a good start.
But not everybody’s happy, apparently. User Mike Miescke is busily pointing the finger after completing a bitcoin purchase equaling $2,200, only to later receive an email stating that the transaction was in the process of being reversed. Gemini listed a “customer error” as the reason behind the decision, and Miescke isn’t happy about it at all. He quickly contacted bitcoin press outlets, explaining:
“I immediately responded to this email stating I do not accept their statement of reversal, demanded my account be restored to its rightful balance as laid out in their terms of service, and referenced their terms of service that ‘customer error’ is NOT a valid reason to reverse transactions.”
Gemini has obviously published several rules in its terms of service to protect itself. The company states:
“While we strive to provide you with accurate information, we cannot guarantee that information on Gemini will always be accurate. As a result, we are not liable to you, any other person or any institution 1) for any transaction that is completed; 2) for the price at which you buy or sell Digital Assets on Gemini… We reserve the right to reverse and/or cancel one or more Orders in the event of (i) any disruption or malfunction in the operation of any electronic communications, trading facilities, storage facilities, recording mechanisms or other components of or integral to Gemini or of Digital Assets, or (ii) any other severe business disruption to Gemini, its systems or Digital Assets, where the nullification of transactions may be necessary for the maintenance of a fair and orderly market or the protection of you and the public interest.”
Gemini further states that if business disruption does occur or is a factor in any way, the company has the right to completely void any and all transactions in question.
Most digital currency enthusiasts are labeling this as the primary reason for the transaction’s cancellation, but Miescke isn’t convinced. Unable to see anything in his transaction that meets “disruption qualifications,” he harshly blames Gemini for what he feels was an incorrect reversal:
“If the trade went through, I believe that individual customer who brought the order book up to $2,200 would have a strong reason to file a lawsuit… Written in their terms of service, Gemini says that all orders pass automated checks and may not be flagged if the order meets certain criteria. They do not list the criteria, but you would assume that ‘fat finger’ orders that cause massive slippage would be easily flagged.”
Miescke plans to fight the decision, while Gemini is merely directing others to their blog page, hoping the answers provided will clear up any lasting confusion.
What do you think of Miescke’s plight? Post your comments below!
Images courtesy of techtimes.com, twitter.comWith the environmental review process now underway, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is moving forward with a $600-million plan by Pritzker Prize winner Peter Zumthor to makeover its Miracle Mile campus. The acclaimed Swiss architect's design would replace the current Bing Center, Hammer, Ahmanson, and Art of the Americas Buildings with a new 390,000 square-foot structure that spans across Wilshire Boulevard.
The design has gone through different evolutions since originally announced in 2014 and earlier this year, new, softer renderings were revealed after Zumthor expressed he was unhappy with the original ones. Construction of the new building is expected to begin in late 2018.
Atelier Peter Zumthor & Partner / The Boundary
Atelier Peter Zumthor & Partner / The Boundary
Atelier Peter Zumthor & Partner / The Boundary
Atelier Peter Zumthor & Partner / The Boundary
Atelier Peter Zumthor & PartnerDuring the 10+ years that I have been studying social skills, I've read a lot of books.
Most were all right. A few useful tips here and there.
Some (unfortunately) were downright terrible.
But a few were simply incredible.
Those were the books that opened my eyes to an aspect of social interaction that I had been totally missing. Those were the books that held a new insight for me each time I pulled them from the bookshelf. Those were the books that dramatically shaped and improved my understanding of social interaction.
And those are the books that I'm going to share with you now.
Level Up Your Social Life Level Up Your Social Life is my newest book, and I think it's some of my best writing yet. I wrote it to help people take practical steps towards a better social life. I explain social skills using metaphors from video games to make it easy to learn and remember. And I finish each lesson with a "quest" that helps you practice what you're learning in the real world. This helps to take the guesswork out of social success -- just learn the metaphors and complete the quests, and you'll naturally improve over time. Gamers will appreciate it the most, but I think anyone who wants to get better socially will find this a great resource. Read it today!
Crucial Conversations Nothing hurts quite like a fight between you and someone close to you. All it takes is a few words spoken in anger for you to deeply hurt someone you care about. Crucial Conversations is the best book on managing conflict that I've ever read. It gives you the tools you need to resolve conflicts without hurt and without misunderstanding. Crucial Conversations explains how to bring conflict to a healthy conclusion without lashing out or withdrawing. Like Improve Your Social Skills, it's written to be easy to understand and incredibly practical. Less than a week after first beginning to read Crucial Conversations, I had already used principles from the book in a conflict. I can't recommend this book enough.
What Every BODY Is Saying What Every BODY Is Saying is a phenomenal body language book. Unlike many other body language books which simply give you a laundry list of every single body language signal under the sun, What Every BODY Is Saying focuses on the most important signals to make application easy. If you're looking to expand your knowledge of body language beyond the lessons in Improve Your Social Skills, I recommend this book as your next step. As a bonus, it's written by an ex-FBI agent, so the examples in the book are exciting real-life examples of the author using body language to catch criminals.
How To Talk To Anyone As a general rule, I don't like lists of social skills tips. Usually, it's much more productive to focus on big-picture principles than try to memorize an endless list of tricks and tips. But for How To Talk to Anyone, I am happy to make an exception. How To Talk To Anyone has 92 different tips for social interactions. Each tip is about a page or two long, and is usually simple enough that it can be boiled down into a sentence or two (which the author helpfully does at the end of each chapter.) They cover different topics, from conversation to remembering names to making a good first impression. The beauty of the tips is the way they are presented. Lowndes has a rare gift for making the tips memorable, which is incredibly helpful when trying to apply them. And the bite-size nature of each tip makes it easy to practice them one at a time. Not every tip in this guide is helpful, but there are enough gems for it to be well worth your time.
Switch Switch is an easy to read explanation of how to make change easy, whether you are trying to change something in your own life or in the world at large. Becoming more social is a big change, and change is hard. If you find yourself struggling to become more social even after reading the guide, read Switch. You will have a much greater chance of changing your life to be more social if you apply the principles in Switch.
Everybody's Normal Until You Get To Know Them For two porcupines (covered in prickly spines) getting close enough to mate is a challenge. This is the "Porcupine's Dilemma" -- how do you get close to others without getting hurt? The Porcupine's Dilemma applies in our human lives as well. Although we're not covered in spines, there are no shortages of ways for people to hurt each other in relationships. So how do we draw close without being hurt? Everybody's Normal Until You Get To Know Them is an incredible answer to that question. It explains how to go deep with others, what healthy communities look like, and how to avoid getting hurt (or hurting others) as you build intimacy. The author is a pastor so he writes from a Christian perspective, but I think you'll benefit from his wisdom no matter what you believe. I devoured this book, and I can't recommend it enough.
Life's Journey's With Mr. Rogers
Ok, I'll admit. This book isn't exactly about social skills. But it is about being a good friend, and discovering who you are, and loving yourself and others -- and the fact is, if you learn social skills and you don't learn how to be a good friend, you've missed the point. Fortunately, you have Mr. Rogers to remind you what's most important. It's a short read -- you could easily finish it in a single afternoon -- but it's packed with profound wisdom. Give it a read, and let Mr. Rogers guide you on life's journeys.The sign outside Matisse about where children can and can't go inside the venue. They arrived at the venue, which has an outdoor pool area, at about 3.30pm. "Our friends were in the outdoor area, my son was sitting with us, he was well behaved, always with me at all times," the mother said. "Not once did he try to get in the pool...he wasn't causing an issue." The mother said a member of staff then approached her and asked her to move.
"He went up to me and he said 'Darling, this is the pool area and due to liquor licensing reasons your son can't be here, are you going to stay here for long'?," the mum said. "I said that was fine but I told him not to address me as darling...as a professional, he would not speak to someone like that." The mother said the staff member pointed to an indoor dining area where they were told they could sit. "I took my son and I went to the indoor area," she said. "I sat there and it was fine. My husband came over and the food came to where we were sitting."
The mother said she believed they were moved not due to liquor licensing laws, but because it was the venue's policy that children are only allowed in the dining area. Venue manager Gina Brand said the family was moved due to liquor licensing laws. The mother said she went back to the staff member to ask him about this. "I told him it was nothing to do with liquor licensing and that my son had every right to be here," she said. "He [the staff member] obviously didn't like that.
"My husband made eye contact with him on several occasions...he was well aware of where we were now sitting. "A couple of minutes later a bouncer came up to us and said 'I've been asked to tell you that you have to leave because your son is here and you can't be in this area.' "I was flabbergasted. I was sitting in the very area we were told we could move to. "We were all shocked." The mother claims the staff member then told her that the area they were sitting in was also part of the pool area.
"Suddenly where I was sitting was also considered the pool area yet it was clearly the dining area," she said. The family was told they could sit in another area closer to the foyer but chose not to and left. "I am just so disappointed," the mother said. "It's discrimination against him [my son]. "It's clear that they've got an image they want to portray.
"If my husband was there on his own, I don't think he would have got that treatment." The mother said she was not so much upset from being moved away from the pool area, but was more upset at how she was spoken to. "They showed me where to move and I complied and when I did, then they told me again to move. It was quite apparent that they simply didn't want us in the venue," she said.
There is a sign outside the front of Matisse Beach Club which states children are prohibited from being in the pool area. "Children are ONLY permitted inside the dining area," the sign says. "Must be constantly supervised. "Guests and those accompanying them who do not comply and respect these rules will be politely asked to leave."
Venue manager Gina Brand said the premises operated under the Liquor Act and Health (Aquatic Facilities) Regulations and thus was approved to operate as a tavern and a "class three aquatic facility." "Both approvals required that children are only permitted in the dining area of the venue," Ms Brand said. "The lady refused to sit in the dining area that is permitted and both areas where she sat are not considered the dining area under our approvals and certificates to operate. Loading "The woman would not cooperate with the government regulations that are in place and was also uncooperative in general and at times abusive when interacting with our management team.
"The venue was operating as required to do so by law at all times."It’s hard to know why a fella was compelled to carry a gun during a Sunday shopping spree at a Target store in Fridley. Regardless, it likely scared the hell out of fellow shoppers when it accidentally went off.
According to WCCO, the clumsy gun-toter was near the checkout lanes when the weapon slipped out from his waistband where it was not-so-securely tucked. As it fell to the floor, the armed butterfingers tried to grab it, causing the gun to discharge in the process. The bullet bounced off the floor and hit the ceiling, fortunately hitting no one.
Not wanting to stick around — because he just SHOT A GUN INSIDE A TARGET STORE — the dude grabbed his piece and bounced with a woman. It’s unclear if the clumsy half-wit had a permit to carry the weapon, though either way he gets an F in gun safety.
A Target spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. However, Fridley cops are looking for a “white male and a woman,” so if you see any, size 'em up and react accordingly.
In 2014, the bullseye retailer “respectfully” requested that their valued guests in states with conceal-and-carry laws leave their guns at home. The move came after a gun control mom group launched a petition asking Target to instill a gun ban after Texas activists rallied for open carry laws by walking the aisles with assault rifles over their shoulders. Subtle.
At the time, Target said having guns in its stores didn’t jibe with the family friendly shopping experience it aims for, which makes sense unless you’re Michele Fiore.
[UPDATE]: The Fridley Police Department has released more info about the suspects, including a security camera image as they fled the store at 5:20 p.m. Sunday. While bantering with a clerk as they checked out, the two revealed they were on a 12- to 15-hour road trip. The brown-haired man was wearing a blue Adidas T-shirt underneath a black jacket and a grayish/greenish baseball hat. The woman wore a blue or black hoodie under a second gray sweatshirt, with dark-colored jeans and white tennis shoes.
Both are described as being in their late 20s and they fled in a red/maroon two-door car. Capt. Mike Monsrud says the gun fell down the leg of the man’s pants and it fired while it was near his ankle. The guy left limping as they ran out of the store, but the cops found no blood on the scene to suggest he was hit.
Anyone with information should call Fridley’s finest at 763-572-3629.Image caption The waterfront park near a busy motorway was often used by a local hobbyist club
A New York teenager has been killed when the toy remote control helicopter he was flying struck him in the head.
Roman Pirozek Jr, 19, was pronounced dead at a park in New York City's Brooklyn borough where hobbyists often fly remote control aircraft.
Police said reports suggested Pirozek was killed when the helicopter's blades struck his head and neck.
His death is thought to be only the second ever from a toy remote control helicopter in the US.
Police told the New York Daily News that Pirozek had apparently been attempting a stunt when something went wrong and the helicopter fell and hit him.
"The major vessels in his neck were involved and he just bled out very quickly," an emergency worker told the newspaper.
While police did not release the model of the helicopter Pirozek was flying at the time of the accident, an online video uploaded in July by someone with Pirozek's name showed an Align T-Rex 700N DFC flying at high speeds.
Rich Hanson, spokesman for the Academy of Model Aeronautics in Indiana told the Associated Press news agency that model was in the larger range of remote control helicopters and has a blade span of nearly 4.5ft (1.4m).
Mr Hanson said the teenager's death may have been only the second ever caused by a remote control helicopter in the US.If you're a politician, you're never too old for a sex scandal
On Tuesday, police arrested Ben Clifford Dawson, an 83-year-old candidate eying a seat on the Centerville, Iowa, city council, for alleged prostitution, according to TV station KTVO.
He's no gigolo, but he's in trouble.
Dawson, allegedly told Melissa Drew that he'd shave some money off her debt to him if he could perform unspecified sexual acts on her, a police report said.
Dawson made the offer several times after he loaned her several thousand dollars in June, Chief of Police Tom Demry said to HuffPost. At the time of the original transaction, Drew says Dawson grabbed her and kissed her neck, station KCCI says.
Prostitution is a misdemeanor and Demry told The Huffington Post that the law dosen't distinguish between johns and hookers.
A 10-day investigation by the Centerville police department led to charges of prostitution and intent to commit sexual abuse against Dawson, who was freed after posting $2,000 bond.Following on from the signing of Michy Batshuayi from the French League, Kante joins from Premier League Leicester City, where he so memorably played a major part in the Foxes’ championship triumph last season.
The 25-year-old came close to adding to that success on the international stage earlier this month. He was part of the France squad that was denied a host-team triumph at Euro 2016 by an extra-time Portugal goal in the final.
After signing a five-year contract, Kante said: ‘I am so happy to have signed for one of the biggest clubs in Europe. It’s a dream come true for me.
‘The opportunity to work with Antonio Conte, a brilliant coach, and some of the best players in the world was simply too good to turn down.
‘My first season in English football was very special and now I hope to go on to achieve even more during my time as a Chelsea player. I am looking forward to meeting up with my new team-mates and helping the club achieve a lot of success.’
Chelsea Football Club technical director Michael Emenalo added: ‘N’Golo is a fantastic signing ahead of the new season and we are delighted to have been able to bring such a talented player to the club.
‘He is a perfect fit in terms of Antonio Conte’s philosophies and the style of football he wants to play.
‘For a player of his age he has already built up a wealth of experience and his exceptional quality will without doubt be a great addition to the team.’
The midfielder was the first signing made after Claudio Ranieri became Leicester manager last summer.
What followed is well-known throughout the world of football as Kante’s ability to win possession of the ball and retain it, and to power his team forward marked him out as the best transfer of the year in many people’s eyes.The Melbourne Rebels have announced the promotion of Baden Stephenson to the role of chief executive officer (CEO), with immediate effect.
Stephenson will assume the responsibility of the day-to-day management of the club, including recruitment and operations.
Cox said that Stephenson’s experience made him the ideal candidate for the role.
“Baden was integral to establishing a stable football department after the club’s initial seasons were plagued by significant turnover of players, coaches and administrators so his experience and knowledge of Victorian rugby will be key to our future,” Cox said.
“After the most challenging year in which the club’s future was negligently brought into question, Baden will be responsible for consolidating our operations and lead the Melbourne Rebels into a new successful era.”
Stephenson joined the Melbourne Rebels in 2014 as the club’s General Manager Football Operations, where he brought much-needed stability on and off the field.
A strong relationship with grassroots through the Dewar Shield Ambassador program, which sees all contracted players aligned with local clubs, and consecutive club record seasons in 2015 and 2016 has provided a solid foundation for the Rebels.
A graduate of the University of Canberra, Stephenson has a long history in Rugby, as a representative player, coach and administrator with 20 years of full-time Rugby employment in Australia and Japan. He has vast experience and very strong working relationships across club rugby, Super rugby franchises, ARU and SANZAAR.
Stephenson spent four years as Executive General Manager at Sydney University Rugby Club, where he was responsible for managing and overseeing all elements of the highly successful SUFC business and Rugby program prior to joining the Rebels.
“I am really humbled by the opportunity and see the appointment as a huge honour” Stephenson said.
“While there is plenty of hard work ahead, the Club has some great people and foundations in place and I really look forward to leading the Club into the future.”
This appointment is the first of a number of changes and announcements that we will be making as we position the Club for the 2017 NRC season and 2018 Super Rugby season, after a difficult season which has been impacted by the instability caused by the ARUs decision to |
interaction ban (IBAN) is to stop a conflict between individuals. A one-way interaction ban forbids one user from interacting with another user. A two-way interaction ban forbids both users from interacting with each other. Although the interaction-banned users are generally allowed to edit the same pages or discussions so long as they avoid each other, they are not allowed to interact with each other.
Editors subject to an interaction ban are not permitted to:
edit each other's user and user talk pages;
reply to each other in discussions;
make reference to or comment on each other anywhere on Wikipedia, directly or indirectly;
undo each other's edits to any page, whether by use of the revert function or by other means;
use the thanks extension to respond to each other's edits.
A no-fault two-way interaction ban is often a quick and painless way to prevent a dispute from causing further distress or wider disruption.
Exceptions to limited bans
Unless stated otherwise, article, page, topic, or interaction bans do not apply to the following:
Reverting obvious vandalism (such as page content being replaced by obscenities) or obvious violations of the policy about biographies of living persons. The key word is "obvious" – that is, cases in which no reasonable person could disagree.
vandalism (such as page content being replaced by obscenities) or violations of the policy about biographies of living persons. The key word is "obvious" – that is, cases in which no reasonable person could disagree. Engaging in legitimate and necessary dispute resolution, e.g., addressing a legitimate concern about the ban itself in an appropriate forum. Examples include: asking an administrator to take action against a violation of an interaction ban by another user (but normally not more than once, and only by mentioning the fact of the violation) asking for necessary clarifications about the scope of the ban appealing the ban
in an appropriate forum. Examples include:
As a banned user, if you think your editing is excepted from the ban according to these rules, you should explain why that is so at the time of the edit, for example in the edit summary. When in doubt, do not make the edit. Instead, engage in dispute resolution or ask whoever imposed the ban to clarify.
Decision to ban
See also: Category:Banned Wikipedia users and Wikipedia:Long-term abuse. Note that the absence of editors from these lists does not necessarily mean that they are not banned.
Authority to ban
The decision to ban an editor can be made by the following groups or persons:
Except as noted above, individual editors, including administrators, may not directly impose bans.
Community bans and restrictions
The community may reach a consensus to impose various types of sanctions on editors:
If an editor has proven to be repeatedly disruptive in one or more areas of Wikipedia, the community may engage in a discussion to impose a topic ban, interaction ban, site ban, or other editing restriction (which may include a limited-duration or indefinite block) via a consensus of editors who are not involved in the underlying dispute. When determining consensus, the closing administrator will assess the strength and quality of the arguments made.
In some cases the community may review a block or an editor's unblock request and reach a consensus of uninvolved editors to endorse the block as a community sanction.
Editors who are or remain indefinitely blocked after due consideration by the community are considered "banned by the Wikipedia community".
Community sanctions may be discussed on the Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard (preferred) or on Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents. Discussions may be organized via a template to distinguish comments by involved and uninvolved editors, and to allow the subject editor to post a response. Sanction discussions must be kept open for at least 24 hours to allow time for comments from a broad selection of community members.[1] If the discussion appears to have reached a consensus for a particular sanction, an uninvolved administrator notifies the subject accordingly and enacts any blocks called for. The discussion is then closed, and the sanction should be logged at the appropriate venue if necessary, usually Wikipedia:Editing restrictions or Wikipedia:Long-term abuse. If a block is administered to enforce a community sanction, please include a link to the discussion and note that the block is enforcing a community sanction in the block log.
Editors without usernames may be banned by the community (example), but bans of editors using only IP addresses are rare.
Bans for repeated block evasion
Editors who are confirmed by a CheckUser to have engaged in sockpuppetry on at least two occasions after an initial indefinite block, for any reason, are effectively site banned by the Wikipedia community. CheckUser findings[2] must be documented on Wikipedia before a user is considered banned. Users who have been banned in this way are subject to the same unban conditions as users banned by community discussion.
Administrators or sockpuppet investigations clerks will normally tag the master account's user page with {{sockpuppeteer|checked=yes|banned}}. If the user made substantial good faith contributions before being banned, a notice should be placed on the administrators' noticeboard alerting the community to the ban.
Recidivism may lead to a ban
In 2012, the Arbitration Committee decided that "Users who have been sanctioned for improper conduct are expected to avoid repeating it should they continue to participate in the project. Failure to do so may lead to the imposition of increasingly severe sanctions."[3]
Duration of bans
Bans are not intended as a short-term measure. Sometimes a ban may be for a fixed period of some months. More often no period is specified, because the ban is a decision that the editor may not edit or participate in the specified matters on this site.
Review and reversal of bans
Appeals of bans imposed by the community
Bans imposed by the community may be appealed to the community or, where there are serious questions about the validity of the ban discussion or its closure, to the Arbitration Committee.[4]
Editors who are banned from a topic area or certain pages but can otherwise edit, may appeal (and comment in an appeal discussion) on-wiki, either at the administrators' noticeboard, or, if there are serious questions about the validity of the ban discussion or its closure, by filing a case request [4].
, may appeal (and comment in an appeal discussion) on-wiki, either at the administrators' noticeboard, or, if there are serious questions about the validity of the ban discussion or its closure, by filing a case request. Editors who cannot edit any page except their talk page may: Post an appeal or comment there, by email or other off-site means such as the Unblock Ticket Request System (UTRS), and ask for it to be reposted to the appropriate discussion board. This is a voluntary act and should not be abused or used to excess.
Submit an appeal to UTRS and ask an administrator to post it to the appropriate discussion board. This is a voluntary act and should not be abused or used to excess.
Where there are serious questions about the validity of the ban discussion or its closure, appeal by email to the Arbitration Committee. An email appeal must specify the banned editor's Wikipedia username and any other usernames he or she has used to edit Wikipedia in the past two years. (Using Wikipedia's email feature to email Arbitration Committee automatically reveals the account used for sending it.) The appeal should clearly but succinctly explain the reasons the editor feels the ban should be overturned, such as what lessons the editor has learned since the ban or block was imposed, how the editor would conduct himself or herself differently in the future if they are allowed to resume editing, or why they believe the ban was unfair. The editor should also include links to any relevant on-wiki discussions and any other information necessary to understand the grounds for the appeal.
Editors unable to edit any page (even their talk page) should appeal through the Unblock Ticket Request System asking an administrator to post their appeal to the appropriate discussion board. This is a voluntary act, and should not be abused or used to excess.
In some cases, a banned editor may be unblocked for the purpose of filing an appeal. In such cases, editing of any unrelated page or other matter is grounds for immediate re-blocking. Editors banned by the Arbitration Committee must appeal to the Committee.
Appeal of Arbitration Committee decisions
Appeal to the Arbitration Committee
Editors who are banned from a topic area or certain pages but can otherwise edit, may appeal (and comment in an appeal discussion) on-wiki, by filing an amendment request.
, may appeal (and comment in an appeal discussion) on-wiki, by filing an amendment request. Editors who are blocked from editing by the Arbitration Committee can appeal by emailing the Arbitration Committee using the EmailUser function or, if email is disabled, by emailing wikimedia.org arbcom-enwikimedia.org An email appeal must specify the banned editor's Wikipedia username and any other usernames he or she has used to edit Wikipedia in the past two years. The appeal should clearly but succinctly explain the reasons the editor feels the ban should be overturned, such as what lessons the editor has learned since the ban or block was imposed, how the editor would conduct himself or herself differently in the future if they are allowed to resume editing, or why they believe the ban was unfair. The editor should also include links to any relevant on-wiki discussions and any other information necessary to understand the grounds for the appeal.
Appeal to Jimbo Wales
Any arbitration decision may be appealed to Jimbo Wales. While it is not unusual for him to consider an appeal, it is exceedingly unusual for him to overturn such a decision. A topic banned editor cannot discuss the topic ban or topic on Jimbo's talk page, but is allowed to appeal the topic ban to Jimbo Wales. An appeal should be lodged at his user talk page within one week of the ArbCom decision.
Arbitration enforcement bans
The following are the applicable parts from the standard provision for appeals of arbitration enforcement bans:
Appeals by sanctioned editors Appeals may be made only by the editor under sanction and only for a currently active sanction. The process has three possible stages (see "Important notes" below). The editor may: ask the enforcing administrator to reconsider their original decision; request review at the arbitration enforcement noticeboard ("AE") or at the administrators’ noticeboard ("AN"); and submit a request for amendment at "ARCA". If the editor is blocked, the appeal may be made by email through Special:EmailUser/Arbitration Committee (or, if email access is revoked, to wikimedia.org arbcom-enwikimedia.org Important notes: For a request to succeed, either (i) the clear and substantial consensus of (a) uninvolved administrators at AE or (b) uninvolved editors at AN or (ii) a passing motion of arbitrators at ARCA is required. If consensus at AE or AN is unclear, the status quo prevails. While asking the enforcing administrator and seeking reviews at AN or AE are not mandatory prior to seeking a decision from the committee, once the committee has reviewed a request, further substantive review at any forum is barred. The sole exception is editors under an active sanction who may still request an easing or removal of the sanction on the grounds that said sanction is no longer needed, but such requests may only be made once every six months, or whatever longer period the committee may specify. These provisions apply only to discretionary sanctions placed by administrators and to blocks placed by administrators to enforce arbitration case decisions. They do not apply to sanctions directly authorised by the committee, and enacted either by arbitrators or by arbitration clerks, or to special functionary blocks of whatever nature. Arbitration Committee, Standard provision for appeals and modifications
Evasion and enforcement
Wikipedia's approach to enforcing bans balances a number of competing concerns:
Maximizing the quality of the encyclopedia.
Avoiding inconvenience or aggravation to any victims of mistaken identity.
Maximizing the number of editors who can edit Wikipedia.
Avoiding conflict within the community over banned editors.
Dissuading or preventing banned editors from editing Wikipedia or the relevant area of the ban.
As a result, enforcement has a number of aspects. While all editors are expected to respect the enforcement of policies by not undermining or sabotaging them, no editor is personally obligated to help enforce any ban.
Bans apply to all editing, good or bad
Editors are site-banned only as a last resort, usually for extreme or very persistent problems that have not been resolved by lesser sanctions and that often resulted in considerable disruption or stress to other editors. A site ban is not merely a request to avoid editing "unless they behave". The measure of a site ban is that even if the editor were to make good edits, permitting them to re-join the community is perceived to pose enough risk of disruption, issues, or harm, that they may not edit at all, even if the edits seem good.[5]
A number of banned editors have used "good editing" (such as anti-vandalism edits) tactically, to try and game the banning system, "prove" they cannot be banned, or force editors into the paradox of either allowing banned editing or removing good content. Even if such editors only make good edits, they will be rebanned for evasion.[6]
On very rare occasions, a limited exception may be requested; for example, to participate in a particular discussion.[7]
If there is any doubt whether a limited ban prohibits any specific edit, the banned editor should assume that it does, unless whoever imposed the ban expressly clarifies that it does not. If clarification is not sought before making the edit, the banned editor assumes the risk that an administrator takes a broader view of the scope of the ban and enforces it with a block or other sanction.
Blocks
In the case of project-wide bans, the primary account of any banned editor may be entirely blocked for the duration of the ban.
If the banned editor creates sock puppet accounts to evade the ban, these usually will be blocked as well. When evasion is a problem, the IP address of a banned editor who edits from a static IP address may also be blocked for the duration of the ban. If a banned editor evades the ban from a range of addresses, short-term IP blocks may be used.
Reset of ban following evasion
It is customary for the "ban timer" to be reset or extended if a banned editor attempts to edit in spite of the ban. No formal consideration is typically necessary. For example, if someone is banned for ten months, but on the sixth month attempts to evade the ban, then the ban timer may be reset from "four months remaining" to "ten months remaining", so if the editor does not subsequently evade the ban again, his or her eventual total duration would be 16 months. Repeated evasion may lead to a longer or more serious sanction.
An editor who has been banned or has had their account blocked, and tries to evade this by creating a new account, is known as a reincarnation of the old account. Obvious reincarnations are easily dealt with—the account is blocked and contributions are reverted or deleted, as discussed above. See sock puppet for policy on dealing with unclear cases.
Edits by and on behalf of banned editors
Anyone is free to revert any edits made in violation of a ban, without giving any further reason and without regard to the three-revert rule. This does not mean that edits must be reverted just because they were made by a banned editor (obviously helpful changes, such as fixing typos or undoing vandalism, can be allowed to stand), but the presumption in ambiguous cases should be to revert.
When reverting edits, care should be taken not to reinstate material that may be in violation of such core policies as neutrality, verifiability, and biographies of living persons.
Pages created by banned users in violation of their ban, and which have no substantial edits by others, are eligible for speedy deletion. Any editor can use the template {{db-g5}}, or its alternative name {{db-banned}}, to mark such a page. If editors other than the banned editor have made good-faith contributions to the page or its talk page, it is courteous to inform them that the page was created by a banned editor, and then decide on a case-by-case basis what to do.
Since categorization can impact many pages, and deletion of a category without merging can leave pages orphaned, you should carefully consider what to do with categories created by a banned user. Blatantly useless categories can be speedy-deleted, as well as any categories which clearly violate existing category standards. Care should nonetheless be taken to see if articles need to be merged to a parent category before the speedy deletion. Categories created by a banned user which may be useful or fit into a larger category scheme should be tagged for discussion and possible merging using the categories for discussion process instead of deleting them outright.
Proxying
"WP:PROXYING" redirects here. For the Wikipedia policy on open proxy servers, see WP:PROXY
Wikipedians in turn are not permitted to post or edit material at the direction of a banned or blocked editor (sometimes called proxy editing or proxying) unless they are able to show that the changes are either verifiable or productive and they have independent reasons for making such edits. Editors who reinstate edits made by a banned or blocked editor take complete responsibility for the content.
New accounts which engage in the same behavior as a banned editor or blocked account in the same context, and who appear to be editing Wikipedia solely for that purpose, are subject to the remedies applied to the editor whose behavior they are imitating.[8] See also the policy on sockpuppetry and meatpuppetry.
User pages
Banned editors' user and user talk pages should be updated with a notice of the ban, linking to any applicable discussion or decision-making pages. The purpose of this notice is to announce the ban to editors encountering the banned editor's edits. Indefinitely site-banned editors may be restricted from editing their user talk page or using email.
Further enforcement measures
Serious, ongoing ban evasion is sometimes dealt with by technical means or by making an abuse complaint with the operator of the network from which the edits originate.
Difference between bans and blocks
The standard distinction is that a ban is a social decision about the right to edit; a block is a technically imposed enforcement setting.
The MediaWiki software does not have the capability to prevent editing selectively.[9] Editors who are banned from specific pages or topics must immediately cease editing these pages or topics. If they do not, then a block will be used to enforce the ban. Such a block will necessarily prevent their editing of the entire site, but they are not banned from the site and remain members of the community.
An editor who is "sitebanned" (which may sometimes be described as a "full ban") has been completely ejected from the project. For the duration of their ban their edits are subject to reversion, although personal attacks towards them remain unacceptable.
Blocked
(including "indefinite blocks") Site banned Page/topic banned Still a member of the community? Yes, although currently unable to edit No Yes Access to own talk page? Usually allowed unless abused Usually not allowed Yes Imposing of block/ban May be imposed by any uninvolved admin May only be imposed by the Arbitration Committee, Jimbo Wales, the Wikimedia Foundation (or uninvolved users specifically authorized by one of these), or by community consensus; users may also be banned for repeated block evasion Appeal and removal of block/ban May be lifted by any uninvolved admin, except CheckUser blocks, Oversight blocks and arbitration enforcement blocks Bans imposed by community consensus or for repeated block evasion may be lifted by community discussion (unless needing ArbCom review)
Bans imposed by Arbitration Committee or Jimbo Wales may be lifted by Arbitration Committee or (very rarely) Jimbo Wales
Bans imposed by Wikimedia Foundation may be lifted by Foundation; but some are not reversible Content created during block or ban
(by the user or by someone acting on their behalf) Edits by the editor or on his or her behalf may be reverted without question (exceptions), and any pages where the blocked/banned editor is both the page's creator and the only substantial contributor may be speedily deleted under CSD#G5. Edits by the editor or on his or her behalf that are clearly within the topic area may be reverted without question (exceptions), and any pages where the banned editor is both the page's creator and the only substantial contributor may be speedily deleted under CSD#G5. If there is any reasonable doubt as to whether the page falls within the topic ban, discussion prior to deletion is generally warranted.
Other considerations
Conduct towards banned editors
Wikipedia's hope for banned editors is that they will leave Wikipedia or the affected area with their pride and dignity intact, whether permanently or for the duration of their ban. It is unacceptable to take advantage of banned editors, whether by mocking, baiting, or otherwise abusing them. Personal attacks, outing and other behaviours remain unacceptable even if directed towards a banned editor.
Scope and reciprocity
The English-language Wikipedia does not have authority over the Meta-Wiki, Wikimedia sister projects, or Wikipedias in languages other than English. As such, bans issued by the English Wikipedia community or Arbitration Committee are not binding on other projects.
See alsoMinnesota United FC striker Christian Ramirez was injured during Wednesday’s 2-2 draw with Tampa Bay and will miss Saturday’s crucial match at Puerto Rico FC, coach Carl Craig told the Pioneer Press on Thursday.
Ramirez, whose 16 goals lead the North American Soccer League this season, has a high ankle sprain and will return to Minnesota instead of traveling to the island territory, Craig said. Ramirez was very limited on the field in Wednesday’s game as the Loons gave up a late goal in stoppage time, settling for the tie with the Rowdies.
Bummed I can't be there to help the guys in PR, but will be supporting from a Minnesota. I'll be back ASAP! https://t.co/yNT7XzpXnN — Christian Ramirez (@Chris_Ramirez17) October 6, 2016
Ramirez gave the Loons a 1-0 lead in the 17th minute Wednesday, but when he was hurt, Craig couldn’t sub him off the field because Unted had used its allottedl three subs. Craig did not share how long Ramirez could be sidelined or how the Loons’ attack would change Saturday and possibly beyond.
Related Articles Minnesota United FC falls 1-0 for fourth straight loss
United FC has 8,000 season ticket deposits for MLS next season
United FC’s Lagos heads to Scandinavia to scout players Ramirez has been an ironman at the top of United’s attack. He has played in 92 matches without injury since he joined the club before the 2014 season. He scored 20 goals and won the NASL’s Golden Boot award for highest scorer in 2014. In 2015, he had 13 goals in league games. Both seasons, he was been named to the NASL’s Best XI all-star team, and he is primed for his third honor this year.
United has four matches remaining and is in a tight fight for the fourth and final spot in the North American Soccer League playoffs. The Loons (10-11-7) and Tampa Bay have 37 points, with Miami at 36 points.Skeptics might say that the order was just a cynical attempt to expand the potential Democratic electorate in a swing state. But this would be unfair. Many important progressive achievements, up to and including the Emancipation Proclamation, were also politically expedient. If expanding the electorate helps your party, there’s nothing wrong with that! More to the point, there are many potentially politically expedient initiatives—such as expanding Social Security and substantially increasing the minimum wage—that elite Democrats have nonetheless failed to embrace. Showing that these ideas have a real constituency is one reason Sanders’s run has been so valuable.
The real lesson of McAuliffe is that leaders don’t govern in a vacuum. Political context matters. If McAuliffe had been elected governor in the 1990s he likely would have been much more timorous and inclined to compromise with Republicans. But it ain’t the ‘90s anymore, and McAuliffe has gotten the message.
We have seen this play out in more historically consequential administrations. When Kennedy selected Lyndon Johnson as his running mate, progressive groups nearly revolted, given his frequently conservative record as a legislator and legislative leader. Had LBJ become president in 1952, it is enormously unlikely that he would be remembered as a progressive giant on domestic policy. But assuming office in the context of 1963, he went on to preside over the widest-ranging and least compromised collection of progressive legislation to be passed by Congress since Reconstruction.
Of course, with even Donald Trump unlikely to undermine the Republican hold of the House of Representatives, there will not be another Great Society starting in 2017, irrespective of whether Clinton or Sanders is the Democratic nominee. On the flip side, the fact that political leaders function within a particular context, and have their agendas largely shaped by the coalitions they lead, doesn’t mean that individual convictions are irrelevant. All things being equal, Clinton and Sanders would not govern in exactly the same way, and a Sanders presidency would be more liberal in some respects.
Still, political pressure can compel leaders to act, and it can also provide a context in which sound policy views can be given practical impetus. So while Sanders won’t be the nominee, his campaign matters for the Democratic Party as a whole. Leaders often act as weathervanes, but this isn’t a bad thing if the wind is blowing in the right direction. Hillary Clinton is unlikely to govern the way her husband did in the ‘90s, and for that matter Bill Clinton probably wouldn’t be the Bill Clinton we remember if he assumed office in 2017. In the end, presidents lead coalitions.The eBay founder just wanted to impress his girlfriend. Instead he revolutionized how people buy and sell...everything.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Pierre Omidyar
Founder of eBay Inc.
Founded: 1995
"I never had it in mind that I would start a company one day and it would really be successful. I have just been motivated by working on interesting technology."-Pierre Omidyar
Pierre Omidyar didn't expect to make a dime-let alone become a billionaire-when he set up a small online auction on his private Web site. He just wanted to score some points with his girlfriend. But within five months, what had started out as a hobby had become a $3 billion empire with more than 2 million subscribers, and Omidyar found himself at the head of one of the most popular and profitable Web-based businesses in Internet history. And it all started with Pez dispensers.
Omidyar was born in Paris in 1967, but moved to Baltimore when his father began his medical residence at the Johns Hopkins University Medical Center. A precocious teen, he became interested in computers and would regularly sneak out of physical-education classes to play with his high school's PCs. Rather than punish Omidyar for ditching class, the principal hired him to write a computer program to print catalog cards for the school library at $6 per hour. It wasn't much, but it was a beginning.
His entrepreneurship proved a little more lucrative a few years later when, while working on a bachelor's degree in computer science at Tufts University, he wrote a program to help Apple Macintosh programmers manage memory. He distributed it online as "shareware," asking users to pay on the honor system, but the few checks that dribbled in barely covered the cost of the post office box he'd rented to collect them.
In 1991, Pierre and three of his friends founded a company to write programs for the pen-computing market. As a lark, he set up an early e-commerce site called eShop on the company's Web site. Pen computing turned out to be one of the more notable technology flops, but the eShop site proved lucrative enough to attract the attention of Microsoft, who later bought the company.
Fed-up with start-ups, Omidyar took a job as a developer relations engineer for software-maker General Magic in 1994, and was making a little money on the side as a freelance Web page designer. It was about this time that he met his spouse-to-be, Pamela Wesley. An avid collector of Pez dispensers, Wesley complained that she was having difficulty finding like-minded souls on the Internet. Eager to help out, Omidyar included a small online auction service on his personal Web page so Wesley could communicate, buy from and sell to other collectors from all over the United States.
Launched on Labor Day 1995, the fledgling auction site which Omidyar dubbed eBay (for "electronic Bay," a reference to the San Francisco Bay area) bore little resemblance to the company that would make Omidyar a fortune. Back then, Omidyar made no guarantees about the goods being offered, took no responsibility and settled no disputes. He simply offered a place where users could go online, interact and bid for items.
Much to Omidyar's surprise, collectors of Barbie dolls, Beanie Babies and household junk of all sorts seized upon eBay almost immediately. By February, the site had become so popular that it outgrew Omidyar's personal Internet account. With the help of his friend and fellow computer programmer Jeff Skoll (who would later become eBay's president) Omidyar moved eBay to a much more expensive business site and to cover his increased costs, began charging a few cents to list an item and collecting a small commission if it was sold.
Traffic on the site continued, and eBay Inc. was immediately profitable. Omidyar began to think he had finally stumbled onto a way to turn his penchant for computer programming into some real cash. "The biggest clue was that so many checks were piling up at my door that I had to hire part-time help to open them all," he told The New York Times.
Unknowingly, Omidyar had tapped one of the richest veins in the online world-the desire of people to connect with others who share their interests. And he quickly realized that few interests generate more passion than collecting. "I thought people would simply use the service to buy and sell things," he says. "But what they really enjoyed was meeting people."
Encouraged by this early success, Omidyar quit his day job, and he and Skoll devoted their time to building eBay's community and technology. The duo rationalized that as long as the system worked, the community (and the profits) would continue to grow. And grow they did. By mid-1997, eBay had become the one of the most visited sites on the Web, with more than 150,000 users bidding on 794,000 auctions every day. The average eBay shopper was spending nearly 3.5 hours per month on eBay, longer than the average shopper on any other site.
With the company doubling every three months, Omidyar and Skoll decided they needed venture capital backing and a savvy management team. In June 1997, they took the eBay business plan to Benchmark Capital and got a $4.5 million check for a 22 percent share of the company. Benchmark also promised to find a CEO to help run eBay, tapping Margaret Whitham, an executive with the Hasbro toy company, for the top spot.
Whitham quickly turned what was a ragtag band of sellers hawking stuff from their basements into a lean, mean corporate machine. She created a new marketing division and placed all firearm and pornography auctions on separate, age-restricted sites. With new marketing energy and the dirty laundry safely hidden away, she took eBay public on September 24, 1998.
The stock single-handedly revived the market for Internet initial public offerings. On its first day of trading, it rolled out at $18 per share. Four months later, it cracked the $300 mark, thrilling investors and making Omidyar an instant billionaire.
From its humble beginnings trading Pez dispensers, eBay has become one of the hottest sites on the Internet and has revolutionized e-commerce. Its success has spawned dozens of imitators hoping to cash in on the online auction craze. Yet even with increased competition, eBay's growth has not slowed one iota. By late 1999, eBay boasted nearly 8 million registered users trading an average of 33 million items per year, ranging from Beanie Babies to fine antiques. As for Pierre Omidyar, he's just as amazed by eBay's astounding growth as everyone else. "I didn't set out to create a huge business on eBay. When it happened, I just took advantage of it."
Rules Of The Game
A Whole Lotta Trading Goin' On
A rarity for Internet start-ups, Pierre Omidyar developed a business model that let eBay Inc. become profitable quickly, while still delivering what users regarded as good value. Here's how it works. Both buyers and sellers pay to use the service. Each "for sale" listing costs 25 cents to $2. Potential buyers submit bids in an "electronic auction" that runs for multiple days. If the goods are sold, eBay collects a commission of 1.25 percent to 5 percent from the seller.From the company's founding in 1995 to late 1999, $2 billion worth of merchandise was sold through eBay Inc.'s auctions. Some of the stranger (and not necessarily legal) items offered through eBay have included a 1998 Volkswagen Beetle, a Russian space shuttle and a human kidney.Larry Smarr: Building the Big Data Superhighway
Internet pioneer Larry Smarr is now spearheading an initiative to create a high-speed virtual super highway for big data. EnterpriseTech shares the details in a Q&A.
Internet pioneer Larry Smarr once had a vision of bringing connected computers out of academia and into the consumer world. Today, he envisions a second virtual highway, one capable of delivering on the promise of big data by leveraging fiber optic networks to transmit data at speeds of 10 gigabits to 100 gigabits per second. The idea is similar to NSFnet, which became the backbone of the Internet in the 1980s. Like NSFnet, Smarr hopes this new network – the Pacific Research Platform – will be a template others will adopt.
Smarr, who is founding director of the director in 2000 of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), a University of California San Diego/UC Irvine partnership, sat down recently with EnterpriseTech to discuss Pacific Research Platform. Following is the interview:
EnterpriseTech: Please could you provide us with an update of where the Pacific Research Platform stands today, about a month since the New York Times article appeared?
Larry Smarr: The National Science Foundation officially awarded the grant a few days before the New York Times article and it has a start date of October 1st, 2015. It is a five-year grant, providing $1 million a year, which will be used to coordinate the development of the Pacific Research Platform. By NSF rules you can't spend the money directly for scientific research; that has to be supported under other peer-supported grants. This is largely a socio-technological grant, in that you've got to coordinate 20 university campuses, and their chief information officers, and the different ways they've all implemented big data campus-scale networks. But then you've also got to work with a dozen or so major scientific research teams, each of which is cross-institutional, which is why they were selected. They're already working together across campuses or across labs, but they're doing so on the commodity shared Internet. And so the real question here is, if we can move them up to a dedicated optical network – roughly about 1,000 times faster than the shared Internet – how will that change the way that they do data-driven science?
EnterpriseTech: How technologically feasible is that, to move these scientific teams up to an optical network?
Smarr: There are only a few places in the United States that could do this for $1 million a year. You've got to remember, the money is not going to buy any optical fiber. We have to build the Pacific Research Platform on prior investments. The West Coast has a great advantage because member universities have invested for two decades in their nonprofit research and education network – the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC), now one of the most advanced regional optical networks in the world. CENIC extends up to the University of Washington over Pacific Wave (PW) and recently CENIC/PW have upgraded to a 100-gigabit optical fiber backbone, connecting the campus gateways of the West Coast research universities. In the Pacific Research Platform we're extending that to the University of Hawaii to the west and to the east to Chicago, to demonstrate it can scale to a national footprint. The important thing is the National Science Foundation spent the last three years having reviewed requests for proposals from campuses to build what are called Science DMZs on their campus, which are dedicated networks for big data science research separate from the commodity Internet. So the way to think about it is we're at a very special moment in history. A project like the Pacific Research Platform couldn't have been done before this moment in time because we had to build on both the National Science Foundation investing in the on-campus infrastructure and the West Coast universities investing collectively in the wide area CENIC/PW infrastructure. What our Pacific Research Platform does, is essentially, tie those all together as one uniform big data freeway system.
EnterpriseTech: What could the results be, beyond speed?
Smarr: A metaphor I like to think about is another form of infrastructure, that of automobile and truck transportation. We had spent 50 years building up in the United States city streets and two-lane highways – Route 66, Highway 40 – connecting those cities and that was our automobile and truck transportation system in 1955. At that point, President Eisenhower called for building the interstate highway system because, in addition to the city streets, a number of the metropolitan areas had created freeway systems – Los Angeles obviously comes to mind, but think of many of the other cities that had created these separate infrastructures away from the city streets. And then the interstate highway systems connected those cities' freeway systems together and, as a result you could drive from New York to San Francisco at high speeds without ever seeing a stoplight. Now that formed the basis of what was the next half-century of economic growth for the United States, because an entire set of new industries started that were only possible because of that interstate highway system, connecting the cities' freeways.
I don't know what the future's going to bring in detail, but this provides a historic analogy for creating a separate Internet infrastructure for a specialized reason – high-speed interconnection from inside one campus to inside another campus.
EnterpriseTech: Has the East Coast caught up?
Smarr: There are a number of regional optical networks in the East that connect many universities. But I think in addition you have to build on that physical infrastructure a collective human effort, as we have here on the West Coast with the Pacific Research Platform, between a set of campuses and the wide-area provider that connects those campuses. That's why I say it's a socio-technological effort, not just an engineering effort.
EnterpriseTech: What brought that socio-economic effort together in the West Coast, whereas it hasn't happened elsewhere?
Smarr: I believe that you will see similar projects to this within the next year or two all over the |
16 this season.
The Hawks have been good in crunch time for four straight years.
The Spurs and Thunder have been up and down.
The Houston Rockets (plus-31) and Memphis Grizzlies (plus-28) are the best crunch time teams this season that have yet to lock up a playoff spot. The Los Angeles Clippers (minus-9) are the only playoff team with a negative clutch plus/minus.
Mostly, this feels like it's the tip of the iceberg. There's a lot more to learn about all this, and one of the big questions on the horizon is something Bill James has wrestled with in baseball for quite some time: Is there such a thing as clutch time performers? Are there really players or teams who do better with the game on the line?
That's still not something we know. What we do know is that a lot of what we thought we knew was wrong.The following are undisputed facts about what FBI Director James Comey did on Friday afternoon in a letter to congressional Republican leaders just less than two weeks before Election Day:
ADVERTISEMENT
2. He wrote the letter without having seen any of these emails. He also didn’t write that any of his investigators have seen any of the emails, read them or deliberated on their legal significance.
4. Clinton has asked for full 100 percent disclosure — publication — of all the emails to which Comey has obliquely referred.
5. Not one Republican member of Congress yet has asked for full disclosure of all the emails, as Clinton did Friday night. Nor has Trump. Nor has Trump, or any Republican, criticized Comey for sending a letter that is vague, fact-free and admits that it is possible none of these emails have any significance at all, and despite this has not yet agreed to Clinton’s request to publish all the emails now.
6. The FBI director, as a top law enforcement investigator for the federal government, has no legal authority to express an opinion — as he did when he offered his opinion that Secretary Clinton was “extremely careless” about handling classified emails that were not labeled classified.
7. During public congressional testimony, Comey stated that the little “c” on three emails out of more than 30,000 would not have been recognized by experts at classification status of documents — yet count the number of journalists who fail to report that, and indeed, report the opposite, and the number of Republican pundits on cable TV who do the same. So the record remains that Comey confirms what Clinton has always said: she never received nor did she send any emails labeled “classified” at any level. Comey’s Friday afternoon letter failed to correct the record on all the false statements to the contrary by the media and Republican members of Congress.
8. Comey, as FBI director — an investigative agency, not a prosecution agency — does not have any authority to send a report to Congress in the middle of an investigation about the past or present subject of an investigation. He appears to have violated the limits of his authority as FBI director in disclosing investigation information — or possible investigation information — directly to Congress without obtaining permission from the attorney general or someone else delegated authority by her. His decision to reveal the results of an ongoing investigation, before a published criminal indictment, violates due process principles and pre-indictment secrecy rules and guidelines of the Justice Department.
9. Never has an FBI director gone public, as Comey knew his letter to Republican leaders would, with suggestions of improper conduct regarding one presidential candidate in the closing days of a presidential campaign, much less while admitting he has no evidence that the subject of his letter (“pertinent” new emails) has any “significance” whatsoever.
According to a news report on Friday night by NBC’s Pete Williams, none of the emails found on Anthony Weiner’s computer, which triggered Comey to write his letter to Republicans, were from Clinton. Award-winning author and journalist Kurt Eichenwald also reported in a Newsweek post on Friday night that his sources told him that none of the emails at issue on the Weiner computer were sent or received by Clinton. Yet the national news media so far has not widely reported on those two facts, if confirmed as true, or questioned why anyone is suggesting that these emails are in any way damaging to Clinton.
When Clinton called for the full disclosure of all emails that are the subject of Comey’s apparently unlawful and improper letter to Republican members of Congress, Donald Trump not only did not join her in that call for transparency, he jumped to conclusions that this proves she is “corrupt,” likening her to Nixon’s undisputed criminal obstruction of justice in Watergate. Naturally, many of his extremists and hateful followers in his audiences, once again, screamed “lock her up” — without even an indictment, due process or a trial.
Why have the cable news anchors and panelists and much of mainstream media virtually ignored all this — the violations of constitutional protections of due process, the presumption of innocence when it comes to Clinton? Why have they ignored Comey’s blatant irresponsible actions during the closing days of a presidential campaign — and not called for his resignation and investigation by the Justice Department Office of Professional Responsibility for serious breaches of ethical responsibilities and exceeding his lawful authority as a federal investigator?
I say what Comey has done, and what Trump and his hateful followers have done, and what many of the Trump apologists on TV cable stations have done, is nothing less than McCarthyism at its worst. I say, as an attorney, that Comey, by writing this letter that he knew would be made public just 10 days before a presidential election, has acted so improperly and outside the boundaries of law and ethics that he should resign and, after investigation by legal ethical authorities and the Justice Department Office of Professional Responsibility, that he could be disbarred from law enforcement and the practice of law.
I say that Comey has a moral and ethical responsibility to disclose all the emails Clinton has demanded he disclose and hold a press conference to warn all against jumping to conclusions based on his fact-free letter and call out those who have done so. And he needs to apologize to the American people for his “extreme carelessness” in writing this letter without facts and without legal or ethical authority.
That is what I think. I hope all fair-minded Americans who believe in due process, whether for Trump or Clinton or whatever your preference, will agree and make their opinions known — especially to the media.
Davis is co-founder of both the Washington law firm Davis Goldberg Galper PLLC and Trident DMG, a strategic media firm specializing in crisis management. He served as special counsel to former President Clinton from 1996 to 1998 and is a regular columnist for The Hill newspaper. He has been a friend of Hillary Clinton since they were students at Yale Law School together in 1969 and 1970.The fourth Forum des Idées Pour le Québec (“Forum for Ideas for Québec”) will take place at Champlain College from September 23 through 25. It will focus on social policies–including a special session devoted to the idea of a guaranteed minimum income (GMI) for Canada and Québec.
Organized by the provincial Liberal Party, Parti libéral du Québec, the Forum des Idées Pour le Québec is an annual nonpartisan gathering, featuring lectures and panel discussions on major social and political issues facing the province.
The head of the provincial government, Premier Philippe Couillard, will be present for the event. Couillard has made a promotional video for the event, which highlights its attention to the GMI.
The session on GMI, which is scheduled for September 24, will feature four highly prominent basic income researchers and advocates:
Yannick Vanderborght, Professor at Université de Louvain and Université de Bruxelles, associate editor of Basic Income Studies and founding editor of Basic Income News.
Evelyn L. Forget, Professor of Community Health and Social Work at the University of Manitoba, well-known in the basic income community for analyzing the results of Manitoba’s Mincome experiment.
Jurgen de Wispelaere, a visiting researcher at the University of Tampere who has worked on the design of Finland’s basic income experiment and written extensively on basic income.
Marc de Basquiat, President of the French basic income group Association pour l’Instauration d’un Revenu d’Existence.
This session will be chaired by Jean-Marie Bézard, vice-president of the Forum Scientific committee and Director of Plénitudes, Prospective & Management.
Other issues to be addressed include poverty, inequality, pay equity, and coordinating social interventions across a territory.
Visit the event page for more information. Registration is limited, and typically sells out weeks before the event.
Two public discussions of guaranteed minimum income and universal basic income will take place in Québec in the following week (September 27 and 28).
Reviewed by Jenna van Draanen
Québec flag photo CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Mathieu Thouvenin
Thanks also to my supporters on PatreonFrom Wiley-Blackwell, via Eurekalert, something just plain surprising.
Nibbling by herbivores can have a greater impact on the width of tree rings than climate, new research has found. The study, published this week in the British Ecological Society’s journal Functional Ecology, could help increase the accuracy of the tree ring record as a way of estimating past climatic conditions.
Many factors in addition to climate are known to affect the tree ring record, including attack from parasites and herbivores, but determining how important these other factors have been in the past is difficult.
Working high in the mountains of southern Norway, midway between Oslo and Bergen, a team from Norway and Scotland fenced off a large area of mountainside and divided it into different sections into each of which a set density of domestic sheep was released every summer.
After nine summers, cross sections of 206 birch trees were taken and tree ring widths were measured. Comparing these with local temperature and the numbers of sheep at the location where the tree was growing allowed the team to disentangle the relationship between temperature and browsing by sheep and the width of tree rings.
According to lead author Dr James Speed of the NTNU Museum of Natural History and Archaeology: “We found tree ring widths were more affected by sheep than the ambient temperature at the site, although temperatures were still visible in the tree ring records. This shows that the density of herbivores affects the tree ring record, at least in places with slow-growing trees.”
The impact of large herbivores on tree rings has, until now, been largely unknown, so these findings could help increase the accuracy of the tree ring record as a way of estimating past climatic conditions, says Dr Speed: “Our study highlights that other factors interact with climate to affect tree rings, and that to increase the accuracy of the tree ring record to estimate past climatic conditions, you need to take into account the history of wild and domestic herbivores. The good news is that past densities of herbivores can be estimated from historic records, and from the fossilised remains of spores from fungi that live on dung.”
“This study does not mean that using tree rings to infer past climate is flawed as we can still see the effect of temperatures on the rings, and in lowland regions tree rings are less likely to have been affected by herbivores because they can grow out of reach faster,” he explains.
Tree rings give us a window into the past, and have been widely used as climate recorders since the early 1900s. The growth rings are visible in tree trunk cross sections, and are formed in seasonal environments as the wood is laid down faster in summer than winter. In years with better growing conditions (in cool locations this usually means warmer) tree rings are wider, and because trees can be very long-lived and wood is easily preserved, for example in bogs and lakes, this allows very long time-series to be established, and climatic conditions to be estimated from the ring widths.
###
The study was funded by the Norwegian Research Council and the Norwegian Directorate for Nature Management.
James D. M. Speed, Gunnar Austrheim, Alison J. Hester and Atle Mysterud (2011), ‘Browsing interacts with climate to determine tree ring increment’, doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2435.2011.01877.x, is published in Functional Ecology on 27 July 2011.
===============================================================
When asked for comment about their effects on tree ring widths, possibly affecting paleoclimate studies based on tree rings, the sheep denied complicity and said repeatedly “Maaaa aaa aann Maaaa aaa aann“.
…
For those wanting a primer on all the things that can affect tree growth, may I suggest this primer.
Advertisements
Share this: Print
Email
Twitter
Facebook
Pinterest
LinkedIn
RedditPC Pro editor Barry Collins is conducting a two-week experiment, returning to Hotmail after six years of using Gmail, to examine Microsoft’s claims that its webmail system has improved. You can read his previous blog posts on Moving from Gmail to Hotmail here.
Today, I was all set to bring you the verdict on my two-week experiment of swapping Gmail for Hotmail. Last night, however, I spent in the pub with the PC Pro team, giving the latest issue of the magazine a good send off. Which is when the problems started.
The Twitter client on my iPhone started buzzing like a wasp trapped in a lamp shade. I received the following message:
Quickly followed by:
And this:
Then my brother rang. Had I meant to send him that link in an email? And why had I also sent it our cousin and three blokes he'd never heard of.
I put my pint down, switched my laptop on, logged into Hotmail, and saw the following:
I then uttered a naughty word. Something along the lines of: “bugger”.
My Hotmail account had been hacked alright, but that was only the beginning of my problems. As readers of my earlier blog posts about this experiment will know, I’d also set up Hotmail to import all my Gmail and its associated contacts. Not to mention the Facebook and LinkedIn contacts that Hotmail merges into your online address book. It soon became painfully clear that pretty much anyone I’d had personal or professional contact with over the past decade had been sent an email containing a link to a malicious site. From my account. Me – the editor of a PC magazine.
All this is a terrible shame, because I was gently warming to Hotmail
In fact, even people I didn’t really know were getting dodgy emails from me, because, as I discovered a couple of days ago, anyone you add to your Circles on Google+ is automatically added to your Gmail contacts.
And so, three pints to the wind and trying to ignore the smug amusement of my (soon to be former) colleagues, I set about trying to change my passwords. Hotmail was easy enough, but as that email address was also used as my iTunes login, I wanted to change that password as well. Except Apple’s changed its password policy since I last changed mine, forcing me to include a capital letter, a number, a set number of characters and a symbol from the Ancient Greek alphabet (I exaggerate only slightly). As my Gmail account was linked to that now compromised Hotmail inbox, I had to change that password too. So I now had three new passwords – all using slightly different systems – swimming round my slightly inebriated brain, and I can’t even remember the name of my news editor when I'm sober. If I’m still able to access my iPhone and Gmail account today, it will be nothing short of miraculous.
All this is a terrible shame, because I was gently warming to Hotmail. I wasn’t about to recommend all Gmail users up sticks and move (back?) to Microsoft, but features such as the SkyDrive integration and automatic inbox Sweep were genuinely useful, and way ahead of what Google’s webmail offers. I’m sure there are plenty of people who’ve had their Gmail account compromised too, although I have to say from anecdotal evidence that Hotmail seems far more susceptible to account hijacking than Gmail.
I simply can’t trust Hotmail anymore. And what’s even more worrying is that it’s not only my webmail that’s been compromised, but my Xbox login (which holds my credit card details) and now my PC login too. Because Windows 8 practically forces you to login with your Windows Live/Hotmail details to access features such as the Metro Store, synchronisation and SkyDrive.
It’s one thing giving hackers access to ten years’ worth of junk mail and iTunes receipts – it’s quite another potentially giving them access to my work PC.
(Update: For those of you inquiring about the strength of my Hotmail password - it was a seven-letter string of lowercase letters. Not a dictionary word, but part acronym, part proper noun. It's not the world's strongest password, and I can feel the parental glare of Davey Winder from 200 miles away, but it wasn't that weak, either.)
Click here to read Davey Winder's Ultimate Guide to PasswordsPolice are investigating the case of a Twitter user posting a picture of a woman passed out on the floor with the caption, “Somebody put something in her drink, anyways, me and my brother bout to rape this b**ch.”
The tweet was posted just after 1 a.m. on New Year’s Day, and it quickly spread all over the Internet. The user, @RichloneyJuan, continued to tweet about the passed out girl all night, and even after he insisted it was a joke, police are not taking the situation lightly.
In the tweets that followed the initial posting, the user continued to make light of the incident, even tweeting that the woman had stopped breathing and didn’t have a pulse.
At one point, another Twitter user, TaBarius, posted a picture that appeared to be the same girl, but in this picture, she was dressed and cleaned up, although still passed out on the floor. The user went on to keep tweeting, saying that he had the girl locked up in the trunk of his car and asked his followers whether or not he should kill her.
ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website
People all over social media were outraged that the users would make jokes about rape and murder, and now, the police are involved. Dana Pierce, an officer in Cobb County, Georgia, said that they don’t have the names of the two men yet, but plan to begin a thorough investigation.
ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website
ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website
“How are we going to find them?” asked Pierce in a statement to Buzzfeed. “We could find their IP addresses, but we’re not going to do that on New Years Day… They [detectives] will probably really sink their teeth into the case tomorrow. “
Police say that someone claiming that none of what was posted was truthful contacted them, but the investigation will still go on despite the claims.
“The alleged incident that has gone viral is not a crime,” said Pierce. “We need a lot more evidence to prove that this happened.”
Both Twitter users are from the same area in Georgia, according to their accounts, which is why Cobb County police are heading the investigation.
undefinedShare. May your framerates be high and your temperatures low. May your framerates be high and your temperatures low.
Running games at their highest framerate on Ultra settings is a really great feeling, but it's even better when you get the chance to show off your rig to the envious masses. QuakeCon is a perfect place to show-off, and the event dripping with unbelievable PCs.
One of the most impressive we came across is a life-sized model of Nick Valentine from Fallout 4. Not only is the case a painstaking recreation, the components inside make it an absolute powerhouse PC.
Insane Nick Valentine Custom PC 5 IMAGES Fullscreen Image Artboard 3 Copy Artboard 3 ESC 01 OF 05 This incredible Nick Valentine PC is more than just a jaw-dropping case mod. The PC inside is a positive beast. 01 OF 05 This incredible Nick Valentine PC is more than just a jaw-dropping case mod. The PC inside is a positive beast. Insane Nick Valentine Custom PC Download Image Captions ESC
Building a truly impressive PC casemod takes the already awesome task of building a computer and adds the extra element of artistic expression. Equal parts technical know-how and creativity, eye-catching casemods are the gull-wing doors and sleek lines of a supercar with the power inside to back up those good looks.
QuakeCon Custom PCs 10+ IMAGES Fullscreen Image Artboard 3 Copy Artboard 3 ESC 01 OF 28 The insane custom PCs of QuakeCon. 01 OF 28 The insane custom PCs of QuakeCon. QuakeCon Custom PCs Download Image Captions ESC
QuakeCon is running through the weekend and we got a chance to check out Arkane Studio's Prey. It looks like a hybrid of BioShock and Dishonored, with problem-solving elements of which weapons are only one part.
Seth Macy is IGN's weekend web producer and just wants to be your friend. Follow him on Twitter @sethmacy, or subscribe to Seth Macy's YouTube channel.Formatting may be lacking as a result. If this article is un-readable please report it so that we may fix it.
Posted on April 1, 2014, Phil Hornshaw No-Win Situation: The Troubled History of Firefall, Part 2
This is a second of our three-part series on Firefall creator Red 5 Studios. The names of sources found in this story have been changed to protect their identities. Read Part 1.
Mark Kern might have likened his last year as chief executive officer at Red 5 Studios to a “no-win situation,” but he wasn’t the only person working there who felt that way.
Employees working at the studio under Kern who spoke to GameFront told stories of struggling through situations they didn’t feel they could win, either. After seven years of development, the studio’s only game, Firefall, remains unfinished — and many sources said the reason for that is a combination of wasted work, a lack of direction from management, and an often-toxic working environment.
That wasn’t the case for all employees, though. For some, Red 5 Studios was a place where like-minded gamers came together to work to create something new, and for whom the studio’s inner culture, known as The Tribe, was a tight-knit community that made them feel welcome and excited to be there.
Kern helped seal the deal that kept Red 5 from closure — and, at the time, saved many employees’ jobs.
Most agree, however, that the studio could be a volatile place under Kern’s leadership. He was the ultimate authority at the studio, and his decisions on gameplay designs often meant throwing out features and projects he’d previously greenlit in favor of new directions.
What was worse, though, was Kern’s explosive temper. The boss was prone to yelling, and was often absent, which made trying to pursue the ideas and goals he laid out even more difficult. What’s more, disagreeing with him was often a good way to get fired.
But what made Kern, the last of three founders who left Blizzard Entertainment and start Red 5 in 2006, such a central authority figure? The studio’s flat hierarchy, which meant that almost no one was considered “above” anyone else, was one part; the lack of defined producers and middle management was another.
And there was the fact that in 2010, Kern helped seal the deal that kept Red 5 from closure — and, at the time, saved many employees’ jobs.
It was also a deal that returned Kern to the position of CEO, after he’d left the job in 2008.
‘A hero’ with ‘bags of money’
Things were looking bleak for Red 5 Studios in 2009. The end was imminent — three years after its official founding, the studio was close to shutting its doors.
“The company was running well and everything was looking great. Then the economy dropped out that summer.”
At that point, Firefall was in a prototype phase, with Red 5 looking for a new publishing contract, which would have meant more money and the ability to take the game to a completed state. The studio had made a deal in 2006 with Korean publisher Webzen for worldwide rights to Red 5’s game for about $25 million, according to The9 financial documents, but issues with that deal had resulted in Red 5 getting publishing rights back in many territories, including North America and Europe.
“We spent six months and we had a prototype, and we demoed it for Sony and EA, and everybody, and we had a great response,” said Greg, a Red 5 staffer who had been with the company since around its founding.“EA was vying for it and Sony was vying for it, and finally, the company was running well and everything was looking great. Then the economy dropped out that summer.”
With that economic hit, the publishers Red 5 had been pitching were less willing to spend, and backed out of any potential deals. Soon, the studio found itself running out of money, so Red 5’s management was looking to exit gracefully by providing severance packages and closing up shop, one source who worked at the company at the time said.
But the studio was saved from closure, thanks to an agreement to sell a controlling interest to Chinese publisher The9. The sale injected millions into the company, and gave The9 an 81-percent controlling interest in Red 5.
The deal also elevated Mark Kern to the position of CEO.
For many at the studio, the deal with The9 must have seemed like a life preserver tossed out to a drowning victim.Story Highlights Woman found stabbed to death Saturday in her apartment
A baby shower and wedding had been planned for this weekend
Her unborn child did not survive the attack
NEW YORK (AP) — A pregnant mother of four killed in her New York City apartment the day before her wedding died from slash and stab wounds to her neck, authorities said Sunday.
The death Vindalee Smith, 38, was ruled a homicide, the city medical examiner's office said in releasing autopsy results. Her unborn child did not survive.
Smith was found on the floor of her home in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn on Saturday. Neighbors said she had moved into the area in recent weeks. Her other children are older and did not live with her.
Police said there was no sign of forced entry, and no weapon was recovered. Investigators were looking for a possible suspect and spoke to Smith's fiance as well as friends and family.
Smith had once feuded with a former neighbor who threatened to kill her, but it was months ago and the trouble had stopped when she moved to the new apartment, the Rev. Ferron Francis told the Daily News.
On Sunday, police tape blocked off the street to keep people away from the brownstone home.
Smith was a devout Seventh-day Adventist and attended New Dimension Church, about half a block from her residence.
The brutal, unexpected death "is tragic, it has broken our hearts," said Francis.
Smith had joined the church about three years ago, said Andrew Connor, a deacon at New Dimension.
"She was dedicated to her family," he said. "She was beautiful and this is very surreal."
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/RM6SuTNewswise — BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Researchers at The Kinsey Institute at Indiana University Bloomington have been awarded a two-year grant to study the medical accommodation and care of transgender service members in the U.S. military.
The study, "Understanding Aspects of Transgender Medical Accommodation and Care in the U.S. Military," will include an overall investigation of military polices on transgender identity and inclusion, and how they fit with current medical understanding and professional standards of care for transgender health. The study will also examine the Department of Veterans Affairs' inclusion of transition-related mental health care and hormone therapy for transgender veterans.
"Some research findings and clinical observations have suggested that the rates of veteran status among the transgender community may be elevated compared to the general public," said Brandon J. Hill, research associate at The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction. "You can even see cases in the media, like Kristin Beck 'Warrior Princess,' a former Navy SEAL, interviewed on the 'Today' show, and soldier Chelsea (Bradley) Manning, recently convicted of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks; there seems to be an ongoing connection between the transgender community and U.S. military."
The investigators, Hill and Joshua Trey Barnett, an IU graduate student, will assess medical needs and accommodations of transgender service members and veterans and examine the impact of this care on long-term health outcomes and the discrimination issues facing transgender service members and veterans.
Hill and Barnett will gather through interviews the stories, experiences, challenges and complexities of transgender service members and veterans who have transitioned during active duty or who have accessed medical treatment and care from either the VA or private health care providers after military service. In addition to reflecting on their previous experiences, participants will also have an opportunity to comment on what an ideal medical care system would make available to transgender service members and veterans.
"This project is situated at a unique intersection regarding transgender care, with current military policies not allowing transgender-identified service men and women to serve openly, even in light of Don't Ask Don't Tell being repealed, and the fact that the medical community is shifting transgender care away from a pathology model," Hill said. "Even the VA now covers the cost of transgender transition-related mental health services and hormone therapy for eligible veterans. Clearly, there is a disjuncture between military policies, transgender health standards of care and the VA's policies on how to best treat America's transgender service members."
The project is commissioned by the Palm Center, a research institute focusing on policy related to gender, sexuality and the military.
To speak with the researchers, contact The Kinsey Institute's Jennifer Bass at 812-855-7686 or jbass@indiana.edu. Hill also is a research professional at The Center for Interdisciplinary Inquiry and Innovation in Sexual and Reproductive Health at The University of Chicago. Barnett is a graduate student in the Department of Communication and Culture in the College of Arts and Sciences at IU Bloomington.Fox News doesn’t think it important enough to tell you, but “kill them wherever you find them” is from the Qur’an (2:191; 4:89; 9:5), the principal source for the Islamic State’s motivations and pattern of action.
“Pro-ISIS hackers release ‘kill list’ with 8,786 targets in US, UK,” by Cristina Corbin, Fox News, April 05, 2017:
An ISIS-linked group of hackers has released a “kill list” of 8,786 names and addresses in the U.S. and U.K., calling for lone wolf attacks on the targets in a chilling video posted online.
The hackers, known as the United Cyber Caliphate (UCC), orders those watching to: “Kill them wherever you find them.”
In a posting Sunday night on Telegram — a private messaging app — the group first warned that a release of the names was imminent.
About 10 minutes later, the hackers posted the actual list, which includes names of seemingly random inviduals from primarily the U.S. and U.K., according to the terror monitor SITE.
“More than 7,000 of the names were from the U.S.,” a source from the cyber department at SITE told Fox News on Wednesday.
The video, just under six minutes, begins with a warning for the United States.
“We have a message to the people of the U.S. and most importantly your President Trump,” the text on the screen reads.
“Know that we continue to wage war against you. Know that your counter attacks only make us stronger. The UCC will start a new step in this war against you,” the message said….
“We’re trying to determine where the list came from and also identify a common theme among all the inviduals,” the source said.
Terror analysts say it’s not yet determined how serious a threat the list may pose in the U.S. and elsewhere.
“This group has released several ‘kill lists’ in the past and so far there’s been no confirmed incident of someone on the list being directly targeted or attacked,” the source said….Manjaro 16.10 Xfce - Surprised me, I like
Updated: December 10, 2016
I'm hungry, so it's time for some Manjaro! Oh, that was probably the worst joke ever. But this might be a decent review still. Hopefully. It all depends on how Manjaro 16.10, our scapegoat de jour, hmm I love goats, will behave today. In the past, this Arch-based distro has given me tough love.
Manjaro 15.12 Xfce was an okay beast, but it failed to deliver a super-mighty punch. Still, it was a very capable product. But it sure can do better. We will commence our barbecue on the G50 machine, which comes with a fairly complex setup - UEFI, GPT totaling sixteen partitions, and then Windows 10 and some 6-7 Linux distributions and such. Quite hectic. Let us proceed. Some ketchup please. I mean blood.
Live session
Launched fine, no complaints. The desktop has a green and gray scheme, and it's quite decent visually, but then, the devil is in the details. Look at the system area. You get two power icons, one of which does not conform to the Numix theme. The icons have all sorts of shapes and sizes and heights, and that bothers me. There's some sort of text or such beneath the Wireless icon. Say what?
Zoomed in on purpose.
Network connectivity
Wireless worked fine, to a point. When I connected my iPhone, which we will talk about shortly, the whole desktop froze, nothing would respond to my mouse clicks or pleas, I mean swearing, and eventually, after the desktop grudgingly relinquished control back to me, the network was all buggered. Of course, Linux does not love my Realtek card, and so my Lenovo G50 box gets all jelly. I had to remove the RTL8723BE module from memory and re-insert it, but then ALSO restart the network manager. More on this later.
Bluetooth cannot be activated, Samba sharing only works with IP addresses, and then it prompted me twice for password, and Samba printing does not work, and the button is grayed out. Not the most promising of test sessions, I must say.
Smartphone support
I was able to use the iPhone, PTP style, and the Ubuntu Phone cooperated well.
Media support
Good. MP3 songs played just fine, although the default media player is a little ugly. It comes with all sorts of tabs in the right pane, where you can listen to radio, Last.fm, check song lyrics and such, but the interface does not proportionally resize with the player window, and stuff gets truncated in a very ugly way. So ugly that I had to remove everything before I was willing to take a screenshot.
HD video also plays fine - VLC is the default choice - but it is configured to open files in their full size, which means, it may be bigger than your screen, so it could be a little awkward grabbing the controls and re-positioning the window. No biggie, though. Hi hi.
Installation
Now, here's a terrible thing. You have no less than THREE installer options, including one command line and two GUI tools, a non-named one and Calamares. I decided to go with the last, simply because it's the prettiest, but this is quite risque. It is also very similar to the experience I had with Netrunner 16.09, so if you feel like you've missed on some of the screenshots in that review, here comes Johnny! I mean screenshots.
BTW - the installer reads Manjaro 16.06.1 Daniella. But the stable release I downloaded reads 16.10 and has no apparent name on the website. This gives me the jeepers. If such an omission managed to creep past the QA team (citation needed), then there might be other big, cardinal issues in the distro. But then, this is nothing specific we should blame the Manjaro team, this is the woe and plague and Armageddon of the entire Linux world.
The installer is pretty and fairly functional - quick, too. It detected the partitions without any big delays, although there's no indication the GUI has advanced to the next step when you click the button. The downside of this speed is, the partitions have no names or labels (like that Western movie - The Distro with No Name - A Fistful of Distros), so you really need to know what your target is going to be before you choose it. And then, you must also manually select /boot/efi, otherwise the installation will fail.
The setup was fairly long. The bootloader part took almost 40 minutes to complete, and I thought it was stuck, and the whole thing was going to explode, but then it finished without issues. It also did NOT reboot my box, unlike Netrunner. If you pay attention, the final step has a selectable checkbox, allowing to choose whether to reboot your system or not once the installer quits. This invisible options is probably pre-selected in Netrunner, hence the sudden restart, poof all me screenshots are gone fiasco that I had.
Fiddling la distra loca
Manjaro! Food time! Or something. Anyhow, the desktop launched fine, I was able to connect to my Wireless network without any problems, and then I started testing and tweaking, getting annoyed and delighted. But first thing first.
Package management & updates
Despite the geeky nature of the distro and the plethora of tools designed for the same task, the distro did not stagger, hiccup or confuse, and it completed its tasks without undue pain. The downloads were slow, probably due to the scarcity of global mirrors, but the update process, a hefty 900+ MB worth of stuff, completed without any issues.
Why is there an alpha border around this application? That don't conform to no Xfce.
Kernel 4.8.7 - fixes my Realtek woes!
As I've proudly and cheerfully and merrily reported in my standalone article on this topic, the new kernel 4.8.7 fixes the Realtek RTL8723BE disconnects. Booya! I was able to download and install the package without any problems, and after rebooting, all those fine entertainment videos were streaming like finest Irish butter, melted, of course. Nice. Awesome stuff. Plus, we finally see added value to nerdy distros like Arch and its siblings, as they are not shy in offering brand new kernels to their masses.
Desktop tweaken
I made a few innocent mistakes here, like deleting a fully expanded separator, which caused the panel to collapse, becoming ugly and annoying. This is not something that I've encountered before, and it took me a few seconds to figure out how to expand the separator so that the clock would be pushed into the far right corner.
I also played with the icons, themes and such, and while the new default selection |
a weight off our shoulders," Heredia said. "It didn't bring peace to our hearts, but it brought a weight off our shoulders."
Adriana Lisa Castillo Perez, 31, of Canadian, pleaded guilty Wednesday to capital murder in the Dec. 23 killing of Leslie Escobar Perez, 23, of Shamrock.
Adriana Perez lured Leslie Perez into an encounter at the family's home in Shamrock with the promise of free baby clothing, a crib and other items, and then stabbed the woman multiple times before fleeing with Abcde Perez, her 2-week-old daughter, 31st District Attorney Franklin McDonough said.
The two women were not related, authorities said.
As part of a plea bargain with 31st District Attorney Franklin McDonough, Adriana Perez will serve life in prison without the possibility of parole, court documents show.
McDonough said Adriana Perez had formulated a "very elaborate plan" before meeting Leslie Perez on Facebook. She had determined she was going to kidnap a child, and had visited a Facebook group dedicated to buying and selling items in search of a target.
On Facebook, she saw a status Leslie Perez had posted expressing her excitement about having a new baby. From there, Adriana Perez contacted Leslie Perez about giving away items for the baby.
The two arranged to meet at Leslie Perez's home on December 23, where authorities said Adriana Perez stabbed her multiple times and fled with Abcde.
Authorities found Leslie Perez outside the home where she had crawled after being stabbed.
"She … fought for her life," McDonough said. "She fought for that baby."
A neighbor reported a strange vehicle had been at the family's home earlier in the day. The neighbor described the vehicle to police and authorities broadcast an alert to nearby law enforcement agencies.
Adriana Perez was stopped as she drove to Pampa by a Gray County Sheriff's deputy later that night. She had the infant and the murder weapon in her possession, McDonough said. Abcde had not been injured.
Texas Rangers led the investigation, with Shamrock police, Texas Department of Public Safety troopers and sheriff's officials in Gray and Wheeler counties assisting.
Maxwell Peck, a defense attorney with the Regional Public Defender for Capital Cases office in Lubbock, represented Adriana Perez.
"We got to a point legally where we felt like if we could resolve the case for life without the possibility of parole, that's what needed to happen," Peck said. "And, thankfully, the victim's family felt like that was enough justice for them and the district attorney agreed and our client agreed to accept responsibility."
Leslie Perez's family members said they were satisfied with Adriana Perez's sentence.
"I think I feel pretty good," Anna Garcia, Leslie Perez's mother, said. "I'm glad she got what she deserved. It's not going to take my pain away, but, I know she's going to be where she won't hurt nobody else."
Garcia is now raising Abcde. She said she hopes the healing process for her family can begin.
"We've been through a lot," Garcia said. "Our family kind of separated over this. We really don't talk. We suffer a lot. We don't sleep, eat. We argue a lot. … Maybe now that everything's settling down we can get back together again, to the family we used to be. It won't ever be the same, because now there's somebody missing there, but maybe we can get through it now."Counting bits
published at 21.02.2015 23:25 by Jens Weller
I did a bit of fun coding. I'm currently thinking on how to generate random bytes. The mersenne twister RNG is known to give very good randomness, so it would be a possible an easy source. But first, I wanted to know, how random is the mersenne twister really? So, when counting the bits in the result of a few thousand calls to a rng, the distribution should be even. So, today I wrote code that counts bits, and tested it on the mersenne twister.
Counting bits
Each bits represents a power of two as a numerical value. So, first thing is to generate an array of exact those power of twos. This array servers as a bitmask, and as its a very easy and basic calculation, I wanted to achieve this with constexpr. I've never used it before, and my first attempt with a loop failed, simply because that is only allowed from C++14 on. So I went with recursion, as other examples also show this path. Forgetting that a simple shift operation would do the same:
constexpr std::uint_fast64_t power_of_2(unsigned int pow) { return 1ull << pow; //return pow == 0? 1ull : 2ull * power_of_2(pow-1); }
Next, the class is needed, which does the actual bit counting, as the underlying type can be different (32bit vs. 64bit e.g.), I implemented it as a template, which holds an array of power of 2 values:
template class bitstats<class int_type> { static_assert(std::numeric_limits<int_type>::is_integer,"int_type must meet numeric_limits::is_integer"); std::vector bitcount{sizeof(int_type)*CHAR_BIT,0}; static constexpr std::uint_fast64_t bitvalue[64]={1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512,1024,2048,4096,8192,power_of_2(14),power_of_2(15),power_of_2(16),...
First, a static_assert checks if the type is an integer with std::numeric_limits<T>::is_integer. Maybe the support for operator & would be enough, but for now I think its good to only let the class compile for integers. Next I need to know how many bits the type has, so sizeof * CHAR_BIT should give me the correct result. A vector is created, which contains an entry for every bit. Next is the array containing the power of 2 values, maybe I should factor this out, as its independent from the stats class. The only public function is the actual counting:
void count(int_type n) { for(size_t i =0; i < bitcount.size(); ++i) { if(n & bitvalue[i]) bitcount[i]++; } }
And this is already the code which does the bit counting. The if is where the test is happening, if that bit is set. As I said, this class is just a fun side project, I decided to test the distribution of the bits with the 32 and 64 bit versions of mersenne twister. Whose returntype is std::uint64_fast_t, the bitvalue arrays type.
As I want to test RNGs, I need a small template function, which fills a vector with random numbers:
template<class RNG, class uint_type = typename RNG::result_type> std::vector<uint_type> fillRandom(RNG& rng,size_t num) { std::vector<uint_type> vec(num); std::generate(vec.begin(),vec.end(),rng); return vec; }
Testing the 32 and 64 bit versions, and maybe later also other RNGs, it makes sense to also setup the test class as a template:
template<class RNG> class random_test { bitstats<typename RNG::result_type> stats; RNG rng; public: random_test(typename RNG::result_type rd = std::time(0)):rng(rd){} void run() { auto vec = fillRandom(rng,5000000); for(auto& i: vec ) stats.count(i); } const bitstats<typename RNG::result_type>& getStats() const{return stats;} };
The class instantiates the RNG with a seed, and the run method does the work. All thats left is to put things together in the main function:
int main() { random_test<std::mt19937> mersenne32; random_test<std::mt19937_64> mersenne64; std::thread t64([&mersenne64](){mersenne64.run();}); mersenne32.run();
print_bitcount(mersenne32.getStats().getBitcount()); t64.join(); print_bitcount(mersenne64.getStats().getBitcount()); }
So, I run the actual code in parallel, the 64bit code in a std::thread, and the other in the main thread. The print_bitcount method simply prints the result to stdout via cout.
Results
As expected the distribution is for 32 and 64 bit quite even. I learned though, that std::random_device isn't working properly on MinGW. That's why the randomness currently is based on std::time(0), std::random_device would be a bit better though. One thing I want to measure now is the actual time it takes to generate 16 random bytes for the 32 and 64 bit versions.
Also, I do not write a lot of generic code, as often Qt already is all I need to write the programs that are currently running Meeting C++ (which is my main real-world programming task). It was once again nice to see, how powerful generic code is, and how it allows you to easily reuse code for different types.
Download the full code.
Join the Meeting C++ patreon community!
This and other posts on Meeting C++ are enabled by my supporters on patreon!A few months ago, in the heat of the tragic teen suicides that came about from intolerance of homosexuality, I saw a man on television who was apologizing for wishing death on gays from his facebook page. This member of an Arkansas school board was contrite for the violence in his words, but maintained that his values pertaining to homosexuality would remain, as he felt homosexuality was condemned in the bible. This concept, while foreign to me, is interesting, as it used to justify so much judgement and separation in our society. When my daughter came home from school one day saying that a classmate had two mommies, my response was, “Two mommies? How lucky is she?!” What does it actually say in the bible that will cause some people to be upset by my line of thinking?
Happy pride.
Love, gp
Cynthia Bourgeault on Homosexuality in the Bible
How you answer this question depends hugely on what you take the Bible to be. IF you believe that the Bible is a single, timeless, internally consistent teaching on matters of human morality dictated by God himself, then yes, the Old Testament book of Leviticus is definitely uncomfortable with homosexuality. But it is also uncomfortable with menstruating women, shellfish, and pigskin. (And for the record, it has some very harsh words to say about lending money at interest, a prohibition that even Biblical literalists seem to find it perfectly permissible to disregard!)
Like most other critically thinking Christians, I see the Bible as a symphony (sometimes a cacophony!) of divinely inspired human voices bearing witness to an astonishing evolutionary development in our human understanding of God (or God’s self-disclosure as we grow mature enough to begin to comprehend it, another way of saying the same thing). The Old Testament, whose 46 books span well over a millennium in their dates of composition, also straddles what scholars call “The First Axial Period,” when spontaneously, across the entire globe, human spiritual consciousness seemed to take a huge evolutionary leap forward. In the same time frame that the Biblical psalms were being composed, the planet was also being graced with the Buddha, Lao-Tse, Zoaroaster, and Plato: a quantum leap in human understanding and ethical vision. It simply defies credibility—my credibility, anyway!— to believe that the early Old Testament teachings on animal sacrifice and “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” are at the same level as Ezekiel’s luminous axial prophecy, “I will take away your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” or Jesus’ stunning “Love your enemy; bless those who revile you.”
This is not in any way to demean holiness of the Bible, but only to affirm that God reveals Godself in time, through process and dialogue, not in unchanging monolithic statements. This does not make the Bible less sacred; it makes it more sacred, for it grounds God’s divine presence in the lived reality of our human experience.
As a Christian I am bound, when I listen to this diversity of Biblical voices, to set my compass by the teachings and the path walked by Jesus himself. Where Biblical testimony is internally inconsistent (and even Jesus experienced it this way!), I am bound to honor Jesus as my final court of appeal. And thus, the bottom line must inescapably be that nowhere does Jesus condemn homosexuality, and certainly nowhere does he wish harm upon anyone, even those whom the religious culture is so quick to condemn as sinners. His harsh words are reserved entirely for those whose certainty about their religious rectitude causes them to condemn others, or to block the Spirit’s persistent attempts to open up new channels of forgiveness and hope. Jesus is all about inclusion, forgiveness, and empowerment. In the light of his compassionate presence, people are set free to live their lives in strength and hope, regardless of whether they be considered outcasts by those in the “religious know.”
Thus, as a Christian, when confronted by a tension between a religious certainty which leads me to violate the law of love and a deep unknowing that still moves in the direction of “loving my neighbor as myself,” I am bound to choose the latter course. Was it not the Pharisees, those so sure that they had “the law and Moses on their side,” who were the first to condemn Jesus to the grave? And make no mistake: The word Pharisees does not mean “the Jews”; that utterly reprehensible piece of scapegoating was a product of the early Christian church. Rather, “Pharisee” names the spiritual sclerotic in each one of us who would prefer the certainty of an unchanging rulebook to the radical open-endedness of God’s ongoing self-revelation in love.
If I really follow what the Bible teaches, it seems to me that I need to be constantly laying my human arrogance (and in Latin, this word comes from “a-rogo,” or “I have no questions”), upon the altar of God’s constantly demonstrated delight in new beginnings. “I will be what I will be,” is the name he asked Moses to know him by in the book of Exodus. With that as one line of bearing on my thinking, and the steadily increasing revelation of God’s mercy and compassion as the other, I am compelled by my Christianity to refrain from any behaviors or judgments which arrogantly demean the dignity of another human being, or cause him or her to lose hope.
—Cynthia Bourgeault is an Episcopal priest, writer, and retreat leader. She is founding director of the Aspen Wisdom School in Colorado and principal visiting teacher for the Contemplative Society in Victoria, BC, Canada. Her most recent book, The Meaning of Mary Magdalene, is now available.The drug problem in the United States has reach epidemic proportions in recent years, led by the ease of access and low cost of heroin and other opioids. In 2014 alone, over 47,000 people died from drug-related causes. In 2013, it was the ninth ranked cause of death (
Each year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) compiles—and makes public—data on the number of drug poisoning deaths in the United States, breaking that information down by state and county. These data sets include the crude death rate and a calculated age-adjusted death rate (both measured as the number of deaths per 100,000 people in the U.S population). The CDC’s 2014 National Vital Statistics Report (
Age-adjusted death rates are constructs that show what the level of mortality would be if no changes occurred in the age composition of the population from year to year….Thus, age-adjusted death rates are better indicators than unadjusted (crude) death rates for examining changes in the risk of death over a period of time when the age distribution of the population is changing. Age-adjusted death rates also are better indicators of relative risk when comparing mortality across geographic areas or between sex or race subgroups of the population that have different age distributions.
The CDC provides three data sets which includes data from 1999 to 2014:
– Crude rates, age-adjusted rates, and numerous other metrics for the United States, broken down by gender, race, and age.
– Crude rates, age-adjusted rates, and numerous other metrics for each State.
I obtained copies of all three data sets and did some analysis. The results are staggering.
In 1999, the United States’ overall age-adjusted rate was 6.4 (16,849 deaths). By 2014, that rate had increased to 14.7 (47,055 deaths). The rate has increased every year except 2008 and 2009 (no change from the previous year) and 2012 (a 0.1 decrease from 2011).
Oklahoma, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Utah, Rhode Island, Ohio, Kentucky, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and West Virginia—were able to make that claim. And sixteen other states had a rate over 15.
In 1999, no state had an overall age-adjusted rate over 20 (the top was New Mexico, with 15.0, followed by Nevada, with 11.5). By 2014, ten states—
In 1999, only 3 of the 3,139 counties, from which data was collected, had an age-adjusted death rate of more than 20 (Rio Arriba County, NM, McDowell County, WV, and Wyoming County, WV). By 2014, that number had increased to 630.
But, I think that this data is all the more striking when visualized. I mapped the county data in Tableau Public. The visualization allows you to scroll through each year from 1999 to 2014 and watch as the number of overdoses increase year over year.
I used the visualization to create the following video which animates the change over the past 15 years.
I also created a similar simulation of the overall state data. Below is the data from 1999, followed by the data from 2014.
Once again, the change from 1999 to 2014 is striking. A few statistics:
The states with the highest age-adjusted rates in 1999 were New Mexico, Nevada, and Maryland, with respective rates of 15.0, 11.5, and 11.4.
In 2014, the states with the highest rates were West Virginia, New Mexico, and New Hampshire, with respective rates of 35.5, 27.3, and 26.2.
The rate in West Virginia went from 4.1 (ranked 37 th ) to 35.5 (ranked 1 st ) in this fifteen-year period.
North Dakota, while ranked 51 st in both 1999 and 2014, still saw its rate increase from 1.8 to 6.3.
I also did some analysis based on age, race, and gender.
A few observations:
While the rate of both men and women have increased significantly, men still have a much higher rate than women (in 2014, 374.0 and 209.4, respectively).
Interestingly, the age most impacted by drug-related deaths is 45-54, followed closely by 35-44 and 55-64. We often think of drugs as a problem for our youth, but the 15-24 age group is ranked 3 rd lowest in 2014.
Non-Hispanic Whites, are affected in much larger numbers than Non-Hispanic Blacks and Hispanics, with a rate that is more than the other two combined.
The rate of increase for Non-Hispanic Whites is also much more significant than Non-Hispanic Blacks and Hispanics.
Wrap-Up
I am not entirely sure what is at the root of this problem and I certainly do not know how to fix it. But I’m hopeful that this post, if nothing else, will help to bring greater visibility to the magnitude of this crisis. If you would like get involved, donate, or know someone who is suffering from addiction, there are numerous non-profit organizations and charities you can contact, including To Write on Her Arms with Love ( www.twloha.com ), Amy Winehouse Foundation ( www.amywinehousefoundation.org ), and Shatterproof ( www.shatterproof.org ) just to name a few.
Also, if you are interested in exploring the CDC data further, you can find the data sets here:
County Data – https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/NCHS-Drug-Poisoning-Mortality-County-Trends-United/pbkm-d27e
State/Country Data – https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/NCHS-Drug-Poisoning-Mortality-U-S-and-State-Trends/jx6g-fdh6.
And, if you’d like to interact with the dashboard I created, you can check it out on Tableau Public here
Note: This article was original posted on 9/11/2016, but was updated on 1/8/2017 with updated visualizations.Ever wanted to get rid of the scourge of the web that is Adobe Flash, but still retain the ability to view Flash whenever you want? With ClickToFlash, you can! Using ClickToFlash, all of those icky Flash bits that have infected most webpages on the internets are replaced with a nice, smooth gradient and the word "Flash" set in a nice, pleasing font. When you want to view the Flash, just click on it!
The advantages of ClickToFlash are numerous. Since Flash isn't loaded until you specifically ask for it, your CPU usage will stay at normal levels when browsing the web. This has tons of benefits: web browsing stays speedy, your Mac laptop won't get as hot, and your Mac's fan won't come on as often. In fact, we guarantee* that ClickToFlash will quintuple your battery life and that it will protect those precious parts of your body on which you rest your laptop! (*note: not actually guaranteed)
Although similar to Flashblock for Firefox and Camino, ClickToFlash offers features over and above what Flashblock offers, and it offers them for Safari. Best among them, ClickToFlash supports viewing all those ADORABLE meowing cat videos, annoying dog videos, and hilarious rickrolls from YouTube without using Flash at all! That's because YouTube also offers H.264 videos, which are used when viewing YouTube on the iPhone. With ClickToFlash, you get access to those same, higher quality videos.
Come join us! The web is so much better without Flash.The Irish economy may post "spectacular" growth of more than 7% this year.
However, there is little danger of it overheating or of the government over-spending, Public Expenditure Minister Brendan Howlin told Reuters.
It is five years since Ireland was forced into the troika bailout programme.
Since then, a weak euro and years of pent-up demand have helped make it the fastest growing economy in the European Union with growth of 5.2% last year.
Now bumper corporate tax returns and a decline in the unemployment rate to below 9% have convinced the Government that the economy may return to 7% growth for the first time since the Celtic Tiger era.
"There is every likelihood it may well be higher than 6.2% at the end of this year," Minister Howlin said, adding the final figure could be 7% or above.
"It's not unusual for an economy that fell as far as ours did to have an initial bounce-back that is little short of spectacular," he said.
The Government was criticised by some economists in October for increasing planned spending this year by €1.5 billion after corporation tax receipts came in far higher than forecast.
But Mr Howlin dismissed as "overly cautious" the critics' warnings that the country should limit spending increases and instead pay back more debt in case the growth rate drops off.
Even after the extra spending, the Government is forecasting a budget deficit next year of 1.7%, almost half the 2015 target under Ireland's bailout.
"People talk about overheating as if we had an economy working at full capacity. We certainly haven't," Mr Howlin said.
The country's small flexible economy can "shift our footing very quickly" if circumstances change, he said.One Observatory Circle The house at One Observatory Circle in Washington, DC is the official residence of the Vice-President of the United States. The house was designated the official residence of the vice-president in 1974, after Gerald Ford had been named as the replacement for Vice-President Spiro Agnew. Ford never moved in, however, as he was quickly elevated to president when Richard Nixon resigned. Ford named Nelson Rockefeller as his vice-president, but the Rockefellers already lived in Washington and had no desire to move, so they used the house only for entertaining. As a result, it was Walter Mondale who became the first vice-president to live in the house in 1977. The house was built in 1894 for the superindendent of the US Naval Observatory. The observatory itself is still in use by the Navy, but the superintendent lives in another residence. In 1923, the Chief of Naval Operations took the house for himself, and it was used as such until 1974. In 2002, neighbors of the Naval Observatory reported explosion sounds coming from the house, which many interpreted as the construction of a bunker built to help ensure the security of the vice-president's family in times of emergency. Vice-President Joe Biden was reported to have said that "a young naval officer giving him a tour of the residence showed him the hideaway, which is behind a massive steel door secured by an elaborate lock with a narrow connecting hallway lined with shelves filled with communications equipment." Biden also reportedly said that Cheny's aides often worked on policy in a room in the house. The vice-president's spokesperson later claimed, "What the Vice President described in his comments was not... an underground facility, but rather, an upstairs workspace in the residence, which he understood was frequently used by Vice President Cheney and his aides. That workspace was converted into an upstairs guestroom when the Bidens moved into the residence." From Wikipedia: The three-story brick house is compact, 39 by 77 feet (12 m by 23 m), with 9,150 square feet (850 m2) of floor space. On the ground floor are a reception hall, living room, sitting room, sun porch, dining room and small pantry, and lavatories added later to the north side. The second floor contains two bedrooms, a study, and a den. The third floor attic was originally servants' quarters and storage space. The kitchen was placed in the basement, along with a laundry room and other storerooms.Former British prime minister Tony Blair helped attract investment to a region of Kazakhstan which had been the scene of a brutal police crackdown. After Blair's consultancy firm Tony Blair Associates (TBA) had been a consultant for the country's president Nursultan Nazarbayev, he became an adviser in 2014 to the oil-rich area of Mangystau.
The Times reported how TBA was the intermediary for energy deals and help to usher in foreign investment and improve governance in the region, where at least 14 people were shot in 2011 when police fired on striking oil workers.
The present governor of the region, Alik Aidarbayev, was the chief executive of KazMunaiGaz (KMP) the oil company whose mistreatment of workers was said to have cause the massacre. After the killings, Blair was heavily criticised in the media when he advised the Kazakh president to say in a speech to the University of Cambridge in 2014 that although the deaths were "tragic...they should not obscure the enormous progress".
The group Human Rights Watch has accused the country of cracking down on the media, civil society and the opposition and expressed concern at the possibility of Blair "whitewashing the image of the government".
A spokesman for Blair said that the company's work in Mangystau involved no communications element and his role involved helping "to build capacity to attract investment and improve accountability" to help the region deliver better services for its citizens, The Times reported.
In March 2016, opposition activist Yermek Narymbayev, who had been jailed for a Facebook posting, told IBTimes UK before his release that he expected a continued crackdown on human rights in the Central Asian country.
Meanwhile, Tony Blair faces questions over claims that he managed his wealth via a secret trust which followed contact with the UK's top tax official. Senior politicians have demanded an inquiry following the claims there was an approach made by a consultant hired by Blair's lawyers to the head of Revenue and Customs Dave Hartnett.The 12 Laws of Karma
What is Karma? Karma is the Sanskrit word for action. It is equivalent to Newton’s law of ‘every action must have a reaction’. When we think, speak or act we initiate a force that will react accordingly. This returning force maybe modified, changed or suspended, but most people will not be able eradicate it.
This law of cause and effect is not punishment, but is wholly for the sake of education or learning.
A person may not escape the consequences of his actions, but he will suffer only if he himself has made the conditions ripe for his suffering. Ignorance of the law is no excuse whether the laws are man-made or universal.
To stop being afraid and to start being empowered in the worlds of karma and reincarnation, here is what you need to know about karmic laws.
1. THE GREAT LAW
– “As you sow, so shall you reap”. This is also known as the “Law of Cause and Effect”.
– Whatever we put out in the Universe is what comes back to us.
– If what we want is Happiness, Peace, Love, Friendship… Then we should BE Happy, Peaceful, Loving and a True Friend.
2. THE LAW OF CREATION
– Life doesn’t just HAPPEN, it requires our participation.
– We are one with the Universe, both inside and out.
– Whatever surrounds us gives us clues to our inner state.
– BE yourself, and surround yourself with what you want to have present in your Life.
3. THE LAW OF HUMILITY
– What you refuse to accept, will continue for you.
– If what we see is an enemy, or someone with a character trait that we find to be negative, then we ourselves are not focused on a higher level of existence.
4. THE LAW OF GROWTH
– “Wherever you go, there you are”.
– For us to GROW in Spirit, it is we who must change – and not the people, places or things around us.
– The only given we have in our lives is OURSELVES and that is the only factor we have control over.
– When we change who and what we are within our heart our life follows suit and changes too.
5. THE LAW OF RESPONSIBILITY
– Whenever there is something wrong in my life, there is something wrong in me.
– We mirror what surrounds us – and what surrounds us mirrors us; this is a Universal Truth.
– We must take responsibility what is in our life.
6. THE LAW OF CONNECTION
– Even if something we do seems inconsequential, it is very important that it gets done as everything in the Universe is connected.
– Each step leads to the next step, and so forth and so on.
– Someone must do the initial work to get a job done.
– Neither the first step nor the last are of greater significance,
– As they were both needed to accomplish the task.
– Past-Present-Future they are all connected…
7. THE LAW OF FOCUS
– You can not think of two things at the same time.
– When our focus is on Spiritual Values, it is impossible for us to have lower thoughts such as greed or anger.
8. THE LAW OF GIVING AND HOSPITALITY
– If you believe something to be true,then sometime in your life you will be called upon to demonstrate that particular truth.
– Here is where we put what we CLAIM that we have learned, into actual PRACTICE.
9. THE LAW OF HERE AND NOW
– Looking backward to examine what was, prevents us from being totally in the HERE AND NOW.
– Old thoughts, old patterns of behavior, old dreams…
– Prevent us from having new ones.
10. THE LAW OF CHANGE
– History repeats itself until we learn the lessons that we need to change our path.
11. THE LAW OF PATIENCE AND REWARD
– All Rewards require initial toil.
– Rewards of lasting value require patient and persistent toil.
– True joy follows doing what we’re suppose to be doing, and waiting for the reward to come in on its own time.
12. THE LAW OF SIGNIFICANCE AND INSPIRATION
– You get back from something whatever YOU have put into it.
– The true value of something is a direct result of the energy and intent that is put into it.
– Every personal contribution is also a contribution to the Whole. – Lack luster contributions have no impact on the Whole, nor do they work to diminish it.
– Loving contributions bring life to, and inspire, the Whole.
Article from: http://www.social-consciousness.com/2013/09/12-little-known-laws-of-karma-that-will-change-your-life.html
AdvertisementsEAST AUSTIN, TX — Soaring property rates in East Austin could claim another victim in the retail landscape, as offcials of the In.gredients, a grocery store on Manor Road, launches a crowdfunding campaign to avert its closure.
The store's owners told CultureMapAustin rising costs are attributable to its current financial woes.
"Though 2016 was their strongest year to date, property taxes at their Manor Road location also doubled in the same period," a company statement reads. "Combined with a number of other economic factors at year end, they were met with a choice: cash in the last of their savings to shut down, or risk staying open long enough to turn the corner. They chose the latter — to go all in — and now they need the help of the community and zero waste advocates around the world."
The crowdfunding campaign, hosted through IndieGogo, will run from February 3 through March 5, with a goal of raising $30,000 will help in.gredients, according to the website. The store distinguishes itself as one of the few zero-waste grocery stores in the world, according to the site.
A trend most popular in Europe, the so-called zero-waste or no-waste concept centers on the idea of encouraging customers to bring their own reusable containers — glass jars, cloth bags and the like — to measure out the precise amount of food items and other products their household requires. Such stores don't offer plastic bags as is the custom at their bigger counterparts.
In July 2016, Huffington Post wrote glowingly about a retailer seeking to open a zero-waste grocery store in Brooklyn, New York,called The Fillery while suggesting it would be the first of its kind in the U.S. "If you only need one cup of sugar for a cake, why buy an entire 4-pound bag?" the Huffington Post wrote in explaining the zero-waste concept that encourages measured shopping among patrons.
To raise awareness of the store's presence, in.gredients is staging a campaign launch party on Friday, Feb. 3, with musicians and vendors on hand to help cast a spotlight on the retailer.
CultureMap Austin noted in its report that in.gredients plea for financial help via crowdfuning isn't the first time a local business beset with escalating property taxes has reached out to the public for help. Last month, Black Star Co-op Pub & Brewery also asked residents for more patronage to stay afloat, according to the website.
>>> Read the full story at Culture Map Austin
Photo credit: Solblomma5 via WikiMedia CommonsAfter the US blacklisted seven North Korean citizens, leader Kim Jong-un's sister among them, Pyongyang’s news agency advised Obama to “make good arrangements for packing in the White House,” also calling the US a “tundra of human rights.”
“Obama would be well advised not to waste time taking issue with others’ ‘human rights issues’ but make good arrangements for packing in the White House,” North Korean news agency KCNA said in a statement late Monday night.
Last week, the US Treasury Department updated the list of North Koreans sanctioned for "serious" rights abuses, adding the names of seven individuals – including Kim's younger sister Yo-jong, who is deputy director of the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the North Korean Workers’ Party.
Other blacklisted officials include Minister of State Security Kim Won-hong and Director of the General Political Bureau of the Ministry of People's Security Kang Pil-hun. The United States also sanctioned the North Korean Ministry of Labor and State Planning Commission.
Read more
The move followed a recent report by the US State Department on the human rights situation in North Korea, which was branded “among the worst in the world.”
Pyongyang "continues to commit extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrest and detention, forced labor, and torture,” State Department spokesperson Mark Toner said.
“Many of these abuses are committed in the political prison camps, where an estimated 80,000 to 120,000 individuals are detained, including children and family members of those subject to persecution and censorship."
In reply, the KCNA statement said: “The Obama group can hardly have a sound sleep, seized with the extreme uneasiness after facing the undeniable strategic setback. Worse still, they are hit hard by the public. Much upset by this situation, the Obama group have gone so foolish as to kick up the ‘human rights’ racket against the DPRK.”
The outgoing US president “had better repent of the pain and misfortune he has brought to so many Americans and other people of the world,” according to the KCNA. Obama “created the worst human rights situation in the US during his tenure of office,” it added.
US President-elect Donald Trump, who is to take office on Friday, has tweeted that the policy of the Bush and Obama administrations won’t continue, saying that DPRK threats to the US mainland "won't happen." However, he is yet to make clear his policy on the sanctioned state.
North Korea just stated that it is in the final stages of developing a nuclear weapon capable of reaching parts of the U.S. It won't happen! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2017
For many years our country has been divided, angry and untrusting. Many say it will never change, the hatred is too deep. IT WILL CHANGE!!!! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 15, 2017
North Korea claims to have conducted five underground nuclear tests in the past 10 years, which were detected by US intelligence and classified as “blasts.” Pyongyang has also developed medium and long-range missiles said to be |
it must be a free market reform. Similarly, there were vehement denials that the Dodd Frank bill, formally named the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, was a takeover of the financial sector.
Most Americans weren’t paying attention. Others naively bought into these disclaimers. Now, however, many are awakening to the fact that something ominous is descending on America. What’s happening is not what we were promised in 2008. Instead of “Change We Can Believe In,” we got a stealth grab for vast new powers that make a travesty of our Constitution.
These bills shift massive power to the president. Both bills gave the executive branch unbridled authority to write regulations that would determine how these laws affect every American’s healthcare and finances. Both bills created a host of new agencies that for all intents and purposes wield legislative, judicial, and executive authority. Both bills created agencies controlled by the executive branch with no legislative oversight. Both bills established dedicated streams of revenue that could not be interfered with by Congress—or anyone else, for that matter.
Americans saw the raw execution of this new power in the mandate that charitable institutions affiliated with a religion must provide employee health insurance offering free contraceptives, including morning-after pills. The administration has purported to walk-back this haughty mandate, but the fix is a non-fix. If someone believes health insurance companies will not bury the cost of free contraceptive into their fee structure, then that person is not competent to run a free market economy.
The robo-signing settlement is a blatant example of Chicago style politics. Banks were buried in foreclosures, and to move the mountains of paper, employees were not reading what they signed. Most of us have bought property, and we’re aware that there are inches of boilerplate that make no sense even when read in good faith. This was a technical breach of law, but not consequential. To date, no one has surfaced who was thrown out of their home because of faulty paperwork. This technicality was seized upon by foreclosure lawyers who wanted to slow down the process. If they could get every page read, foreclosures would grind to a crawl. Then a light bulb went on: with the demonization of banks, it should also be easy to squeeze a large fine from these institutions.
Twenty-five billion dollars is a big stack of cash. Why did banks pay so much for a minor offense? Now comes the interesting part for those who want to understand how this administration works. Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray was the one who had the light bulb go off in his head, and he led the attorneys general in this extortion scheme. Except the banks stalled, delayed, and dragged their feet.
Next, Cordray was nominated by Obama to head the Consumer Financial Protection Board, which was created by the Dodd Frank bill. Because he had politicized his prior office, Cordray could not gain approval in the Senate. No problem. Obama made an infamous recess appointment. Except that the Senate was not officially in recess. Senators wailed and/or whined, but Cordray settled into the executive chair in his unassailable agency—an agency with a guaranteed rake-off from the earnings of the Federal Reserve Board and absolute power to write banking regulations. Bankers looked aghast at their worst enemy controlling their business practices and coughed up tribute of $25 billion.
This is not unique. Several agencies under the Patient Protection and Affordability Act also have absolute regulatory power and independent financing that no one can touch. This administration understands that they do not need legal ownership to extort assets from private enterprises or to dictate that churches go against their strongest held beliefs. They only need control: Control through regulations and exorbitant fines.
Many say the contraceptive mandate was a blunder by the White House … perhaps not. If the Catholic Church withdrew from healthcare and education, the country would become even further dependent on federal largess.
Yesteryear, highwaymen used to demand your money or your life. Obama wants both.Host Frank Stasio talks with comedians Cliff Cash and Tom Simmons.
Comedians Cliff Cash, Tom Simmons and Stewart Huff are tired of seeing negative stereotypes plague their Southern identity. The trio of comedians use stand-up to push against these stereotypes and offer different perspectives outside what is seen on shows like "Duck Dynasty." They tackle topics like gay rights, religion and gun control.
Host Frank Stasio talks with Cash and Simmons about embodying their identity as Southern comedians. The trio performs at Bourgie Nights in Wilmington on Friday, June 17 at 9:30 p.m. and Saturday, June 18 at 9:30 p.m., at the Idiot Box Comedy Club in Greensboro on Friday, June 24 at 8 p.m. and at The Millroom in Asheville on Saturday, June 25 at 8 p.m.Paul Adey will not return behind the bench next season for the Stena Line Belfast Giants. Adey and General Manager Todd Kelman failed to come to an agreement for next season and mutually decided to part ways.
“Paul has done a great job for us this year. He won a league title and advanced to the finals for the other 2 major titles,” said Kelman.
Adey led the Giants to the Elite League title for the second time in three seasons. He also advanced to the final of the Challenge Cup and ended his season with the overtime loss in the Playoff Championship game last Sunday against the Sheffield Steelers.
Adey was named the seventh head coach in franchise history just 12 months ago. His efforts this season saw him deservedly named “Coach of the Year” by both the Elite League and the UK Ice Hockey Journalists.
“On behalf of the Belfast Giants players and staff and the entire organisation that we are a part of, I want to thank him for his work and for playing a big part in what we accomplished together as a team this past season. I wish him well for wherever he ends up next season,” concluded Kelman.
For the Giants, the search for a new head coach starts immediately.Every day, we are bombarded with ads telling us that we need top-of-the-line makeup to look beautiful, and anything less is unacceptable. But is this stigma surrounding low-end cosmetics really deserved? These millions of women decided to find out in a totally interesting way: They tried using cheap drugstore makeup for their entire lives.
Wow. What an absolutely incredible social experiment.
Ranging in age from 11 to 63, these millions of women have been walking into their local CVS or Walgreens, selecting some budget eyeliner, mascara, and lipstick straight off the shelves, and using those items as their exclusive sources of makeup. What makes this even more amazing is that unlike most social experiments, which only last a week or so, these millions of women showed complete dedication by being willing to spend their entire adult lives using these non-name-brand foundations and concealers. Incredibly, at no point over the decades that they’ve been illuminating how the cosmetics industry manipulates the way we view ourselves did these brave social experimenters drop more than $100 at Ulta to try out a new look.
Advertisement
Though it’s hard to imagine how anyone would be comfortable using $6 blush for even seven days, the scores upon scores of women went above and beyond, suffering through makeup hauls that didn’t even top out at $35 for years on end to prove a point about society.
While this undertaking already sounds crazy difficult, it gets even more impressive when you think about the many events that these women attended while wearing drugstore makeup. From job interviews to first dates and even weddings, these millions of women never caved and used an Urban Decay Naked eye-shadow palette or a Kylie Jenner lip kit. They simply toughed it out while contouring their faces with cheap drugstore highlighters and even cheaper drugstore beauty blenders, all in the name of a fascinating social experiment.
Simply amazing. To all the women who have been participating in this eye-opening trial, your point is well-made and totally inspiring. Now go treat yourself with a shopping spree at Bloomingdale’s. You’ve earned it!Michael Vickery
Work on Southeast Asian history
Vickery's research and writings have concentrated on ancient and modern history of Cambodia and Thailand[3] with publications ranging from early history to contextual studies and interpretations of recent and contemporary Cambodia - being one of only a handful scholars, who comprehensively examined regional events during the 1980s.[4]
Vickery essentially contributed to and helped to extend[5] the scholarly debate of the Pre-Angkorian kingdoms,[6] the classic age and the dark ages of Cambodia, introducing and integrating the works of the Cambodian scholars Khin Sok and Mak Phoen by utilizing their alternative view-points.[7] On the basis of volumes of previously non-deciphered epigraphic inscriptions, Vickery elaborated on the fact, that many works of earlier scholars, "...written 20 years ago may be simply refuted by the discovery or the deciphering of a [new] inscription". and further: "To study nowadays Cambodian history with [Georges] Coédès would amount to do geography with Ptolemy".[8]
1984 he published his "carefully researched"[9] book "Cambodia 1975–1982" that covers the years of the Pol Pot era and its immediate aftermath. The work has since become a standard reference text on the Khmer Rouge Canon and Cambodia's Civil War decades before and after.[10]
Although Vickery, as a member of the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars is often labelled a "Marxist" historian[11][12] by some scholars, he is considered to be and regularly cited as a "Cambodia expert"[13] and one of the "leading historians"[14] on Cambodian history.[15]
Vickery in the Bulletin Of Concerned Asian Scholars, Volume 21, 1989:
"My first contribution (1982) to BCAS [Bulletin Of Concerned Asian Scholars] was on CIA falsification of Cambodian statistics. I believe the task of BCAS should be to counter U.S. regime misinformation and mainstream self-censorship, and provide well-researched progressive information on Asia and the Pacific...[sic]"[16]
Vickery contributed a number of columns for the Phnom Penh Post from 1992 to 2007[17] during which time he engaged in political debate.[18] In 2008 it was announced, that he had been working with former Khmer Rouge foreign minister Ieng Sary’s defense team at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, serving as an analyst and historical expert.三菱UFJフィナンシャルグループも参加表明し、名実ともに世界的なプロジェクトとなったブロックチェーングループ。暗号通貨コミュニティにおいて存在感を示すUBSやバークレイズを始めとし、R3Cevが中心となり世界最大クラスの金融機関22行が金融インフラを置き換えるため真剣にブロックチェーン技術を討論する場を設けたことが大きな話題を呼んでいる。
関連ニュース：
R3Cev - プレスリリース
BTCN - クレディ・スイス、JPモルガンら9大銀行がブロックチェーンの共同利用に合意
ここでは、これまでの参加行のブロックチェーンへの取り組みやスタンスについて調べていくことにする。スタンスに関しては参考程度に。
バンク・オブ・アメリカ
バンク・オブ・アメリカは2014年3月にビットコインを用いた低コストで安全な電信送金システムの特許出願を行い、米特許庁により2015年9月に出願公開された。OKCoinやBTCChinaなど、サードパーティの取引所サービスを介して預け入れ資産をビットコインに変換し対象通貨へ再度変換するといった出願内容となっている。また、同社はビットコインが「資産転送上の重要な転換点になる可能性が高い」ともコメントした。
スタンス ビットコイン 強く支持 ブロックチェーン 支持
BNYメロン
BNYメロンは行内のインセンティブシステムとして同社の独自通貨BKCoin（ビットコインのフォーク）を発行し、流通実験を行っている。社員は何かしらの成果を挙げるとBKCoinを付与され、クーポンやドリンク、お菓子などと交換できる。流通経路や利用特性をブロックチェーンを用いて解析し、金融ビジネスへの応用可能性を探る狙いだ。
スタンス ビットコイン 支持 ブロックチェーン 支持
参考：https://btcnews.jp/bny-mellon-start-bitcoin-tech-substantiative-experiments/
バークレイズ
バークレイズはブロックチェーンに最もポジティブな金融機関のひとつだ。今年6月にはスウェーデンのビットコイン企業と提携しビットコインを用いた送金プロトコルの試験運用を開始。また8月の終わりには、ビットコインによる寄付の公式受付に関するアナウンスを行った。同社は現在ビットコイン関連企業3社と独占契約を結び複数の暗号通貨プロジェクトを開始している。
スタンス ビットコイン 支持 ブロックチェーン 支持
参考：https://btcnews.jp/barclays-start-blockchain-pilot-program/
参考：https://btcnews.jp/barclays-accept-bitcoin-for-charity-activity/
BBVA
BBVAは今年1月、アメリカに本拠を置くビットコイン企業CoinbaseのシリーズCラウンドに加わっている。また、7月には「Blockchain Technology: The Ultimate Disruption in the Financial System」と題したブロックチェーンのレポートも執筆・公開した。同社はまたブロックチェーンの金融セクター外への応用にも注目しており、具体例として「デジタル身分証」「投票システム」を挙げた。スマートコントラクトを用い記録された情報に権限を与え必要な情報のみを抽出できるようにすることで、インターネット上の汎用IDとして利用可能になると分析している。
スタンス ビットコイン 支持 ブロックチェーン 支持（特に金融外への応用に強い関心）
参考：https://btcnews.jp/spanish-one-of-the-biggest-bank-practice-a-bitcoin-campaign/
Citi Group
BNYメロンと同様に、シティグループも行内で流通する独自の暗号通貨「Citicoin」を発行し実験しているようだ。マイニングや流通のプロセスを通じて暗号通貨への理解を深めることを狙いとしている。その他にも2つのブロックチェーンプロジェクトも実施中とのこと。また、同社はイギリス政府に対し「独自のデジタル法定通貨を発行すべき」とも打診している。ブロックチェーンという技術的なシフトが起こっている今、紙幣の在り方も変わるべきだと述べられている。
スタンス ビットコイン スタンスなし ブロックチェーン 支持
参考：http://www.coindesk.com/citi-uk-government-should-create-digital-currency/
コモンウェルス
豪コモンウェルス銀行は今年の5月、リップルラボと提携し技術実験を開始。子会社間の送金システムとしてリップルのプロトコルを採用した。同社の最高情報責任者を務めるデビット・ホワイティング氏は、リップルによる「フォワード・ルッキング・レピュテーション」を強化する狙いであると語っている。
スタンス ビットコイン スタンスなし ブロックチェーン 支持
クレディ・スイス
クレディ・スイスは今年の3月、ビットコインに関する基本的な概念や課題についてのスタンスを示す記事を公開した。同社はビットコインを「新時代の始まり」と評したが、多くの課題やトラブル、既得権益と衝突する可能性があることも示唆した。またビットコインによりお金の概念が置き換わる可能性も示唆したが、メインストリームに採用されることは現状では難しいと分析している。同社によればお金の最も重要な要素は「信頼」であり、分散性によって価値を担保する暗号通貨は一般に受け入れがたいものであると説明した。一方で、通貨への信頼が元々無い国々においては普及する可能性があり、また国際送金のようなセクターにおいては採用機会が充分に残されていると述べた。
スタンス ビットコイン 支持 ブロックチェーン 支持
参考：https://www.credit-suisse.com/jp/en/news-and-expertise/economy/articles/news-and-expertise/2015/03/en/bitcoins-money-without-physical-form.html
ドイツ銀行
ドイツ銀行は今年8月、欧州証券市場監督局（ESMA）の調査依頼に対する解答として金融セクターでのブロックチェーンの応用可能性について説明した。ポストトレードプロセスの効率化や、スマートコントラクトによるデリバティブの自動執行システム、アセットレジスタとしての応用など幅広い用途に利用可能だと考えているようだ。同社はブロックチェーンを永続的なインフラストラクチャとして捉えており、しかしながら金融機関で利用するには検証が足りず、時期尚早だと考えている。
スタンス ビットコイン スタンスなし ブロックチェーン 支持
参考：https://btcnews.jp/deutsche-bank-reply-esma-blockchain-technology-disrupt-existing-financial-infrastructure/
ゴールドマン・サックス
ゴールドマン・サックスは昨年より定期的に外部からパートナーを招き、ブロックチェーンの応用可能性について議論を重ねている。また今年2月には最先端技術に関する3部のレポートのひとつのテーマとしてビットコインを取り上げ、今最も熱い「メガトレンド」の技術であると形容した。4月下旬にはアメリカのビットコイン企業CircleのシリーズCに出資している。
スタンス ビットコイン 支持 ブロックチェーン 支持
参考：https://btcnews.jp/circle-raised-50m-dollars-on-series-c/
HSBC
同社のイノベーション部門に所属するクリストフ・シャゾット氏は、今年4月に開催されたSWIFTフォーラムにおいてブロックチェーンの可能性を高く評価するコメントを行った。同氏はブロックチェーンの金融セクターへの応用は可能性の一部であってすべてではないと述べた。しかしながら「ひとつの分散データベースでできることはひとつだけであって、すべてを解決することはできない」と述べた。一方、6月に開催されたSAP金融サービスフォーラムにおいては「注目しているものの、現時点では具体的なアイデアやスタンスを持っているわけではない」と発言している。現在、ブロックチェーンに精通したインターンも募集中だ。
スタンス ビットコイン スタンスなし ブロックチェーン 検討段階
参考：https://btcnews.jp/blockchain-on-swift-forum-2015/
参考：http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/hsbc-tech-innovation-leader-patrick-mang-tight-lipped-bitcoin-1507787
JPモルガン
ジェイミー・ダイモンCEOはビットコインに関して「価値の記録手段としては最悪だ」と一貫してネガティブな姿勢を保っているが、ブロックチェーンには強い関心を示しているようだ。シリコンバレーの関心がブロックチェーンと暗号通貨に向いたことで、同社は技術を理解する必要性を認識したとのこと。
スタンス ビットコイン 強く否定 ブロックチェーン 支持
モルガン・スタンレー
ジェームズ・ゴーマンCEOはビットコインを「あまりにも非現実的」な通貨であると非難したが、2014年3月に暗号通貨技術を利用したマイクロファイナンスに関するイベントを実施。金融セクターへのビットコインの影響力を議論した。
スタンス ビットコイン 否定的 ブロックチェーン 検討段階
三菱UFJフィナンシャルグループ
三菱UFJフィナンシャル・グループはFinTech分野に積極的な姿勢を見せており、 FinTechを題材にしたハッカソンも開催している（三菱東京UFJ銀行主催）。6月19日に行われた最終審査には、バックエンドに暗号通貨技術を採用したポンク株式会社も進出。また同グループ傘下のベンチャーキャピタルである三菱UFJキャピタルは、ビットコイン企業bitFlyerにも出資を行った。
スタンス ビットコイン 不明 ブロックチェーン 不明
参考：http://goodway.co.jp/fip/htdocs/joyv1giz2-3636/
ロイヤル・バンク・オブ・スコットランド
同社は今年の6月、リップルラボと提携し決済システムの実証実験を開始した。現在、銀行システムのIT化に伴う障害により60万のトランザクションが消失しているとの報告があり、これをリップル・プロトコルやブロックチェーンの技術を用い解決したい狙いだ。
スタンス ビットコイン スタンスなし ブロックチェーン 支持
ソシエテ・ジェネラル
ソシエテ・ジェネラルは今年7月、ビットコインやブロックチェーンの技術に精通したスペシャリストの国際インターンの募集を開始した。スマートコントラクトなどのプロトコルの実証実験を繰り返し、プロトタイプの開発に携わる人材の採用に踏み切った形だ。既存の暗号通貨スタートアップとの連携にも積極的な姿勢を見せている。
スタンス ビットコイン 支持 ブロックチェーン 支持
参考：https://btcnews.jp/societe-generale-start-hiring-blockchain-specialist/
UBS
スイスに本拠を置くUBSは、今年の4月にブロックチェーンラボを構えて以来、最先端のプロジェクトを同時並行で大量に行っている。最高情報責任者であるオリバー・バスマン氏によれば、UBSが取り扱っているブロックチェーンプロジェクトは25を超えており、中にはイーサリアムを用いたスマート債権プラットフォームも含まれているとのこと。また、9月には銀行間で管理運用する共有ブロックチェーンである「セトルメントコイン」のプロジェクトに取り組んでいることも発表した。今回R3Cevが中心となり組成されたブロックチェーングループの中心議題のひとつであることは間違いないだろう。
スタンス ビットコイン スタンスなし ブロックチェーン 支持
参考：https://btcnews.jp/ubs-create-innovative-blockchain-platform/
その他
Commerzbank
National Australia Bank
Royal Bank of Canada
SEB
State Street
Toronto-Dominion BankAn anonymous hacker who has exploited an iCloud security flaw that lets anyone unlock a lost or stolen iPhone says Apple contacted him about the matter today, but he deleted the email.
“They have asked me to contact [them] as quickly as possible, but why now?” the hacker, who goes by AquaXetine, said in an email to Cult of Mac. “I’ve already warned Apple couple months ago.” Cult of Mac confirmed that the email did in fact come from Apple.
The hack, which is the first of its kind, bypasses the iCloud security system for locked iOS devices called Activation Lock. By using the free DoulCi site, which appeared to be offline most of the day but is now back up, a locked iOS device can be tricked into thinking it’s talking to Apple’s iCloud servers when connected to a computer.
With iPhone theft accounting for about half the crimes in cities like San Francisco and New York, lawmakers are pushing legislation that requires all smartphones to have built-in kill switches. Activation Lock is Apple’s answer to the problem, a fail-safe introduced in iOS 7 to keep stolen iPhones and iPads from being usable. The system is designed to keep the contents of locked devices unreadable and unable to be erased without the user’s Apple ID.
Just deleted the mail from Apple ;) They are sooooooooo toooo late — AquaXetine (@AquaXetine) May 21, 2014
The hackers responsible for bypassing iCloud and Activation Lock, known by online pseudonyms AquaXetine and MerrukTechnolog, form Team DoulCi (roughly “iCloud” backward).
Their exploit, which they are labeling “the world’s first iCloud Activation Bypass,” involves adding just one line of code to the “hosts” file on a desktop computer. Instructions can be found on the tool’s new website, DoulCi. Dutch publication De Telegraaf first reported news of the hack this morning.
Security researcher and iOS hacker Steven De Franco described the bypass as a “man-in-the-middle attack,” which means that it intercepts traffic going between a device and Apple’s servers. “It seems like it’s a firmware-related bug,” said De Franco in an interview with Cult of Mac. “So it would require a new update [from Apple] to patch it.”
When the hack is used and an iPhone is tricked past Activation Lock, the SIM card becomes unreadable “because they don’t have Apple’s private keys to tell the phone whether it’s unlocked or not,” explained De Franco. The two hackers behind DoulCi have sai they have a fix coming for the SIM block issue.
The DoulCi website says the tool was “built with love for the people to give them a second chance to get there iDevices working again” and is “only for personal use.”
Tweets show that thousands of locked iPhones around the world have been bypassed using the tool just today. Most of the tweets thanking the two hackers come from outside of the U.S, where stolen iOS devices are shipped and sold at a premium on the black market.
In the Philippines, a Twitter user showed six iPhones that were unlocked.
Another satisfied unlocker in Asia tweeted the following:
The hackers claim the project has been a huge success. Earlier today, they posted screenshots of server logs claiming 5,700 devices had been unlocked in just five minutes. Later, they claimed another 10,000 devices had been unlocked. The two hackers say they worked on the exploit for five months and contacted Apple in March. Apple did not respond to Cult of Mac’s requests for comment.About a year ago I decided that I would bottle my sour beers instead of kegging them. I figured I would want to have a variety of sours available to drink at any given time and kegging would mean I’d have to constantly rotate them in and out based on what I want to drink and also worry about line contamination. I started collecting equipment and bottles to make this happen, expecting that I would have bottled some shortly thereafter. I didn’t want just plain old bottles either, I wanted these to look fancy so I opted for corking and caging the bottles with real labels from GrogTag.
As it turns out I just bottled my first sours a few weeks ago, almost a year later, both of which came from AABG club barrel projects. One barrel is a rotating recipe every 6 months, with the most recent batch being a tripel, and until the most recent batch the barrel was allowed to naturally sour – though it did so to varying degrees based on the beers in there. The other is a Lambish (my term for a beer aimed at mimicking a lambic), and we pull and fill that barrel when we feel like the flavour has developed appropriately; the last batch was in for 18 months. I treated about 3 gal of each to a few pounds of Montmorency cherries we picked from a local orchard this year. The cherries were frozen/thawed, and pits were left in. I kept the remaining beer in the kegs I used to transport them, and as they were already in the kegs put some gas on to bring the carb level up to 1.5 vol. Given the age of the beers, I wasn’t sure how active the microbes in it would be, so the extra carbonation for the non-fruited beers seemed like a good insurance policy, despite re-yeasting the beers prior to bottling. I assumed that the fruited sours would allow the yeast enough time to wake up to be useful for bottle conditioning.
I allowed the fruited beer to sit for about 8 weeks before I started the bottling process. I bottled the straight beer in the keg first and not knowing exactly how much beer I had in the kegs I opted for a sugar solution and syringe to add the calculated amount of sugar to each bottle. I then racked the same style cherry beer into the keg and bottled that. There was a bit of a learning curve at first, but it became a much smoother process after a while. All in all it took me 4 nights to bottle all 8-ish gallons of beer. I have a mix of 750 mL and 375 mL bottles at the end of it.
Post Bottling Sour Beer Wrangling
After racking the beers out of the 3 gallon carboys I figured it might be worthwhile to see what else I can extract from the cherries. I had a partial keg of the same tripel I filled the barrel with that I pulled from the keezer to make room for other beers, so instead of putting it back in the keezer I racked what was left into the sour tripel cherry carboy. It didn’t quite fill it all the way up so I topped it off with some of my original sour beer (that will soon be 2 years old), containing a yeast I have discovered to be quite voracious, so I expect it to dry out and change quite a bit.
The cherry Lambish carboy got filled with that same original sour only. The beer I brewed to put in the Lambish barrel back in spring of 2015 is actually the other half of my original sour so it seemed fitting. I also had a sample of Amoretti blackcurrant “compound”, which appears to be a concentrate of some sort consisting mostly of blackcurrants with a little extra sugar and no preservatives. I got the sample specifically for trying in a sour beer and this was as good a time as any to use. Both of these beers will get much longer than the 8 weeks the previous beers did to extract everything and anything they can from the cherries. I also still have about 1 gallon of the straight original sour beer left in a keg that I will should bottle sometime soon.This Sunday, Orlando City will play their final match of the MLS season before the start of the offseason. Head Coach Jason Kreis has sent a clear message to his players-- he wants a win. But as players and coaches alike get ready to look at the offseason, Kreis already knows what he needs of his players next season.
“I think first and foremost you have to have a large group of players willing to give anything. That appreciate winning more, and that really get angry about losing,” Kreis said after training on Thursday. “When we have a higher number of those types of players that are extremely competitive and take a ton of pride in what they do every single day then you have real competition for starting positions every single weekend.”
“They should have the motivation within them to be hungry and to improve their career themselves, and to be part of a winning team,” Kreis continued. “That should mean something. Especially going next year into what’s going to be an absolutely fantastic stadium, with as we know, an absolutely fantastic crowd. We need to begin to represent ourselves and give the fans what they deserve here.”
Lions to Celebrate Camping World Stadium Era with Throwback Game on Sunday Read
While competition is incredibly important heading into next season, Kreis also wants to make sure that his players are comfortable and are having fun when they play. In training last week, Kreis split players into three groups and they played mini-training games. The players were having a blast.
“For me, it’s also important to keep the right mood around the group, to keep people happy. I truly believe that happiness means something,” Kreis said. “I think people perform at their best when they have a certain level of comfort and a certain level of enjoyment about what they’re doing. So, there are days over the year that we’ll always look to for a little bit of fun, mixed in with a bit of competition as well.”
Orlando City will play their final match of the season this Sunday, October 23rd at 4:00pm.COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — The National Junior College Athletic Association says it will relocate its 2017 Division III baseball championships out of Kinston, North Carolina, because of a state law that restricts the rights of LGBT people.
The NJCAA is working on a replacement site for the May tournament. The organization is the latest to pull an event from North Carolina because of House Bill 2, which was signed into law earlier this year by Republican Gov. Pat McCrory. The NBA moved its All-Star game, while the NCAA and Atlantic Coast Conference also moved championship events.
The law requires transgender people to use restrooms at schools and government buildings corresponding to the sex on their birth certificates. It also excludes gender identity and sexual orientation from local and statewide anti-discrimination protections.
© 2016, Associated Press, All Rights Reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
This Story Filed UnderIt has been announced about the departure of Sergey «G» Bragin on the official website of the organization Vega Squadron. The player’s contract expires on December 31 and it has not been extended by the mutual agreement. We will be able to see the renewed rosters of “sharks” at the qualifiers to ESL One in the first days of the upcoming years.
See also: The list of talents for Captains Draft 4.0 was revealed.
Murielle «Kips» Huisman, Vega Squadron Dota 2 coach:
«In the short time that we worked together, G impressed me with his knowledge and resilience. But our efforts as a team only led to meager rewards. While it pains me to see Sergey go, I think that it's the best move for both him and for Vega. I wish him good of luck in his next squad. All the best!»
Sergey spent about 13 months on the Vega Squadron rosters and wasn’t able to help the team to achieve great results. With Sergey, the rosters fought its way to Perfect World Masters, where held the first placeJan and Nelson aren't the typical off-grid couple.
Living off the Grid in British Columbia read more
Announcements, Events & more from Tyee and select partners ‘Punch to the Gut’ Musical on Residential Schools Returns to Vancouver Children of God has been shaped by intense audience reactions, says director Corey Payette.
I have never braved the road to Bamfield, and a visit with these two unique homesteaders seems like the perfect opportunity to pin another flag on our country’s off-grid map. Already 30 kilometres west of Port Alberni and past the last Tim Hortons -- that fact itself a respectable sign of remoteness in Canada -- I come to the realization that the road to Bamfield is probably the main reason why this oddly spelled coastal outpost is not another Tofino. The 80 kilometre slog through active logging roads isn't something anyone should attempt without a good deal of bodily tolerance for constant vibrations, or an all-wheel-drive with high clearance and serviceable suspension. "The road's at its best right now," a local had advised me a few days before the adventure. I guess. I suppose thick banks of dust and flying rocks make it easier to navigate than wintery mud and wind-crushed trees.
Thankfully, the torture-by-shaking eventually ends and gives way to a more pleasing form of mobility. Much of Bamfield -- Bamfield West, to be precise -- is separated from the rest of Vancouver Island by the Bamfield Inlet. Only boats can take you across this very unique Main Street. Many homes situated elsewhere in the area -- from Grappler Inlet to Barkley Sound -- are also off the road grid. For a student of unusual infrastructures such as myself, this is simply paradise. And being so close to British Columbia's most spectacular sandy beach -- little-known Brady's Beach -- soon makes the unpaved odyssey seem worthwhile.
The assignment begins bright and early on the eve of Labour Day. A warm, bright sun is out and a mother bear and her scruffy little cub are my only companions on the low tide shore. I have unwittingly chosen slack hour to make my way to East Bamfield, which is great news for my lemon of a kayak and my sore back. But upon reaching the shore it'll take me another long trek up an overgrown trail -- after an all-too-short drive on beloved pavement -- before I can shake hands with Jan and Nelson.
A few off-grid surprises
Canadian off-gridders come in many varieties. There are those who pinch no pennies to recreate the comforts and conveniences of |
-16.
9. Wolf Blitzer,"U.S. sends Jewish envoys to help deal with Israelis," Cleveland Jewish News, 27 June 1986.
10. Charlotte Sailkowski,"America's Israel Aid Budget Grows," Christian Science Monitor, 30 November 1983, p. 5.
11. Quoted in Paul Findley, They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Ismel's Lobby (Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill & Co., 1985), p. 47.
12. Arthur Liebman, Jews and The Left (New York John Wiley and Sons, 1979), p. 1.
13. Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, Roots of Radicalism: Jews, Christians, and the New Left (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 98.
14. Ibid., p. 80.
15. Review of Roots of Radicalism, in The American Spectator, vol. 16, no. 5 (May 1983), p. 26.
16. Rothman and Lichter, Roots of Radicalism, p. 105.
17. See Findley, They Dare To Speak Out; Cheryl Rubenberg,"The Middle East Lobbies," The Link, vol. 17, no. 1 January-March 1984); Earl D. Huff,"A Study of a Successful Interest Group: The American Zionist Movement," Western Political Science Quarterly, vol. 25 (March 1972), pp. 109-124; Lee O'Brien, American Jewish Organizations and Israel (Washington, D.C.: Institute For Palestine Studies, 1986); Alfred M. Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection II: What Price Peace? (New Brunswick, N.J.: North American,1982): Morrell Heald and Lawrence S. Kaplan, Culture and Diplomacy (New York, 1978).
18. Review of The American House of Saud: The Secret Petrodollar Connection, by Steven Emerson, 11 July 1985, p. 17.
19. Richard Siegel and Carl Rheins, comps. and eds., The Jewish Almanac (New York Bantam, 1980), p. 58.
20. Wilmot Robertson, Chapter 15 of The Dispossessed Majority, "The Jews," (Cape Canaveral, Florida Howard Allen, 1981), pp. 152-201.
21. See the short discussion of Fortune magazine's 1936 report on Jews in America in James J. Martin's, The Man Who Invented Genocide": The Public Career and Consequences of Raphael Lemkin (Torrance, California Institute for Historical Review, 1984), p. 54.
22. Edwin Black, "Owned by Jews, evangelical radio spreads Gospel," Cleveland Jewish News, December 1985, p. 13.
23. Alfred M. Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection II, p. 219.
24. Richard Siegel and Carl Rheins, The Jewish Almanac, p. 99.
25. Stephen D. Isaacs, Jews and American Politics, p. 46.
26. Ibid., p. 46.
27. E. J. Epstein, News From Nowhere (New York: Random House, 1973), pp. 222-23, cited by Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, Roots of Radicalism, p. 97.
28. Muriel Cantor, The Hollywood TV Producer (New York Basic Books, 1971), cited by Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, Roots of Radicalism, p. 97.
29. Particia Erens, The Jew in American Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 28.
30. James Yaffe. The American Jews (New York Random House, 1968), p. 225.
31. Cynthia Dettelback, "'Coming of Age' 54th GA Theme," Cleveland Jewish News, 22 November 1985, p. A4.
32. Ibid., p. A4.
33. Hyman Bookbinder, of the American Jewish Committee, once made a claim to this effect, as quoted in Stephen D. Isaacs, Jews and American Politics, p. 246. Among other things, he said "... But as for Jewish political power -- large P partisan Power -- there is relatively little organized Jewish political Power." Based upon the evidence presented in this essay, I believe that one is justified in rejecting this claim as false. Jews as a group do have political power -- and a lot of it.
34. The view expounded here differs significantly from that of Dr. Robert A. Hall Jr. ("The Persecution of P. G. Wodehouse," The Journal of Historical Review vol. 7, no. 3, Fall 1986, p. 345). Speaking of P. G. Wodehouse, he wrote: "He was very much aware that there are too many individual differences among members of any group to justify judging it en masse." By logical extension, then, there are too many individual differences among members of any group to justify criticizing it en masse. Although there are many individual differences among members of any cultural grouping, this still does not rule out the persistence of general patterns of behavior and thought among individuals of the group, nor characteristics common to the group as a whole. The Jewish historian, Lucy S. Dawidowicz, has made this clear in The War against the Jews: 1933-1945 (New York Bantam, published by arrangement with Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, 1975), p. 464. Jewish behavior during the crises of WW II, she noted, was in large part determined by "... the dominant values of Jewish tradition and culture and a modal national character and personality. National character reflects the enduring formative influences of a people's culture and history. Through the processes of socialization during which the values of the group and patterns of behavior common to all its members are transmitted by family and peers, each individual's uniqueness is modified and seasoned by national characteristics."
35. American Heritage Dictionary, (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston. 1982, 1985), s.v. "anti-Semite."
36. Review of Why the Jews? The Reason for Anti-Semitism, by Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin, The Journal of Historical Review, vol 5, nos. 2, 3, 4, (Winter 1984), pp. 375-77.
37. Yitzhak Santis, "Supporters of Demjanjuk seeking to discredit OSI," Cleveland Jewish News, 3 January 1986, p. 10.
38. For a good discussion on how some Americans are being railroaded, see Peter Carr, Susie Department, Media, KGB Pump U.S. 'Nazimania'," The Spotlight, 2 March 1987, p. 31.
39. David Bird, "State U. Professor in a Dispute on Zionism Stand Is Denied Tenure," New York Times, 18 August 1985.
40. Lee O'Brien, American Jewish Organizations and Israel, p. 219.
41. Dube was made to leave the university. See the source in footnote 39.
42. Alex C. Michalos, Improving Your Reasoning (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Halt 1970), p. 78.
43. United Nations, General Assembly, 2400th Plenary Meeting, 10 November 1975, Resolution 3379 (XXN Determining That Zionism is a Form of Racism; Sami Hadawi, "Who Are the Palestinians?," The Journal of Historical Review, vol. 4, no. 1, (Spring 1983), pp. 43-59; Abdeen Jabara, Zionism and Racism, Arab World Issues, Occasional Papers: No. 3 (Detroit Association of Arab-American Graduates, 1976); Louise Cainkar, ed., Separate and Unequal: The Dynamics of South African and Israeli Rule (Chicago: Palestine Human Rights Campaign, 1985); Regina Sharif, Non-Jewish Zionism: Its Roots in Western History (London Zed Press, 1983); David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East (Faber and Faber, 1977; London Futura Publications, a division of MacDonald & Co., 1978); for a good discussion of the close ideological affinity between National Socialist and Zionist racialism, see Francis R. Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question (Austin University of Texas Press, 1985), pp. 16-21.
44. Douglas Reed, The Controversy of Zion (Torrance, California Noontide Press, 1985), p. 174; Vladimir Begun, "The Accusation of Anti-Semitism," Sputnik, September 1980, p. 31; Dewey M. Beagle, Prophecy and Prediction (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Pryor Pettengill, 1978), pp. 201-02; Fred Reed,"Intimidating the Press in Israeli Washington Post, 28 June 1982; Charles M. Fischbein,"Money Talks to Media, and Media Controls Information," The Spotlight, 22 September 1986, p. 19; see the letter of Dr. Alfred M. Lilienthal, reprinted in Richard V. London, "Author Challenges GOP Lawmaker to Change Attitude on 'USS Liberty'," The Spotlight, 2 February 1987, p. 5; finally see the statements of former Undersecretary of State George W. Ball, the journalist Harold Piety, and Jewish intellectual Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht in Paul Findley, They Dare to Speak Out, pp. 127, 268, 296.
45. Introduction to Logic, 5th ed. (New York Macmillan, 1978), p. 88.
46. Joseph Julian, Social Problems, 3rd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1980), p. 48.
47. "Congress and the Pro-Israel Lobby (Interview)," Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. xv, no. 1 (Autumn 1985), p. 107.
48. Examples and evidence in support of this statement are so numerous, it would be impractical to list it all here. However, the following should suffice to illustrate the point. In reference to the legitimate criticism which Liberty Lobby (a populist institution based in Washington) has consistently advanced throughout the years, a very important ADL official Arnold Forster, has stated the following: "There is more than ample scientific basis... for unequivocally stating that anti-Semitism is a disease, and that its disseminators are just as dangerous [as] any Typhoid Mary." See Liberty Lobby, Conspiracy Against Freedom: A Documentation of One Campaign of the Anti-Defamation League Against Freedom of Speech and Thought in America, ed. Willis A. Carto (Washington, D.C.: Liberty Lobby, 1986), p. 106. Notice how Zionist ideologues deal with revisionist critiques of the "Holocaust." Robert Faurisson has pointed out how Elie Wiesel uses the following terms -- all of which conjure up the idea of mental illness -- in reference to the revisionists: "indecent pamphleteers with morally deranged minds;" "Those hateful and vicious persons;" "it is to take leave of one's senses;" "this entire affair arises from lunacy." See "Revisionism on Trial: Developments in France, 1979-1983," The Journal of Historical Review, vol. 6, no. 2 (Summer 1985), p. 177. L. A. Rollins has uncovered other examples of the same. See "The Holocaust as Sacred Cow," The Journal of Historical Review, vol 4, no. 1 (Spring 1983), pp. 37-38.
49. Palestine Human Rights Campaign (U.S.A.) and Committee Confronting the Iron Fist (Jerusalem), Special Report (Chicago Palestine Human Rights Campaign, 1986); Palestine Human Rights Campaign and American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Report on Israeli Human Rights Practices in the Occupied Territories for 1985 (Chicago: Palestine Human Rights Campaign, n.d.); Washington, D.C.: American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, n.d.); Jan Abu Shakrah, "The Making of a Non-Person," The Link, vol. 19, no. 2, (May-June 1986); Raja Shehadeh, Occupier's Law: Israel and the West Bank (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1985); Israel Shahak,"A Summary of the System of Legal Apartheid Which Is in Force in the Occupied Territories," Palestine Human Rights Newsletter vol. VI, no. 4, July-August 1986), p.9; "Crockett Assails Repression of Palestinians," Palestine Perspectives, October 1985, p.12.
50. "Crockett Assails Repression of Palestinians," Palestine Perspectives, October 1985, p. 12.
51. Review of Occupiers' Law: Israel and the West Bank, by Raja Shehadeh, in "The Making of a Non-Person," The Link, vol. 19, no. 2, (May-June), p.14..
52. David Irving,"On Contemporary History and Historiography," The Journal Historical Review, vol 5, no 2, 3, 4, (Winter 1984), pp. 265-266; David Irving, Uprising! (London Hodder and Stoughton, 1981); R. V. Burks, The Dynamics of Communism in Eastern Europe (Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 163.
53. David Irving, "On Contemporary History and Historiography," p. 266; David Irving, Uprising!, pp. 47-50.
54. "Arlene Gets Serious on Mr. Reagan," The National Jewish Post and Opinion, May 1, 1985, p. 9.
From The Journal of Historical Review, Summer 1988 (Vol. 8, No. 2), pages 185-203.Story highlights Shi Yongxin is known for promoting the Shaolin brand and turning it to multimillion-dollar business
He is accused of being an embezzler and womanizer with illegitimate children -- something he denies
A self-identified Shaolin insider has posted a series of explosive allegations on Chinese social media
Beijing (CNN) The world's most famous kung fu temple is fighting back amid a growing list of scandalous accusations against its controversial abbot.
Established more than 1,500 years ago and home to some 3,000 monks, the Shaolin Monastery in central China is renowned for its age-old tradition of practicing both Zen Buddhism and martial arts.
Since last weekend, however, a self-identified Shaolin insider has posted a series of explosive allegations on Chinese social media, depicting Abbot Shi Yongxin as an embezzler and womanizer with illegitimate children.
Calling himself Shi Zhengyi -- or "interpreting justice" in Chinese -- the accuser included documents dating back to the late 1980s purportedly showing Shi Yongxin being kicked out of Shaolin following theft and other accusations from his own master.
Among other evidence posted online was a birth certificate for one of the abbot's supposed illegitimate children with a mistress, as well as photos of the mother and the child.
Read MoreThis marks the first marriage for Eve, who was born Eve Jeffers in Philadelphia. The two have been together for about four three years and got engaged on Christmas Day last year. He shares four children with an ex-wife.
Eve told E! News on Wednesday that they are "the coolest, sweetest kids" and that she would like to have two of her own with Cooper.
The two spent the past week ''racing'' towards the aisle! Eve and Cooper took part in his annual Gumball 3000 rally. The rapper had said they planned to wed after the international event, which ended on Saturday.
The two told the British fashion website iD-VICE that they had first met at the 2010 event. Cooper said the two have "been together every day since." The Gumball 3000 website dubs Eve the "First Lady of Gumball."
The 3,000-mile rally takes place on public roads and spans across 13 countries. This year's event began in Miami and went through Daytona, Atlanta, Charlotte and New York, where the drivers' vehicles were flown to Scotland. Participants traveled there separately and picked them up to drive through England, including London's Regent Street, a busy shopping destination, and board ferries that would take them to Paris and beautiful, sunny Ibiza, a popular party spot in Europe.
Cooper shared from their trip on his Instagram page many photos and videos, including one of Eve racing in Scotland and shots of David Hasselhoff, star of Baywatch and talking-car show Knight Rider. The rapper also got to relax by the pool and party it up in Ibiza.The Olympia-based Freedom Foundation scored a significant win last month when the Washington attorney general’s office filed a lawsuit against the local SEIU affiliate for failing to disclose $5 million in donations. Now, they’re expanding the fight against Big Labor ahead of the 2018 midterms. We all know labor unions amass significant campaign war chests for elections. Freedom Foundation is trying to lighten the load by curbing union dues from going into the campaign coffers. Unions almost exclusively support Democrats, despite 40 percent of members having conservative political views.
The organization has detailed their goals in the video below, where they proudly tout that 10,000 union members have stopped paying dues as a result of their pro-free market activities. That amounts to $10 million, according to Freedom Foundation. So, the rallying cry is to defund Big Labor. I think all of us on the Right can get behind that, right?Kentucky State Police is investigating a situation that left three people dead and another person injured in an officer-involved shooting.
Photo provided by Kentucky State Police
It happened just after 10 p.m. Friday night in the Savoy community just off U.S. 25W near Williamsburg.
Whitley County Sheriff Colan Harrell confirms to WKYT that the victims are Larry Taylor and his two children, 18-year-old Jessie Taylor and at 13-year-old.
Investigators believe the victims were shot in their beds.
"There was no struggle. They were all shot in the head," Whitley County Sheriff Colan Harrell said.
Sheriff Harrell told WKYT that a relative came over to the home after not hearing from the family. Once learning what had happened, that relative then called 911.
Deputies came to the house and found Taylor's wife, Courtney Taylor.
She had a pitstol in her hand," Sheriff Harrell said.
The sheriff says Taylor pointed the gun at a deputy.
"He repeated put down the weapon, she didn't, and he fired," Sheriff Harrell described.
Courtney Taylor was injured after being shot by a Whitley County sheriff's deputy, according to Harrell. Kentucky State Police say she pointed a gun at the deputy, before she was shot. We're told after two surgeries, she's in stable condition at UK Hospital.
Police say charges will be filed against Courtney Taylor.
Sheriff Harrell says the shooting has been hard on the deputies and people in the community, as they try to wrap their minds around what officials say went down.
"You try to put a place for things in your life, in someone elses life, especailly if they're close to you and this is something that would be hard to do," he said.
Kentucky State Police is continuing the investigation.
The sheriff also tells WKYT that Larry Taylor is the son of former Whitley County judge-executive Jerry Taylor.I have a weird speculation, call it a hunch, that the admittedly “very big” announcement by Iran’s Ahmadenijad might be some type of free energy device. The west is obviously superhyping the most dastardly evil Iranians for enriching Uranium, just look at the blatant charge thrown into the article:
The West suspects Iran’s nuclear program is aimed at producing atomic weapons, a charge Tehran denies.
But could they be using it to develop free energy devices? According to Bill Wood, one of the black swans that could completely rock the world in incredibly short order is the emergence of free energy technology in a country such as Iran. Bill specifically mentioned the Keshe Foundation, an Iranian lead nonprofit working to produce free energy devices which seems possible given the research we know that has been suppressed. If you’re new to this subject, watch Thrive.
CBS NEWS Iran’s very big nuclear announcement.The Eagles host the Niners on Sunday. It isn’t a “must win” game, but it’s pretty darn important. The Eagles need to get back to.500 and they need to build some confidence.
Fans are looking for all kinds of answers. I’ve seen some people calling for Juan Castillo to be fired. Trading for Aaron Curry was a hot topic yesterday. People continue to ask about Lofa Tatupu. Reuben Frank called for the Eagles to give Greg Lloyd a shot at MLB. I actually did a double take on that one.
Right now the Eagles need to focus on playing more like a team. There is no quick fix to this. Watch 2010 tape of Lofa Tatupu. He just can’t run anymore. Aaron Curry seemed to play best in 2009. If you trade for him, are you getting that guy or the one who was benched last week? Lloyd? He struggled with 3rd string RBs in the preseason. If run plays came right at him, Lloyd shut them down. If they went outside or he had to adjust on the move, he struggled big time. I might try him if we faced Brandon Jacobs and Peyton Hillis all year long, but Lloyd vs any athletic RB scares the heck out of me. None of this is the real key to fixing things.
Andy Reid really got on the team Sunday. Nnamdi Asomugha said he was hard on them and let them know just how disappointing that loss was. Reid later told the team that the key to all of this is becoming more of a team. Pick each other up. When the offense turns the ball over, the defense needs to come up with a stop. When the defense allows a score, the offense needs to respond with a score of their own. The STs need to help out in any way they can. Function as a team, as one.
The Eagles were highly dysfunctional in the Buddy Ryan years in large part due to the way the team splintered into groups. That hasn’t been the case under Andy Reid. He’s good at getting all 53 men to be part of one group…the Eagles. Right now that isn’t clicking.
This isn’t a case of egos or blame or problems like that. Group dynamics is a tricky subject. Getting individuals to function as a group isn’t easy even when everyone wants to. You need something to make it work. One of the best ways is the bunker mentality…us against the world.
I’m sure Reid has talked to the team about the fact there are no magical solutions to the problems. Back in 2008 Dallas was going through a rough stretch in the middle of the season. Tony Romo was injured for a couple of weeks and the team was struggling. Jerry Jones responded by trading for WR Roy Williams and I remember Eagles fans saying “They’re going to be unstoppable”.
I wrote then that it was the wrong move and it sent the wrong message to the team.
“I think Jerry Jones erred in making the deal. The Cowboys had enough talent to win the Super Bowl without Roy. They had enough talent last year. Pure talent hasn’t been an issue recently. What the Cowboys lack is intestinal fortitude.”
Later in the column I wrote this:
“My bet is that the Cowboys don’t make it to the Super Bowl, let alone win it. They won’t lack talent. They simply won’t be able to overcome some other team that has a bit more junkyard dog than the ‘Boys. Toughness can outdo talent in the postseason.”
You may recall that the Boys and Eagles met on the final day of the season with a playoff berth on the line. The Eagles had a lot more junkyard dog and won 44-6. Ugly, ugly loss for Jerry and his Boys.
Right after the trade for Roy, Dallas lost to the lowly Rams. Here’s part of what I wrote about that:
“Tough situations call for tough teams. Dallas wasn’t close to tough on Sunday. I talked about the problem with the Roy Williams trade in a recent post. It seems as if Jerry Jones was trying to solve problems by acquiring more talent. The NFL doesn’t work like that. The coaching staff has to get with the players and get them to step up. You overcome adversity with hard work, focus, and leadership. Jerry Jones had great intentions, but I think the Williams deal was a bad move for the 2008 team. It will certainly help when TO moves on in the future. “
I’m happy to report that I was wrong about Roy Williams being the guy to replace TO. Clearly I had not factored in Miles Austin at that juncture. Anyway…my point to bringing up all of this ancient history is to focus on what the 2011 Eagles need to do. Get tough and get together.
Reid will preach this message to his team. He doesn’t want his players looking around for answers. Reid wants them to realize they are the answer. He will challenge them. Some guys will respond, some won’t. That’s how you find out who can handle pressure and who can’t.
Reid will give the players ownership of the situation. And that’s key. You make the players realize that they dug the hole and now they need to get out of it. That can be a great motivational tool. Again, not everyone will buy in, but that’s okay. You need a strong core of people to step forward, to embrace the situation.
Reid has been coach of the Eagles now for 13 years. He knows how to push buttons and try different things to get players going. This is a weird team. There are a bunch of stars and a bunch of young guys. That makes for an odd mixture of personalities. In the past Reid was able to reach his teams and get them on the right path (2005 being the great exception). This is his biggest challenge in a while. I hope he’s able to sell his message and get the players to respond.
The Falcons and Giants punched us in the last couple of weeks. We punched back until the 4th Qtr. Then we went to our corner and watched quietly. Can’t have that anymore. We need 53 guys to come together and show some sense of urgency. We need action. We need results.
Jeremy Maclin needs to catch the 4th down pass. Jamar Chaney needs to tackle Michael Turner in the open field. Shady McCoy needs to lower his head and get a yard when we give him the ball on 4th/1. DRC needs to tackle Ahmad Bradshaw for a loss on 3rd/short. Nnamdi Asomugha needs to break up the pass to Victor Cruz. And so on.
The plays were there to be made and we didn’t do it. The plays will be there in the next 13 weeks. Guys need to step up and get the job done. Forget about help, this is us against the world.
* * * * *
Now, just because Reid is preaching to the players to not expect magical answers to the problems does not mean you stay put across the board. You always look at the lineup and who’s getting it done and who isn’t. Should we make lineup changes? Will they truly help or is this change for the sake of change? If you feel changes will help, make them.
And that’s just what Reid and his staff did. Brian Rolle, aka my long lost son, is now the starting WLB. Nate Allen is taking over for Kurt Coleman.
Obviously I’m ecstatic to see Rolle getting on the field as a starter. He earned it. I thought Casey Matthews was showing progress, but Rolle is ahead of him and just looks like he belongs. Brian isn’t some game changer that will come in an dominate. Here’s what he will do:
* Play at full speed. Matthews was thinking/reacting. Rolle isn’t as hesitant. He’s seeing the field clearer and that allows him to play faster.
* Shed blocks better. Rolle has a leverage advantage. He strikes the blocker with his hands. Matthews had some plays where he was able to move off blocks, but too often was slow in doing so.
* Be there. Rolle has shown a knack for being at the right spot at the right time. Matthews hasn’t. You can’t coach this. Rolle has it…for now.
Rolle gives you a WLB with good speed and power. He is a good tackler. He diagnoses plays well. He’s got excellent closing speed. He has come coverage ability. Yes, he’s undersized, but he doesn’t play that way. Rolle acts like he’s 6’3, 250. He takes on blockers when he needs to. He also knows how to use his size wisely. He’ll move through traffic better than a big LB. He’ll slip blocks when thats the prudent move.
Jamar Chaney gets start number two in the middle. Hopefully a week of practice at the spot will help him bring out the best in his game. He’s still the key to our LB play improving.
I’m very happy to get Nate Allen back in the lineup. I know many people are down on him. I’ve been a big supporter of his for a while. Terrific draft prospect, solid rookie FS. Good ball skills. Okay hitter. Solid tackler. The question with him is his knee. The Eagles brought him back this summer and worked him on and off to see how the knee held up. They decided to sit Nate for a while. He’ll play 50 snaps on Sunday. I don’t know if he’s got 50 plays worth of action so far this year.
Kurt Coleman struggled mightily in the opener and then again last week. I still have hopes for him, but Kurt was getting stuck on blocks too much and also had the missed tackle that led to a TD on Sunday. You cannot have mistakes like that from your Safeties. Mistakes by them lead to TDs or huge plays. Safeties are supposed to clean up messes created by the players in front of them.
Are there any other lineup changes or adjustments to make? I think you stick with Jarrad Page for now. I do think you try and get Jaiquawn Jarrett on the field as a STer to get him some action and see how he responds.
I’m open to benching Moise Fokou at SAM, but I don’t feel strongly about Keenan Clayton or Akeem Jordan. Plus, you want to be careful about making wholesale changes at once. Let Chaney get used to playing with Rolle for a week or two. Fokou has the potential to be a solid OLB. Maybe the new look at LB will bring out the best in him. If not, you work someone else into his spot down the road.
Obviously I leave DL and CB alone.
A few people have suggested mixing in Joselio Hanson in at Safety. I’d stick with Page for now, but I do agree we need to play Hanson more. The Nickel defense has been up and down. See how Hanson can help. He’s our best slot guy. Use him there. At least mix him in so that teams have to consider he could be on their slot receiver.
The offense isn’t safe either. Andy and Marty need to come up with a better set of ideas for the goal line offense. Steve Smith got mixed in last week. How about Clay Harbor and Ronnie Brown this week? Maybe make Brent Celek a key receiver down there. Do something.
Keep tweaking the lineup and schemes until we find the right combination of players and plays.In the hand the controller feels light, and it feels comfortable. It's most similar to the old GameCube controller, really, but much wider and with more buttons. There are four face buttons, a D-pad, dual-analog sliders, start, select, and four more 'round the back: ZL, ZR, L, and R. All fall to hand quite readily, even for gamers with bigger mitts. Looking back at ya is a front-facing camera, and there's a plain plastic stylus tucked in the top, so we're certainly looking at a resistive touch display.
We got hands-on time with a simple game called Shield Pose that is a good demonstration of the gyro and accelerometer aspects of the game. Here you have to fend off a vicious flotilla of pirates who are firing... vicious suction cup arrows at you. You have to swing the controller up and around to catch the arrows from the various ships, but in a curious twist of difficulty you actually have to do it to a very specific beat. So, it's also a rhythm title, and a pretty tricky one at that.
We also played a game called Chase Mii, which is a simple game of tag played with multiple gamers. Up to four players play on the TV, each getting a 3D view at their Mii running through a maze. A fifth character plays on the Wii U controller and has a private view of the locations of all the other players, who are trying to catch him and only have a vague idea of where the main character is thanks to an arrow. It's another simple but fun game that shows the potential here.Finally, there's a title called HD Experience, which is basically just a tech demo showing what Twilight Princess might look like rendered in HD. You can't do much other than control the camera and change from day to night but the graphics are certainly impressive -- much better than the Wii could manage. We're not ready to say we're talking superior graphics to the current competition, the Xbox 360 or the PS3, but it's certainly a big jump forward. And, of course, being able to pump those graphics to either the controller or the TV is a nice touch. Try as we might we couldn't get anyone to spill the beans about the resolution of the touchscreen, but it looks to be 16:9, and we'd guess it's at least 720p.It's interesting that Nintendo chose this year to unveil the controller ahead of the console, a 180 degree twist from the E3 unveil a few years back, where we saw the console first. Does this mean all will be unveiled in Tokyo at TGS in a few months? We'll be there to find out.Zach Honig contributed to this report.An astronaut took this photograph of muddy floodwaters and distributary channels in the northern sector of the Tsiribihina River delta on Madagascar’s west coast. It was taken in April 2015 from the International Space Station.
Delta distributaries (channels and streams) have two morphologies: large and relatively straight or small and highly contorted. In the photo, brown sediment has been stirred up by heavy rains; when it reaches the sea, it is swept north (to the left in this image) by local ocean currents. Clearer blue water is visible to the lower right (south). Over thousands of years, the sediment supplied by the river has been shaped by waves into beach ridges along the shoreline. Those ridges appear as many parallel lines, with each line representing a prior coastline on this fast-changing (geologically speaking) coast. The oldest coastline lies furthest inland.
Four cyclones hit Madagascar in the first four months of 2015. Heavy floods followed a mid-January storm and affected not only the 50 kilometer (31 mile) shoreline of the delta but also the lower 75 kilometers (47 miles) of the river.
Astronaut photograph ISS043-E-101832 was acquired on April 12, 2015, with a Nikon D4 digital camera using a 1150 millimeter lens, and is provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Johnson Space Center. The image was taken by a member of the Expedition 43 crew. The image has been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast, and lens artifacts have been removed. The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory as part of the ISS National Lab to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public, and to make those images freely available on the Internet. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Caption by M. Justin Wilkinson, Texas State University, Jacobs Contract at NASA-JSC.With this column, the Poynter Review Project’s work comes to an end.
After nearly 40 columns reviewing ESPN content across all platforms, we’ll close with lessons learned over 18 months of observing the network’s various media outlets, examining their successes and failures, and investigating how ESPN works (and sometimes doesn’t).
We offer these observations not just as a starting point for the networks’ next ombudsman but also because it’s increasingly ESPN’s own viewers and readers who serve in that role, sharing their links, thoughts and criticism in real time. This is a relatively new phenomenon for ESPN and other media companies, and ESPNers are of two minds about the torrent of discussion, simultaneously appreciating being the center of so much conversation and worrying about a discourse they can’t control.
We hope what we’ve learned will help readers and viewers understand ESPN better, so they can make more informed judgments -- whatever those judgments may be -- about the network’s decisions.
ESPN isn’t a monolith: ESPN’s television presence includes multiple channels -- ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNEWS, ESPN Classic, ESPN Deportes and ESPNU stand alongside the likes of the Longhorn Network, the broadband channel ESPN3 and the many flavors of ESPN International. The same could be said for ESPN’s digital operations: ESPN.com gets most of the attention, but there’s also espnW, Grantland, the quintet of powerful local city sites, and overseas, sport-specific outposts such as ESPNFC.com. And we haven’t even mentioned ESPN The Magazine, ESPN Radio, the company’s 30 for 30 documentaries or the unrelenting waves of information ESPN pushes out to mobile subscribers.
Why should readers and viewers keep this startling breadth in mind? Because we all fall into the trap of thinking about ESPN as a monolithic organization with a |
technical team.
The KGB also distributed a secret personality questionnaire, advising case officers what to look for in a successful recruitment operation. In April 1985 this was updated for “prominent figures in the West.” The directorate’s aim was to draw the target “into some form of collaboration with us.” This could be “as an agent, or confidential or special or unofficial contact.”
The form demanded basic details—name, profession, family situation, and material circumstances. There were other questions, too: what was the likelihood that the “subject could come to power (occupy the post of president or prime minister)”? And an assessment of personality. For example: “Are pride, arrogance, egoism, ambition or vanity among subject’s natural characteristics?”
The most revealing section concerned kompromat. The document asked for: “Compromising information about subject, including illegal acts in financial and commercial affairs, intrigues, speculation, bribes, graft … and exploitation of his position to enrich himself.” Plus “any other information” that would compromise the subject before “the country’s authorities and the general public.” Naturally the KGB could exploit this by threatening “disclosure.”
Finally, “his attitude towards women is also of interest.” The document wanted to know: “Is he in the habit of having affairs with women on the side?”
When did the KGB open a file on Donald Trump? We don’t know, but Eastern Bloc security service records suggest this may have been as early as 1977. That was the year when Trump married Ivana Zelnickova, a twenty-eight-year-old model from Czechoslovakia. Zelnickova was a citizen of a communist country. She was therefore of interest both to the Czech intelligence service, the StB, and to the FBI and CIA.
During the Cold War, Czech spies were known for their professionalism. Czech and Hungarian officers were typically used in espionage actions abroad, especially in the United States and Latin America. They were less obvious than Soviet operatives sent by Moscow.
Zelnickova was born in Zlin, an aircraft manufacturing town in Moravia. Her first marriage was to an Austrian real estate agent. In the early 1970s she moved to Canada, first to Toronto and then to Montreal, to be with a ski instructor boyfriend. Exiting Czechoslovakia during this period was, the files said, “incredibly difficult.” Zelnickova moved to New York. In April 1977 she married Trump.
According to files in Prague, declassified in 2016, Czech spies kept a close eye on the couple in Manhattan. (The agents who undertook this task were code-named Al Jarza and Lubos.) They opened letters sent home by Ivana to her father, Milos, an engineer. Milos was never an agent or asset. But he had a functional relationship with the Czech secret police, who would ask him how his daughter was doing abroad and in return permit her visits home. There was periodic surveillance of the Trump family in the United States. And when Ivana and Donald Trump, Jr., visited Milos in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, further spying, or “cover.”
Like with other Eastern Bloc agencies, the Czechs would have shared their intelligence product with their counterparts in Moscow, the KGB. Trump may have been of interest for several reasons. One, his wife came from Eastern Europe. Two—at a time after 1984 when the Kremlin was experimenting with perestroika, or Communist Party reform—Trump had a prominent profile as a real estate developer and tycoon. According to the Czech files, Ivana mentioned her husband’s growing interest in politics. Might Trump at some stage consider a political career?
The KGB wouldn’t invite someone to Moscow out of altruism. Dignitaries flown to the USSR on expenses-paid trips were typically left-leaning writers or cultural figures. The state would expend hard currency; the visitor would say some nice things about Soviet life; the press would report these remarks, seeing in them a stamp of approval.
Despite Gorbachev’s policy of engagement, he was still a Soviet leader. The KGB continued to view the West with deep suspicion. It carried on with efforts to subvert Western institutions and acquire secret sources, with NATO its No. 1 strategic intelligence target.
At this point it is unclear how the KGB regarded Trump. To become a full KGB agent, a foreigner had to agree to two things. (An “agent” in a Russian or British context was a secret intelligence source.) One was “conspiratorial collaboration.” The other was willingness to take KGB instruction.
According to Andrew and Gordievsky’s book Comrade Kryuchkov’s Instructions, targets who failed to meet these criteria were classified as “confidential contacts.” The Russian word was doveritelnaya svyaz. The aspiration was to turn trusted contacts into full-blown agents, an upper rung of the ladder.
As Kryuchkov explained, KGB residents were urged to abandon “stereotyped methods” of recruitment and use more flexible strategies—if necessary getting their wives or other family members to help.
As Trump tells it, the idea for his first trip to Moscow came after he found himself seated next to the Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin. This was in autumn 1986; the event was a luncheon held by Leonard Lauder, the businessman son of Estée Lauder. Dubinin’s daughter Natalia “had read about Trump Tower and knew all about it,” Trump said in his 1987 bestseller, The Art of the Deal.
Trump continued: “One thing led to another, and now I’m talking about building a large luxury hotel, across the street from the Kremlin, in partnership with the Soviet government.”
Trump’s chatty version of events is incomplete. According to Natalia Dubinina, the actual story involved a more determined effort by the Soviet government to seek out Trump. In February 1985 Kryuchkov complained again about “the lack of appreciable results of recruitment against the Americans in most Residencies.” The ambassador arrived in New York in March 1986. His original job was Soviet ambassador to the U.N.; his daughter Dubinina was already living in the city with her family, and she was part of the Soviet U.N. delegation.
Dubinin wouldn’t have answered to the KGB. And his role wasn’t formally an intelligence one. But he would have had close contacts with the power apparatus in Moscow. He enjoyed greater trust than other, lesser ambassadors.
Dubinina said she picked up her father at the airport. It was his first time in New York City. She took him on a tour. The first building they saw was Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, she told Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper. Dubinin was so excited he decided to go inside to meet the building’s owner. They got into the elevator. At the top, Dubinina said, they met Trump.
The ambassador—“fluent in English and a brilliant master of negotiations”—charmed the busy Trump, telling him: “The first thing I saw in the city is your tower!”
Dubinina said: “Trump melted at once. He is an emotional person, somewhat impulsive. He needs recognition. And, of course, when he gets it he likes it. My father’s visit worked on him [Trump] like honey to a bee.”
This encounter happened six months before the Estée Lauder lunch. In Dubinina’s account she admits her father was trying to hook Trump. The man from Moscow wasn’t a wide-eyed rube but a veteran diplomat who served in France and Spain, and translated for Nikita Khrushchev when he met with Charles de Gaulle at the Elysée Palace in Paris. He had seen plenty of impressive buildings. Weeks after his first Trump meeting, Dubinin was named Soviet ambassador to Washington.
Dubinina’s own role is interesting. According to a foreign intelligence archive smuggled to the West, the Soviet mission to the U.N. was a haven for the KGB and GRU (Soviet military intelligence). Many of the 300 Soviet nationals employed at the U.N. secretariat were Soviet intelligence officers working undercover, including as personal assistants to secretary-generals. The Soviet U.N. delegation had greater success in finding agents and gaining political intelligence than the KGB’s New York residency.
Dubinin’s other daughter, Irina, said that her late father—he died in 2013—was on a mission as ambassador. This was, she said, to make contact with America’s business elite. For sure, Gorbachev’s Politburo was interested in understanding capitalism. But Dubinin’s invitation to Trump to visit Moscow looks like a classic cultivation exercise, which would have had the KGB’s full support and approval.
In The Art of the Deal, Trump writes: “In January 1987, I got a letter from Yuri Dubinin, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, that began: ‘It is a pleasure for me to relay some good news from Moscow.’ It went on to say that the leading Soviet state agency for international tourism, Goscomintourist, had expressed interest in pursuing a joint venture to construct and manage a hotel in Moscow.”
There were many ambitious real estate developers in the United States—why had Moscow picked Trump?
According to Viktor Suvorov—a former GRU military spy—and others, the KGB ran Intourist, the agency to which Trump referred. It functioned as a subsidiary KGB branch. Initiated in 1929 by Stalin, Intourist was the Soviet Union’s official state travel agency. Its job was to vet and monitor all foreigners coming into the Soviet Union. “In my time it was KGB,” Suvorov said. “They gave permission for people to visit.” The KGB’s first and second directorates routinely received lists of prospective visitors to the country based on their visa applications.
As a GRU operative, Suvorov was personally involved in recruitment, albeit for a rival service to the KGB. Soviet spy agencies were always interested in cultivating “young ambitious people,” he said—an upwardly mobile businessman, a scientist, a “guy with a future.”
Once in Moscow, they would receive lavish hospitality. “Everything is free. There are good parties with nice girls. It could be a sauna and girls and who knows what else.” The hotel rooms or villa were under “24-hour control,” with “security cameras and so on,” Suvorov said. “The interest is only one. To collect some information and keep that information about him for the future.”
These dirty-tricks operations were all about the long term, Suvorov said. The KGB would expend effort on visiting students from the developing world, not least Africa. After 10 or 20 years, some of them would be “nobody.” But others would have risen to positions of influence in their own countries.
Suvorov explained: “It’s at this point you say: ‘Knock, knock! Do you remember the marvelous time in Moscow? It was a wonderful evening. You were so drunk. You don’t remember? We just show you something for your good memory.’”
Over in the communist German Democratic Republic, one of Kryuchkov’s 34-year-old officers—one Vladimir Putin—was busy trying to recruit students from Latin America. Putin arrived in Dresden in August 1985, together with his pregnant wife, Lyudmila, and one-year-old daughter, Maria. They lived in a KGB apartment block.
According to the writer Masha Gessen, one of Putin’s tasks was to try to befriend foreigners studying at the Dresden University of Technology. The hope was that, if recruited, the Latin Americans might work in the United States as undercover agents, reporting back to the Center. Putin set about this together with two KGB colleagues and a retired Dresden policeman.
New Window From COLLUSION: SECRET MEETINGS, DIRTY MONEY, AND HOW RUSSIA HELPED DONALD TRUMP WIN, by Luke Harding
Precisely what Putin did while working for the KGB’s First Directorate in Dresden is unknown. It may have included trying to recruit Westerners visiting Dresden on business and East Germans with relatives in the West. Putin’s efforts, Gessen suggests, were mostly a failure. He did manage to recruit a Colombian student. Overall his operational results were modest.
By January 1987, Trump was closer to the “prominent person” status of Kryuchkov’s note. Dubinin deemed Trump interesting enough to arrange his trip to Moscow. Another thirtysomething U.S.-based Soviet diplomat, Vitaly Churkin—the future U.N. ambassador—helped put it together. On July 4, 1987, Trump flew to Moscow for the first time, together with Ivana and Lisa Calandra, Ivana’s Italian-American assistant.
Moscow was, Trump wrote, “an extraordinary experience.” The Trumps stayed in Lenin’s suite at the National Hotel, at the bottom of Tverskaya Street, near Red Square. Seventy years earlier, in October 1917, Lenin and his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, had spent a week in room 107. The hotel was linked to the glass-and-concrete Intourist complex next door and was— in effect—under KGB control. The Lenin suite would have been bugged.
Meanwhile, the mausoleum containing the Bolshevik leader’s embalmed corpse was a short walk away. Other Soviet leaders were interred beneath the Kremlin’s wall in a communist pantheon: Stalin, Brezhnev, Andropov—Kryuchkov’s old mentor—and Dzerzhinsky.
According to The Art of the Deal, Trump toured “a half dozen potential sites for a hotel, including several near Red Square.” “I was impressed with the ambition of Soviet officials to make a deal,” he writes. He also visited Leningrad, later St. Petersburg. A photo shows Donald and Ivana standing in Palace Square—he in a suit, she in a red polka dot blouse with a string of pearls. Behind them are the Winter Palace and the state Hermitage museum.
That July the Soviet press wrote enthusiastically about the visit of a foreign celebrity. This was Gabriel García Márquez, the Nobel Prize–winning novelist and journalist. Pravda featured a long conversation between the Colombian guest and Gorbachev. García Márquez spoke of how South Americans, himself included, sympathized with socialism and the USSR. Moscow brought García Márquez over for a film festival.
Trump’s visit appears to have attracted less attention. There is no mention of him in Moscow’s Russian State Library newspaper archive. (Either his visit went unreported or any articles featuring it have been quietly removed.) Press clippings do record a visit by a West German official and an Indian cultural festival.
The KGB’s private dossier on Trump, by contrast, would have gotten larger. The agency’s multipage profile would have been enriched with fresh material, including anything gleaned via eavesdropping.
Nothing came of the trip—at least nothing in terms of business opportunities inside Russia. This pattern of failure would be repeated in Trump’s subsequent trips to Moscow. But Trump flew back to New York with a new sense of strategic direction. For the first time he gave serious indications that he was considering a career in politics. Not as mayor or governor or senator.
Trump was thinking about running for president.[xmonad] ANNOUNCE: xmonad 0.7 released
http://xmonad.org The xmonad dev team is pleased to announce xmonad 0.7! The headlines: The 0.7 release of xmonad provides several improvements over 0.6, including improved integration with GNOME, more flexible "rules", various stability fixes, and of course, many new and interesting features in the extension library (general support for window decorations, utf8 support, scratch pad terminals, pointer control) and more! New GNOME support: Active, automated support for GNOME utilities. We know our users often like to use GNOME menus, tools and status bars, and we'd like to announce that xmonad actively supports GNOME! Extensions for communicating with and utilising gnome utilities come in the library suite, as well as extensive documentation and support. For more information see the GNOME/xmonad integration page on the wiki. A period of active development: In the past year, the xmonad development team received contributions from over 60 developers, making xmonad one of the largest window manager development teams around, and dwarfing other tiling window manager projects. Yet, at the same time, the core code base remains at around 1000 lines of code, with another 7000 lines in the extension library -- a significant achievment! Change logs: http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Notable_changes_since_0.6 http://xmonad.org/changelog-0.7.txt http://xmonad.org/changelog-xmc-0.7.txt About: xmonad is a tiling window manager for X. Windows are arranged automatically to tile the screen without gaps or overlap, maximising screen use. Window manager features are accessible from the keyboard: a mouse is optional. xmonad is extensible in Haskell, allowing for powerful customisation. Custom layout algorithms, key bindings and other extensions may be written by the user in config files. Layouts are applied dynamically, and different layouts may be used on each workspace. Xinerama is fully supported, allowing windows to be tiled on several physical screens. Features: * Very stable, fast, small and simple. * Automatic window tiling and management * First class keyboard support: a mouse is unnecessary * Full support for tiling windows on multi-head displays * Full support for floating, tabbing and decorated windows * Full support for Gnome and KDE utilities * XRandR support to rotate, add or remove monitors * Per-workspace layout algorithms * Per-screens custom status bars * Compositing support * Powerful, stable customisation and reconfiguration * Large extension library * Excellent, extensive documentation * Large, active development team, support and community Get it! Information, screenshots, documentation, tutorials and community resources are available from the xmonad home page: http://xmonad.org The 0.7 release, and its dependencies, are available from hackage.haskell.org: http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/xmonad xmonad packages are available in the package systems of at least: Debian, Gentoo, Arch, Ubuntu, OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Gobo, NixOS, Source Mage, Slackware and 0.7 packages will appear in coming days (some are already available). On the fly updating to xmonad 0.7 is supported. You should be able to upgrade to xmonad 0.7 from 0.6 and earlier, transparently, without losing your session. Load the new code with mod-q and enjoy. Extensions: xmonad comes with a huge library of extensions (now more than 7 times the size of xmonad itself), contributed by viewers like you. Extensions enable pretty much arbitrary window manager behaviour to be implemented by users, in Haskell, in the config files. For more information on using and writing extensions see the webpage. The library of extensions is available from hackage: http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/xmonad-contrib Full documentation for using and writing your own extensions: http://xmonad.org/contrib.html This release brought to you by the xmonad dev team: Spencer Janssen Don Stewart Jason Creighton David Roundy Brent Yorgey Devin Mullins Braden Shepherdson Roman Cheplyaka Lucas Mai Featuring code contributions from over 60 developers: Aaron Denney Adam Vogt Alec Berryman Alex Tarkovsky Alexandre Buisse Andrea Rossato Austin Seipp Bas van Dijk Ben Voui Brandon Allbery Chris Mears Christian Thiemann Clemens Fruhwirth Daniel Neri Daniel Wagner Dave Harrison David Glasser David Lazar Dmitry Kurochkin Dominik Bruhn Dougal Stanton Eric Mertens Ferenc Wagner Gwern Branwen Hans Philipp Annen Ivan Tarasov Jamie Webb Jeremy Apthorp Joachim Breitner Joachim Fasting Joe Thornber Joel Suovaniemi Juraj Hercek Justin Bogner Kai Grossjohann Karsten Schoelzel Klaus Weidner Mathias Stearn Mats Jansborg Matsuyama Tomohiro Michael Fellinger Michael Sloan Miikka Koskinen Neil Mitchell Nelson Elhage Nick Burlett Nicolas Pouillard Nils Anders Danielsson Peter De Wachter Robert Marlow Sam Hughes Shachaf Ben-Kiki Shae Erisson Simon Peyton Jones Stefan O'Rear Tom Rauchenwald Valery V. Vorotyntsev Will Farrington Yaakov Nemoy timthelion As well as the support of many others on the #xmonad and #haskell IRC channels, and the wider Haskell and window manager communities. Thanks to everyone for their support!Oct. 13, 2017, 4:29 PM GMT / Updated Oct. 13, 2017, 4:29 PM GMT By Catherine Chapman
Anastasia-Eva Domani was assigned male at birth but always enjoyed donning women’s stockings, high heels and makeup — secretive acts that were considered more or less a fetish when growing up in Ukraine under the Soviet Union. While living as a man, Domani, now 38, married and had a child. But last October, she decided to begin hormone treatment and her transition.
“I still have a passport and all the other documents for Oleksandr’s name,” she told NBC News, using her former name. “I will change it. But this is a complex process.”
"Forcing anyone to have surgery that they don't want or need is absolutely unconscionable.” Dr. Jamison Green
Changing gender on legal documentation in Ukraine — such as a passport — has long been considered one of the most repressive policies found in any European country, due to its required procedures involving psychiatric diagnosis and forced sterilization.
When Domani, for example, wants to change her passport from male to female, she must first be labeled with a mental disorder and then undergo gender reassignment surgery, leaving her with effectively no control over how she identifies, but putting this decision to a number of doctors and politicians who have a binary definition of gender.
“When a transgender woman enters the hospital, she is identified in the ward according to her ‘male’ passport,” Domani said. “This causes a sense of gender dysphoria and shyness. It is very difficult to explain to the head physician your gender identity, especially if the doctor received medical education in Soviet times.”
Stereotypical gender roles engrained within society mean that a transgender person must embody the behavioral traits of the gender they wish to transition to — a transgender man should be perceived as what is understood as masculine and a transgender woman as feminine, essentially.
People like Domani are often refused legal gender recognition if they do not adhere to these principles, which is inclusive of a change of physical body parts and an implied heterosexual orientation.
“A medical practitioner sometimes doesn’t like lesbian and gay people, but they can support trans people if they are heterosexual,” said Natallia Mankouskaya, 29, an LGBTQ activist in Belarus. “They don’t understand that trans people can be lesbian or gay as well. One of the main problems are these stereotypical gender roles, the second would be the medical system.”
About 2,000 representatives of the LGBTQ community of Ukraine and its supporters guarded by thousand of policemen walk with the Kiev Pride March in Kiev, Ukraine, on June 18, 2017. (Photo by Sergii Kharchenko/NurPhoto via Getty Images) Sergii Kharchenko / NurPhoto via Getty Images
Amnesty International estimates there are approximately 1.5 million transgender people living in the European Union (EU), and, across the continent, restrictive roadblocks to legal gender change is paired with high levels of transphobia and gender inequality throughout medical sectors. Poor visibility of transgender communities also contributes to a lack of understanding of a transgender person’s needs.
According to a 2008 EU-wide study by the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) and Transgender Europe, only 30 percent of transgender respondents experienced a health care practitioner who was responsive when surgical or hormonal treatment was requested. The majority of the 1,964 surveyed said they were denied state funding for hormone therapy or primary surgeries.
“If you happen to be someone like Caitlyn Jenner, who has money, then you can do whatever you want with your life,” said Dr Jamison Green, a former president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). “But if you’re not in that position, then you’re going to need help from some system, and if you want medical care, it needs to be the medical system.”
Traditional medical models for transgender health globally share two predominate conditions: mandatory sterilization and a mental illness diagnosis.
“First of all, forcing anyone to have surgery that they don't want or need is absolutely unconscionable,” said Dr Green, 68. “Secondly, we don’t prescribe what everyone’s genitals have to look like, why do we have to do that for trans people?”
WPATH was established in 1979 to create better access to health care and new standards of treatment for transgender patients, many of whom turn to unsafe black market treatments when medical systems fail them.
In 2010, the nonprofit organization released a statement outwardly against sterilization, urging countries to remove any surgical procedures as requirement for legal gender recognition. Earlier this year, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) agreed with them, ruling that forced state sterilization was in violation of human rights.
“It’s taken decades to get to this decision of the court,” said Sophie Aujean, policy officer at ILGA Europe, who works with LGBTQ advocates on a national level to improve health legislation.
“We see more and more countries that are actually changing their laws, and that there’s a clear divide between Eastern and Western Europe, with some exceptions. Changing this legislation is not necessarily something that will bring you a lot of support from the general population.”
A photo from the ILGA-Europe Annual Conference in Nicosia, Cyprus. ILGA-Europe
The ECHR ruling is expected to work toward ridding forced sterilization in the 20 European countries where it is still practiced, which ILGA and Transgender Europe list as: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Finland, Georgia, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Montenegro, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland and Turkey.
But, as Aujean points out, decisions by the ECHR are not as binding as national legislation or an EU directive.
“There’s still a lot of room for improvement,” she said. “Another big battle is the diagnosis of a mental disorder, which is extremely pathologizing for trans people. This is essentially labeling a whole population as having a mental health issue.”
ILGA and Transgender Europe state that 36 countries in Europe require a mental health diagnosis for legal gender recognition change and access to health care, a stigmatizing classification that rests on the notion that a transgender person has something inexplicably wrong with them. Legislation like this trickles down, mirroring societal attitudes toward transgender communities.
“In small towns and villages, where the population knows practically nothing about transgender people, everyone considers us perverts and mentally ill people trying to oppose the church and family values,” Domani said. “So the destruction of gender stereotypes is slower than we would like — before you sit on a two-wheeled bike, you need to learn how to ride a three-wheeled.”
Next year, the World Health Organization will meet to revise its International Classification of Diseases, where LGBTQ advocates hope to see the depathologization of trans people.
At the end of 2016, Ukraine changed its controversial legal gender recognition policy, but worrying conditions, including surgery, still remain. The legislation is currently undergoing revision.
FOLLOW NBC OUT ON TWITTER, FACEBOOK AND INSTAGRAM.By Wayne Rowe, World Hunger-Tangible Love Team member
Our congregation in Kasompe, Zambia, is at the heart of the community, serving 200 households and 1,400 people. Access to clean water often has been difficult.
A few households have shallow wells near their homes. Unfortunately, during the dry season these shallow wells dry up. The only other source of water for the community is the nearest river—a three-mile walk.
An average family in Kasompe needs at least five gallons of water daily for drinking, washing, and cooking. Women and children walk the dusty road to the river, sometimes twice a day. However, river water can be contaminated, and children often become sick.
The church provided a Tangible Love grant to the Kasompe Congregation, allowing people to drill a deep borehole, or well, near the church. Fresh, clean water now is accessible not only to the congregation, but to the wider community.
“We are so grateful that Tangible Love has given us this pump because water was very difficult for us,” said Temwani, a Community of Christ member and Kasompe resident. “Now we are giving thanks because it is so much nearer and cleaner.”
AdvertisementsThe car industry is in the throes of a once-in-a-lifetime disruption towards electric vehicles, but traditional car companies—like General Motors—are, in my opinion, out of position. It’s a classic innovator’s dilemma. Instead of using capital to invest in the future (i.e. Gigafactories), it’s my belief that GM is squandering shareholder cash by buying back company stock.
The numbers tell the story: In the five years from 2012 to 2016, GM spent $16.8 billion on stock buybacks. Just to give you some perspective, that cash represents 30 percent of the value of the company, assuming GM’s current market cap of $56 billion. Meanwhile, Tesla is investing $5 billion to build the Gigafactory, which will dramatically lower the price of electric vehicle batteries, and help Tesla produce their Model 3 at scale. (Disclosure: We own shares in Tesla.)
By 2020, Elon Musk says, Tesla will have the ability to produce up to one million electric vehicles per year.
Investors, take note. This is how the story plays out in a disrupted vertical. A young upstart emerges on the scene, on an epic mission and willing to risk it all in an effort to produce an incredible value proposition. Meanwhile, the old guard—in this case GM -- plays protect and defend. And how do they do that? Buybacks.
Buybacks may have inflated the GM’s short-term value by boosting the company’s per share earnings, but the buybacks did nothing to invest in the company’s future. In GM’s 2016 proxy, CEO Marry Barra wrote that the company’s strong performance “enabled us to reinvest in our business...” But “importantly,” she added, “it also enabled us to increase shareholder returns through dividends and our expanded share repurchase program.”
In the same letter, Barra also trumpeted the introduction of the company’s first all-electric vehicle, the Chevrolet Bolt. It’s certainly an impressive vehicle that’s generating positive reviews. But while Barra publicly touts the importance of innovation, renewable energies, and the Bolt—which has its batteries and most of its parts reportedly made in South Korea—I think it’s lip service.
In reality, I don’t see how GM isn’t making a meaningful strategic pivot to electric, especially compared to Tesla. Why?
By March 2017, GM sold a little over 2,000 Bolts, which retail around $37,000. By way of comparison, Tesla has delivered “over 183,000 Model S and X vehicles over the last four years,” according to Electrek. And then there’s the Model 3. Tesla has received over 400,000 customer deposits for its Model 3, which is priced at $35,000.
The future is indeed electric, but if manufacturers refuse to face the music, they may not be around for much longer. Bloomberg New Energy Finance, for instance, predicts that by 2040 the electric vehicle market will hit 41 million cars sold, “representing 35% of new light duty vehicle sales.”
To get there, the auto industry will need to re-tool its manufacturing in order to create a steady source of cheap, reliable lithium-ion batteries. That’s where the Gigafactory comes in. As strategy professor Howard Yu writes: “By producing batteries at a scale far exceeding the current capacity of today’s global supply chain, the Gigafactory is set to drive down the production cost to a level the world has yet to see.”
Now, let’s go back to GM’s buybacks. With $16.8 billion, GM could have built three Gigafactories and given Tesla a run for their money, not to mention providing tens of thousands of jobs, securing a vital source of their supply chain for decades, and, most importantly, helping to usher in the next generation of electric vehicles. But they didn’t.
This is big deal for the investors who can recognize the opportunity. We’ve already seen this story play out in disruptions in other verticals, such as retail and cloud. Here we go again, only this time it’s a revolution that will not only rock the car industry’s world -- it appears destined to turn the energy industry upside down too. As Musk has stated over and over again, Tesla’s “Master Plan” isn’t just to build cars -- it’s to completely disrupt the energy industry with renewables.
As an investor, you don’t get these sorts of opportunities very often, where a wealth pie that measures in the trillions (if you include the energy complex) gets divided up anew. It’s healthy for consumers, and it’s healthy for the economy, when you rip out the old and bring in the new.
This is what makes a disrupted vertical so unimaginably fun to watch and to invest in: We can’t know for sure how it will play out. In the early days of a disrupted vertical, you can’t identify all of the players. Nor can we define the boundaries of a disrupted vertical. Nor do we yet know the rules, which are still evolving: How much of driving will be automated? Will people continue to own cars, or will it be pay-as-you-go? Will human drivers be allowed on roads in 2030?
To be sure, the road to electric is not without its challenges. As Tesla makes clear in its recent 10-k, the company could potentially face future product delays, unanticipated costs, and competition from other automakers. The company's future growth also depends on the willingness of consumers to adopt electric vehicles.
Ultimately, the Gigafactory exemplifies a possible long-term value creation for Tesla. The investment won’t pay off in terms of operating results for a few years, so you likely won’t see an immediate boost to Tesla’s income statement. But, you do see something else happening: Tesla is creating interest for Gigafactories all over the world.
Officials in Denmark and Cyprus, for instance, have openly propositioned Tesla to build their next Gigafactory in their home countries. Portugal, too. As Deutsche Welle, Germany’s international broadcaster reported in December 2016, “Euphoria has nevertheless gripped many Portuguese over a possible Tesla investment. There’s even a Facebook group called “Bring Tesla Gigafactory to Portugal.”
So while Tesla is playing the long game, GM is focused on the short term.
Now, it is true that there were activist investors that were agitating for the buyback in 2015. But those investors represented hedge funds who were looking for a short-term boost in the stock. To be clear, though, there was hardly universal support for the buybacks. Warren Buffet, for instance, publicly advised GM against the buybacks, saying in 2015 that "the idea of doing something now that will get a little pop in the stock" shouldn't be part of the GM plan.
GM also has a massive shareholder base, and the interests of hedge funds who seek to profit from short-term fluctuations in the stock price shouldn't be confused with the thousands of other shareholders (especially pension funds) who are looking for long-term value, and who never specifically asked for the buybacks.
General Motors is saying they’re making a commitment to electric cars, but when I take a deeper look, I believe they have other priorities. GM executives seem more intent on making their quarterly numbers than in leading a revolution.
Just a few years after taking a government bailout and getting booted from the Dow Jones Average after an eighty-year run (1929-2009), GM executives suddenly decided that they should repurchase hordes of stock. In GM’s 10k, the company talks about its commitment to “renewable energy” and how they are working “to drive growth and scale of renewables.”
But in January 2017, the company announced another $5 billion for buybacks. Is that the best way money could be spent?
This post has been updated since it was originally posted to include an updated headline, more information regarding potential risks for Tesla, and more information regarding activist investors pushing for buybacks at GM.Arianespace and ELV/AVIO announced today the signature of a contract for Arianespace to order 10 Vega and Vega C launchers from the Italian manufacturer.
The signing ceremony was attended by French President Emmanuel Macron and Paolo Gentiloni, the President of the Council of Ministers of the Italian Republic, at the Prefecture du Rhône, in Lyon, France, on the occasion of the 34th French-Italian summit.
Today’s contract was signed by Giulio Ranzo, CEO of AVIO, signatory on behalf of ELV; and Luce Fabreguettes, Arianespace’s Executive Vice President, Missions, Operations and Purchasing.
These 10 additional Vega and Vega C launchers will enter service starting in 2019, from the Guiana Space Center, Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana (South America).
Following the successes of the 10 Vega missions to date, with 10 more launches already in the Arianespace order book, today’s contract confirms the long-term viability of the Vega light launcher, now established as the leading launch vehicle in its class. Vega is especially well suited to the launch of scientific or Earth observation satellites into low or Sun-synchronous orbits. It is fully available for European government and institutional missions, and offers equally high performance for other customers.
The higher-performance Vega C version will offer increased payload weight and volume, enabling it to carry out an even broader range of missions, from nano-satellites to larger optical and radar observation satellites – making it even more competitive.
Three of the first Vega C launchers have already been assigned to missions:
Two to orbit satellites in the Airbus Earth observation constellation, with contracts signed in June during the 2017 Paris Air Show at Le Bourget.
One to launch a second-generation COSMO-SkyMed satellite, built by Thales Alenia Space on behalf of the Italian ASI space agency and the Italian Ministry of Defense.
Vega is part of the Arianespace launcher family, alongside the Ariane 5 heavy launcher and the Soyuz medium launcher, operated from the |
>Servlet TestServlet at " + request. getContextPath () + "</h1>" ); Principal userPrincipal = request. getUserPrincipal (); boolean adminUser = request. isUserInRole ( "admin" ); String userName ; if ( userPrincipal!= null ) { userName = userPrincipal. getName (); } else { userName = "Unknown User" ; } out. println ( "You are currently authenticated as: " + userName + "<br>" ); if ( adminUser ) { out. println ( "<br>As you're admin you can view this.<br>" ); } else { out. println ( "<br>Sorry, you're not admin. Nothing to see here.<br>" ); } out. println ( "</body>" ); out. println ( "</html>" ); }
This is very basic but will allow us to see the relevant authentication data being returned by the server.
Testing your application
Start your Payara Server – Under Services > Servers, right click on your server and click Start.
To run your servlet, click the Run Project button and the index page should load in your default browser. From there, append TestServlet to the URL and navigate to that page (by default, http://localhost:8080/JASPICTest/TestServlet).
You should get the following response:
You have accessed TestServlet at /JASPICTest2
You are currently authenticated as: Unknown User
Sorry, you're not admin. Nothing to see here.
Creating the Server Authentication Module
The Server Authentication Module (SAM) must implement the javax.security.auth.message.module.ServerAuthModule interface as defined by JSR 196. The Javadoc for the interface can be found here.
The SAM is invoked indirectly by the message processing runtime at the validateRequest and secureResponse interaction points.
Create a new Java project called TestAuthModule, and then create a new Java class in it called TestAuthModule, with a package of fish.payara.
Next:
Right click the project and select Properties > Libraries.
Click Add JAR/Folder
Add the following dependencies (they can both be found in <PAYARA_INSTALL_DIR>/glassfish/modules): servlet-api.jar security.auth.message-api.jar
Click OK
These will only be used to compile the code, you don't need to package them up as the web container will already contain copies.
In the TestAuthModule class implement the javax.security.auth.message.module.ServerAuthModule interface, and have NetBeans generate the required interface’s method stubs.In the TestAuthModule class, implement the javax.security.auth.message.module.ServerAuthModule interface, and have NetBeans generate the required interface’s method stubs.In the TestAuthModule class, implement the javax.security.auth.message.module.ServerAuthModule interface, and have NetBeans generate the required interface’s method stubs.In the TestAuthModule class, implement the javax.security.auth.message.module.ServerAuthModule interface, and have NetBeans generate the required interface’s method stubs.In the TestAuthModule class, implement the javax.security.auth.message.module.ServerAuthModule interface, and have NetBeans generate the required interface’s method stubs.In the TestAuthModule class, implement the javax.security.auth.message.module.ServerAuthModule interface, and have NetBeans generate the required interface’s method stubs.In the TestAuthModule class, implement the javax.security.auth.message.module.ServerAuthModule interface, and have NetBeans generate the required interface’s method stubs.In the TestAuthModule class, implement the javax.security.auth.message.module.ServerAuthModule interface, and have NetBeans generate the required interface’s method stubs.In the TestAuthModule class, implement the javax.security.auth.message.module.ServerAuthModule interface, and have NetBeans generate the required interface’s method stubs.In the TestAuthModule class, implement the javax.security.auth.message.module.ServerAuthModule interface, and have NetBeans generate the required interface’s method stubs.
For now we won't add in anything major besides giving the class something to initialise to, and filling out some methods so that they don’t throw their UnsupportedOperation exceptions:
package fish. payara ; import java.util.Map ; import javax.security.auth.Subject ; import javax.security.auth.callback.CallbackHandler ; import javax.security.auth.message.AuthException ; import javax.security.auth.message.AuthStatus ; import javax.security.auth.message.MessageInfo ; import javax.security.auth.message.MessagePolicy ; import javax.security.auth.message.module.ServerAuthModule ; public class TestAuthModule implements ServerAuthModule { private CallbackHandler handler ; @Override public void initialize ( MessagePolicy requestPolicy, MessagePolicy responsePolicy, CallbackHandler handler, Map options ) throws AuthException { System. out. println ( "initialize called." ); this. handler = handler ; } @Override public Class [] getSupportedMessageTypes () { throw new UnsupportedOperationException ( "Not supported yet." ); //To change body of generated methods, choose Tools | Templates. } @Override public AuthStatus validateRequest ( MessageInfo messageInfo, Subject clientSubject, Subject serviceSubject ) throws AuthException { System. out. println ( "validateRequest called" ); return AuthStatus. SUCCESS ; } @Override public AuthStatus secureResponse ( MessageInfo messageInfo, Subject serviceSubject ) throws AuthException { return AuthStatus. SEND_SUCCESS ; } @Override public void cleanSubject ( MessageInfo messageInfo, Subject subject ) throws AuthException { throw new UnsupportedOperationException ( "Not supported yet." ); //To change body of generated methods, choose Tools | Templates. } }
Build the project, and then copy the jar to <PAYARA_INSTALL_DIR>/glassfish/lib and restart Payara Server.
Configuring the SAM
Next up we need to create a message security provider in Payara Server and then link this to our web app.
Go to the Payara Server Admin console (http://localhost:4848):
Go to Configurations > server-config > Security > Message Security > HttpServlet
Select the Providers
Click New: Provider ID - TestSAM Provider Type - server Class Name - fish.payara.TestAuthModule
Click OK
Updating the web app
Right click the JASPICTest project, and add a new GlassFish Descriptor with default settings, before adding the following to the glassfish-web-app tag in its XML to indicate that the TestSAM you just set up should be used for this app:
<glassfish-web-app httpservlet-security-provider="TestSAM">
Testing the changes
Navigate to http://localhost:8080/JASPICTest/TestServlet in your browser, and the servlet should load as before. If you look in the Payara Server console output though, you should see our messages:
INFO: initialize called.
INFO: validateRequest called.
INFO: secureReponse called.
This shows that our SAM is now being used by Payara Server.
Locking down resources
OK, so at the moment we have a web app that is linked to our SAM, but we haven't actually said to secure anything, and even if we did, our SAM simply authenticates anyone!
So, let’s implement some (albeit very basic) security.
NOTE - This is only for demo purposes to show how JASPIC works, it is most definitely not intended to be a way of doing security!
First of all, let's lock down our servlet. We want to lock it down to only users with the role admin or standard. To do so, we need to create and add the following to an application web.xml. To create the web.xml file, right click the JASPICTest project > New > Other… > Web > Standard Deployment Descriptor. Once you’ve created it (just use the default settings), add the following to it between the web-app tags:
< security - constraint > < web - resource - collection > < web - resource - name > JASPICTest </ web - resource - name > < url - pattern >/*</ url - pattern > </ web - resource - collection > < auth - constraint > < role - name > standard </ role - name > < role - name > admin </ role - name > </ auth - constraint > </ security - constraint > < security - role > < role - name > standard </ role - name > </ security - role > < security - role > < role - name > admin </ role - name > </ security - role >
There is one additional (rather ugly) step we need to do to make our app work. In order for GlassFish to accept the roles that our authentication module puts into the JAAS Subject we have to map them to groups.
In order to do so, add the following to the glassfish-web.xml:
< security - role - mapping > < role - name > standard </ role - name > < group - name > standard </ group - name > </ security - role - mapping > < security - role - mapping > < role - name > admin </ role - name > < group - name > admin </ group - name > </ security - role - mapping >
NetBeans should auto-deploy our changed files to Payara Server once these changes have been saved, but to make sure they’re deployed you can click the “Run Project” button.
Next up we will alter our SAM again to implement the methods. Each of the methods is implemented as follows:
initialize - Simply takes the CallBackHandler and instantiates our local handler.
getSupportedMessageTypes - Returns the HTTP servlet request and response types.
secureResponse - Simply returns Success.
cleanSubject - Clears all principals from the Subject.
validateRequest - This is the main method of interest. In order to pass in the user and role, I have added them as servlet request parameters for testing purposes. This method extracts those values and then calls authenticateUser.
authenticateUser - NOTE - This method doesn't actually do any authentication! It simply takes the user and group, creates callback classes from them, and passes them to the callback handler.
Once we have filled out the above, our TestAuthModule looks like this:
package fish. payara ; import java.util.Map ; import javax.security.auth.Subject ; import javax.security.auth.callback.Callback ; import javax.security.auth.callback.CallbackHandler ; import javax.security.auth.message.AuthException ; import javax.security.auth.message.AuthStatus ; import javax.security.auth.message.MessageInfo ; import javax.security.auth.message.MessagePolicy ; import javax.security.auth.message.callback.CallerPrincipalCallback ; import javax.security.auth.message.callback.GroupPrincipalCallback ; import javax.security.auth.message.module.ServerAuthModule ; import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest ; import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse ; public class TestAuthModule implements ServerAuthModule { @SuppressWarnings ( "rawtypes" ) protected static final Class [] supportedMessageTypes = new Class [] { HttpServletRequest. class, HttpServletResponse. class }; private CallbackHandler handler ; @Override public void initialize ( MessagePolicy requestPolicy, MessagePolicy responsePolicy, CallbackHandler handler, Map options ) throws AuthException { System. out. println ( "initialize called." ); this. handler = handler ; } @SuppressWarnings ( "rawtypes" ) @Override public Class [] getSupportedMessageTypes () { return supportedMessageTypes ; } @Override public AuthStatus validateRequest ( MessageInfo messageInfo, Subject clientSubject, Subject serviceSubject ) throws AuthException { HttpServletRequest request = ( HttpServletRequest ) messageInfo. getRequestMessage (); String user = request. getParameter ( "user" ); String group = request. getParameter ( "group" ); System. out. println ( "validateRequest called." ); System. out. println ( "User = " + user ); System. out. println ( "Group = " + group ); authenticateUser ( user, group, clientSubject, serviceSubject ); return AuthStatus. SUCCESS ; } @Override public AuthStatus secureResponse ( MessageInfo messageInfo, Subject serviceSubject ) throws AuthException { return AuthStatus. SEND_SUCCESS ; } @Override public void cleanSubject ( MessageInfo messageInfo, Subject subject ) throws AuthException { if ( subject!= null ) { subject. getPrincipals (). clear (); } } private void authenticateUser ( String user, String group, Subject clientSubject, Subject serverSubject ) { System. out. println ( "Authenticating user " + user + " in group " + group ); CallerPrincipalCallback callerPrincipalCallback = new CallerPrincipalCallback ( clientSubject, user ); GroupPrincipalCallback groupPrincipalCallback = new GroupPrincipalCallback ( clientSubject, new String []{ group }); try { handler. handle ( new Callback [] { callerPrincipalCallback, groupPrincipalCallback }); } catch ( Exception e ) { e. printStackTrace (); } } }
Testing
Now all we need to do is test our new module.
First of all, build it, and copy the JAR over to <PAYARA_INSTALL_DIR>/glassfish/lib as before, and restart Payara Server.
Now we can test by passing in different dummy credentials.
If you go to http://localhost:8080/JASPICTest/TestServlet?user=Andy&group=standard, you should see the "Sorry, you're not admin. Nothing to see here." message.
If you go to http://localhost:8080/JASPICTest/TestServlet?user=Andy&group=admin, you should see the "As you're admin you can view this." message.
And if you go to http://localhost:8080/JASPICTest/TestServlet?user=Andy&group=xxx, you should see a HTTP Status 403 - Forbidden message.
Wrapping Up
Hopefully this has given you a taster of how to use JASPIC to secure your applications, and you can see how relatively straightforward it is to put the basic building blocks in place.
If you're looking for an example of a SAM that does authentication then there is one available from Oracle here: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19798-01/821-1752/gizeb/index.html
Although JASPIC is yet to really take off, it's a good first step towards standardising security in web containers, and avoids the need for each to have their own proprietary solution. That being said, there is still the issue of different containers using different deployment descriptors, hindering the portability of apps.A brief explanation
Projection
A cube is made
Perspective
All together
Rotation
The game
In our three dimensional world we think of three coordinates x,y,z. A fourth dimensions can be obtained by simply adding a coordinate. So if in 3D we have coordinates named x,y,z then in 4D we might have w,x,y,zWhen we project a higher dimension object on to a lower dimension, we get distortion. A cube consist of 6 square faces. But drawing that three dimensional cube on to a 2D surface might look like this.Only two of the squares that make up the cube are still square, the other four are now distorted.Just as a cube can be thought of as a plane copied into the third dimension.So too a tesseract is cube moved perpendicular into 4D along that w coordinate.But that picture is almost unintelligible so a little more explanation is needed.When we represent 3D objects, we think of them in perspective. While it is possible to present the 3D world without perspective such as in an isometric projection, there are several difficulties. In our case, the main problem would be that foreground objects are the same size as background objects and if we were looking at a transparent cube there would be no way to tell which face is in front. The pictures above have no perspective and so we can not tell which face is in front of the other. With perspective a cube looks like this:So when we project our 4D object onto 3D we are going to have to apply perspective or the image will be even harder to understand and some of the cubes that make it up will completely over lap and not be shown at all. For example a cube drawn face on with perspective vs withoutSo we represent a 4D object by applying perspective then projecting it into 3D which causes distortion (and obviously this 3D object is then reduced to 2D on the screen) On a cube, perspective makes some squares smaller than others. On a tesseract, perspective will make somesmaller than others. On a cube the distortion will make some squares not square shaped. On a tesseract it makes some cubes not cube shaped. So we get this:we can now indicate the w,x,y,z axises although the w axis is still hard to indicate as it is the axis of perspective on which items shrink and grow.We normally think of rotation occurring about an axis. In 3D we think of thee possible axis of rotationAs it turns out, this is misleading: the idea of an axis of rotation only works in 3D. But it is obvious that a rotation in 2D has no axis. Indeed looking at 2D we notice one obvious feature, the rotation is on a plane.And moving up to 4D, the idea of an axis of rotation is nonsense but the idea of rotation on planes is still valid.So we should think of 3D rotations as rotations on three possible planes xy, xz, yzIf in 3D we have coordinates named x,y,z then in 4D we would have w,x,y,z. What planes of rotation become possible in this case? It turns out we get three more: rotations on the wx, wy, and wz planes. Picturing this on our model we getRotating along this axis will create a sort of inside out movement as the inner cube changes places with the outer cube moving through the distorted shape in between.The game plays with all this by adding an unusual kind of gravity. A ball can be moved from one cell to another but when done in an interesting order, it ends up on ceilings and walls. The player needs to get a sense of that ordering to win.Morris the Cat meow First appearance 1968 Created by 9Lives Portrayed by John Erwin Information Nickname morrcatt Species Tabby cat Gender Male Occupation spokescat Children none Nationality American
Morris the Cat (voiced by John Erwin) is the advertising mascot for 9Lives brand cat food, appearing on its packaging and in many of its television commercials.
Description [ edit ]
A large orange tabby tomcat, he is "the world's most finicky cat", eating only 9Lives, and making this preference clear with humorously sardonic voice-over comments when offered other brands. Every can of 9Lives features Morris' "signature".
Three different cats have played Morris the Cat. The original Morris was discovered in 1968, at the Hinsdale Humane Society, a Chicago-area animal shelter,[1] by professional animal handler Bob Martwick. That Morris died in 1978. All cats to play Morris have been rescues, either from an animal shelter or a cat rescue. The current Morris lives in Los Angeles with his handler, Rose Ordile.
Other appearances [ edit ]
Morris has appeared in other media over the years. He debuted in the Robert Altman film The Long Goodbye with Elliott Gould,[2] and starred in the movie Shamus with Burt Reynolds and Dyan Cannon in 1973.[3]
Morris also appears as a "spokescat" promoting responsible pet ownership, pet health and pet adoptions through animal shelters. To this end, he has "authored" three books: The Morris Approach, The Morris Method and The Morris Prescription. He was quoted at the 1993 "end of year" edition of People magazine which noted deaths of 1993 to which he quoted a simple "Meow" in honor of the death of his friend, fellow advertising mascot, the dog Spuds MacKenzie.
In 2006, Morris was depicted as adopting a kitten, Li'l Mo, from a Los Angeles animal shelter, representing the first adoptee in a campaign known as Morris' Million Cat Rescue.
British advertising [ edit ]
When he first appeared in British television advertisements in the late 1970s, he was coincidentally voiced by Johnny Morris (then famous in the UK for his anthropomorphic character portrayals in the series Animal Magic), which led many British viewers, unaware of the character's origins, to wrongly suppose that the cat had been named after Morris himself. British ads for 9Lives later featured the voice of Richard Briers.
References [ edit ]Part of the campaign:
The French colonial empire has grown at a rapid pace.
We have heard stories from the natives of Louisiana along with fur trappers that there are cities made of gold and fountains that give eternal life.
People who speak a barbaric language rise up to in support this trait. They need to be civilized.
We have intel that tells us that our rival has plans to make voyages to the new world but for what purpose?
While we had an alliance with the Ottomans, we must choose family and faith over tempory political decisions.
In a new unexplored world, our explorers must be careful and take a cue from the native population if there is a danger.
To challenge our north sea rival, we support the independence of Sweden
King Vladislav de Valois has been elected under pressure of French and Bohemian delegates. While he has assimilated to Polish culture he never forgets his French roots. We can expect valuable friend in Poland.
The English have realized the futility in challenging our expansion. Their allies on the continent are tired of war and refuse to scheme against us.
With the expansion of Louisiana and New France, we are able to standardize our methods of colonization.
We also have plans on expanding our efforts to claim more land for the motherland.
We must focus on protecting our trade as colonization is expensive and our coffers are quite empty right now
Another crusade against Morocco, they need to find a better plan in order to be successful
Portugal is dominating West African trade, Some much so that they created a dependency to manage it all.
Loyal Catholic freedom fighters, Known as Jacobites, have laid siege to Edinburgh to liberate Scotland from heretic oppression.
Crusaders have captured Constantinople, history is repeating itself.
The king of Poland has not forgotten his family or cultural roots and has accepted an alliance.
The English have made it to the new world. Their own arrogance will cause their colonies to fail.
Frenchman tired of war, taxes and other life struggles flee to Quebec.
To stop English trade in the new world, we have created a system of privateering were we pay pirates to raid English ships.
With the Reformation is full swing, the court of Europe now focus their attention on fighting or protecting the reformation.
The Hapsburgs have inherited the Kingdom of Savoy which is concerning because most of our eastern border is controlled by rivals.
Why we search for the fountain of youth we cannot afford to lose our men and we cannot trust these savages.
Newly acquired Brittany has created an economic boom due to the crowns excellent planning
Our explorers believe there is gold in the jungle and travel to the heart of the Amazon to find out.
They were correct, God is on our side!
Writers note I did not mean to stop here but I realized I captured enough pictures for 2 parts.In the ancient Greek City, Zeugma, which is located in today’s Turkey, unbelievable mosaics were uncovered, dating back to the 2nd century BC, but incredibly well-preserved and look as beautiful and stunning as the first day.
The site came to the attention of the international archaeological community when it was threatened by flooding, due to the construction of a nearby dam in southern Turkey in 2000.
When Professor Kutalmış Görkay of Ankara University and his team of archaeologists began excavating, they found amazing and well-preserved glass mosaics rich with color.
“There are still unexcavated areas. There are rock-carved houses here. We have reached one of these houses and the house includes six spaces. We have also unearthed three new mosaics in this year’s excavations,” he said.
People used mosaics with characters from ancient Greek mythology to decorate their houses.
Görkay emphasized that now, the project will reach its most important stage – conservation.
“From now on, we will work on restoration and conservation. We plan to establish a temporary roof for long-term protection. We estimate that the ancient city has 2,000-3,000 houses. Twenty-five of them remain under water. Excavations will be finished in the Muzalar House next year,” he said.The funding of collegiate athletics is a contentious issue in large part because some athletic departments seem to be so bad at spending the tens of millions of dollars that fall into their laps every year. This money comes from a number of different places, but in general you can expect the golden coins in that big ol' sack with a dollar sign on it to be accumulated from about four major places: donations to the program, licensing fees, ticket sales, and in every public university athletic department save seven, some kind of subsidy from the school and the students that populate it.
This is not news. USA TODAY has, for years, done a great job at maintaining an incredible site that details the various finances of every major public university athletics department in the country. It's been a godsend for writers like me who want to get students and alumni really angry about how their money is being spent, or more accurately, how their money is being burned to light a delicious Cuban cigar in the mouth of a trained chimpanzee that their AD just bought for his yacht because the truth is that while many schools give the impression of a financial need, the reality is often different.
I'm typically the fart joke and MS Paint guy on 11W, but what brought me back to the NCAA Finances page was this excellent article by Spenser Davis over at the OU Daily, the University of Oklahoma's student newspaper. In it, he breaks down the average cost of a student ticket in each of the Power 5 conferences, and then goes on to detail how much a season ticket costs at each school. It's one of those extremely handy articles that you'll bookmark and then forget about, but Davis deserves a lot of credit for this.
Where I slide into your 11W DMs like woah comes right after this addendum that Davis added, presumably at the request of an irritated Oklahoma administration:
Associate Athletic Director Kenny Mossman commented on this story in an email earlier this afternoon. Mossman first addressed the average price OU, the rest of the Big 12 and the SEC. "It is difficult to compare financials with a large number of schools because circumstances vary. One of the biggest influencers is student fees. A number of schools assess a fee that supports athletics. OU does not," Mossman said.
That's true! OU, along with LSU, Texas, Ohio State, Nebraska, Purdue, and Penn State do not take any fees from their universities, student or otherwise, in the form of subsidies. That makes them a rarity in college athletics, as the vast majority of schools take occasionally substantial amounts from the people that go there.
So, in the spirit of Spenser Davis' original post, I decided to look at each of the Power 5 conferences and combine his look at ticket prices with my much less credible look at two additional statistics: the subsidy that schools receive in total and the difference between their expenses and revenue. The whole point to this incredibly unscientific (and I stress unscientific because I'd be remiss if I didn't shout out my girlfriend for helping me figure out how to use Excel for this) endeavor is to identify the worst of the worst in each of the Power 5 in terms of the financial deal that students are getting from the athletic departments that they enjoy.
It's also important to note that "subsidy" is also a tricky word, because for every school that means something else, depending on how that school allocated money during that year. It's probably unfair to look at total subsidy numbers and imply that an athletic department is bilking its school out of millions of dollars. Different accounting can mean that the cost of a scholarship can also vary wildly from school to school, depending on how they want to use it to suit their needs.
That's why, for the purpose of this article, subsidies will be mostly discussed in terms of student contributions rather than overall dollar amounts from the school.
This is by no means definitive or authoritative, but if we can shame Rutgers into decreasing their student subsidy to something less than a down payment on a house, we'll call this a win for everyone and go home.
PAC-12
The Pac-12 is interesting in that every school takes a subsidy of some kind, but some schools are infinitely better at managing said subsidy and revenue in general than others. The Pac-12 is also interesting because Oregon had roughly a trillion damn dollars. Seriously look at this crap:
Okay, now look at it again. Oregon takes a small subsidy from students for God knows what reason when they're 86 million in the black, but also look at that contributions number from year to year. I'm not a betting man, but if I had Phil Knight's money I sure as hell would be. An athletic department with 196 million dollars in revenue in 2014 has no business taking any amount of money from their university (or charging an NCAA-high 52 dollars per football ticket for students) but thanks to the bottom feeders in the Pac-12, the Ducks are off the hook.
See, four Pac-12 athletic departments take subsidies of over 10 million dollars from their schools; Colorado, Washington State, Arizona State, and Oregon State all need that sweet, sweet cash to function, I guess. Still, I'm going to laser-focus on Oregon State because A) student funds account for 2.5 million of their 12 million dollar subsidy, B) that's somehow almost 20% of their total athletic revenues, and C) did I mention that they're heavily in the red? Because their expenses outpace their revenues by 14%, 73 million to 63 million. That's pretty red.
SEC
The SEC is, on the whole, doing a pretty decent job at making sure that their revenues keep pace with their expenses. That's probably not surprising considering the vast popularity of the chief money-making engine of college sports in the south, but considering how badly other schools have bungled things, it's at least... kind of commendable? I guess? As a side note, while I certainly believe there was a lot of dirty pool involved in the initial death of UAB football, it's also probably relevant to point out that almost 2/3rds of UAB althletic department revenue came through subsidies, including over 5 million dollars from the student body itself.
But as much as I would like to burn Alabama's ass, it's in-state rival Auburn, which currently has the third-highest student ticket prices in the SEC, still somehow manages to justify a 4.3 million dollar subsidy funded entirely by students. Despite a 113 million dollar total profit in 2014 and their collections from rights and licensing fees more than doubling from 2006 to 2014, students at Auburn have been forced into propping up an athletics department that is still managing to be 13 million dollars in the red.
While I remain a giant idiot, I'm still not sure how that's possible. Since 2005, Auburn's athletic department revenues have literally doubled, with their various expenses keeping pace with increased revenue for the most part, yet student fees have remained above 4 million dollars in every year since 2007. There is that "other" column in USA TODAY's expense report, however, and that seems to bounce higher and higher pretty capriciously.
"Other" isn't descriptive, and could mean any one of a billion different things, many of them potentially justifiable in a way I'm just not aware of. But in any event, it seems unfair to put any kind of major revenue burden on students for a program that is making almost the same kind of money Ohio State is, but still managing to look like Uncle Pennybags when he's hauled off to prison.
ACC
I've thrown a lot of numbers out there, so let's talk about the mechanics of this a little bit. The two biggest dirtbags in the ACC are currently residing in the Big Ten, so let's use the University of Virginia as an example instead.
UVA's athletic department made 83,697,971 American dollars in 2014. 13,235,814 of those dollars came from students, which is a crap ton of money. At UVA, students have a mandatory 657 dollar athletics fee that they pay per year (or half of that per semester). The University of Virginia currently has about 21,000 students in total, so it's easy enough for their athletic department to do some multiplication and boom! 13 million dollars out of nowhere.
Point is, it's easy to see why schools ask students to subsidize their sports programs. Many schools, including UVA, offer football tickets to students for free, hoping that they don't do the mental math which shows that their mandatory athletics fee is far higher than any football season ticket would be.
BIG-12
In general the Big-12 seems to have it's act together, but that's from a largely superficial look at the raw numbers. Since I'm a petty, suspicious man, let's take a closer look at how things are going at Texas.
The UT athletic department currently takes zero dollars and zero cents in subsidies from either its school or students. That's great. It also made north of 161 million dollars in revenue in 2014, which is also great. But for comparison's sake, I want to make a note of a few things here:
There's that "other" column again. It's also interesting that two athletic departments of comparable size have such a discrepancy in terms of scholarship money, but the larger issue is that of transparency. Even when an athletic department isn't taking money directly from students of the university, the athletic department expense report should be mandatory reading, especially when it reveals that 30 million dollars in 2012 went to "Administrative Salaries and Benefits."
BIG TEN
Okay, this is the fun one. When the Big Ten added Nebraska to its ranks, people were excited because it seemed to be a natural cultural and geographical fit. When the Big Ten added Maryland and Rutgers to its ranks, Jim Delany was excited because those schools happen to sit in between the largest media market corridors in the country.
This is what the student fees look like at Rutgers' main campus (link goes to a PDF). They're pretty high, but my favorite part is the 1200 dollar mandatory "campus fee" per semester! Most schools have some kind of campus fee; here's the breakdown for Ohio State's, which ran a little over 400 bucks per semester as of 2014 (I guess Ohio State doesn't have nearly the kind of operating expenses Rutgers does). Aside from the additional expense, what's interesting about the Rutgers athletic department is that they get a 36 million dollar subsidy from the school, which accounts for over 40% of their total revenues.
Wait, it gets better. In 2014, the Rutgers athletic department actually managed to reduce their reliance on a subsidy by 11 million dollars, but still raised student contributions to that same 36 million by an additional 500,000 wing wangs. Also funny: Rutgers still wants students to pay about a hundred bucks for a season ticket to their games. Less funny is the tuition hike Rutgers has planned for the next school year.
For Rutgers students, fans, and really anyone associated with the Big Ten, it'll be very important to keep tabs on how they've spent that sweet sweet B1G cash that's coming their way, and if they decide to ease the burden on students.
I want to re-emphasize that this is the barest of statistical analyses. The inner financial workings of massive organizations with hundreds of workers and sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue are far more complex than I can describe in a thousand words or so. A school like Kentucky likely allocates and distributes money in a way that Oregon wouldn't even dream of.
What's more important to note is that many schools continue to include students as a part of their financial calculus for various fees, and then double down on ever increasing ticket prices. However light we might perceive that burden to be, students shouldn't be forced to shoulder a statistically significant portion of an athletic department's operating expenses, especially when the overall athletic department revenue is in the tens of millions of dollars.
Andy Schwartz wrote an article for Deadspin that talked about how universities hide the actual cost of operations, and he made this point:
As Brian Goff and Dennis Wilson very perceptively have written, athletic departments are trying to walk a rhetorical tightrope. They want to hide their profits to make it easier to keep them away from other would-be claimants. They also want to avoid looking so poor that other stakeholders within academia use sports' apparent poverty to strip them of power. Rhetoric that turns a price into a cost, and a transfer of profit into a loss of money, helps play a role in confusing things enough that the moment in the magic trick where the profit is moved from one pocket to the other gets obscured.
Lots of athletic departments are genuinely struggling, but through this subterfuge, many more are justifying student fees and ticket prices by fudging their numbers to claim shortfalls. That's unfair, and wrong.Estonian President Toomas Ilves speaks at a talk titled “The Estonia Model: Why a Free and Secure Internet Matter” at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., on April 21, 2015. Photo by Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images
On an unseasonably warm April day, I hurriedly made my way up Washington, D.C.’s Embassy Row, my documents clutched in my hand. As I sweated through the suit I rarely wear to work, the eagle on the cover of my passport seemed to be looking up at me accusingly. More than 80 years ago, my grandfather left his home in Eastern Europe to move to America. Now, I was about to take a journey in the opposite direction.
I double-checked that all my papers were in order as I rang the bell at the embassy door. I was about to apply for residency in Estonia … well, on the Internet anyway.
Last October, Estonia announced that it would be first country to offer “e-residency” to foreign citizens, allowing them to take advantage of the same digital services as Estonian citizens. The status was initially offered to foreigners living in Estonia, but as of April, it became available to people outside the physical borders of the country.
It’s not surprising that the first country to offer this would be the Baltic republic that likes to tout itself as “E-stonia.” The government has embraced information technology, and the nation’s healthy startup scene birthed Skype. But much of the early coverage of the announcement, including that of my Slate colleague Lily Hay Newman, questioned what exactly one could do with e-residency. Was it a pyramid scheme? Or the state-run equivalent of one of those companies that “sells” you property on the moon? Or was it a prescient glimpse of a world in which new communications technologies render physical borders obsolete? To find out, I decided I would have to become an E-stonian myself.
Perhaps appropriately for such an experiment like this, I have never been to the physical country of Estonia. While I like to think I have basic knowledge of the country’s politics and history—particularly its fraught relationship with neighboring Russia—from my day job writing about foreign affairs for Slate, the fact is I don’t know too much about the place. Until applying for e-residency, the only Estonians I had much of any concept of were Jaan Tallinn, the apocalypse-predicting Skype programmer whom I |
Championship Match.
Congratulations to Los Pollos Hermanos on a great match, and we will look forward to seeing them play the American runners-up in the Third Place Match.
Match Report
Match Replay (Coming Soon) d1sc and company pulled off an epic comeback after losing the first two maps, Revenge and November-110 each 2-1. They fought out of a cap deficit twice on Vengeance before settling in to a 6-4 victory, and then held off the Pollos for a 4-3 win on Infested. The tiebreaker, Vaultcity, was a tight affair, but in the end it was TiTs FTW and a 2-1 result sends them to the Championship Match.Congratulations to Los Pollos Hermanos on a great match, and we will look forward to seeing them play the American runners-up in the Third Place Match.Match Replay (Coming Soon)
Conference Semifinals
Posted By: mattdjoh @ Thu Aug 01, 2013 12:02 pm \\ Comments : 0
European Conference
#1 DEFEATED #3
Replay
d1sc and Hektor put the rest of the league to shame, managing to complete their semifinal matchup before some other teams could even play their quarterfinal. TiTs picked Lavagiant, rarely played overseas, and befuddled Shaft in a 3-0 rout. kepa put together some nice flag runs, and shaft's defense was set to chasing for much of this map. Cynosure was closer, but a quick run by d1sc and a perfect pickup/cap by kepa at the 11 min mark proved to be the difference.
TiTs is definitely the team to beat in the European Conference. d1sc is no stranger to the business end of MLCTF, but he usually finds a way to lose the biggest matches (see MLCTF XXI and XXIV and MLUT EU I). Could this be the season he finally gets to savor the sweet fruit of triumph?
#4 VS #3
The Pollos knocked off nin's binary squad in a blowout, and I guess that makes them the favorite heading into this semifinal matchup. Obviously this match will be defined by whether or not bleh manages to show up, and I'm sure GT is crossing their fingers hoping he does. Regardless, either team will be a huge underdog in the Finals with TiTs awaiting. While it may look like an unexpected matchup, this one doesn't surprise me at all considering how tight the standings were in Europe, especially in the Skaarj Division. The Guys From Tomorrowland eeked out an epic win against JV's FACEGRILLGIGOLOS in the quarters, despite not even having their best player, bleh, in the lineup. After splitting the first two maps, Ranel and Gataka, they pulled together and sealed the deal with some really solid teamwork on Cynosure.The Pollos knocked off nin's binary squad in a blowout, and I guess that makes them the favorite heading into this semifinal matchup. Obviously this match will be defined by whether or not bleh manages to show up, and I'm sure GT is crossing their fingers hoping he does. Regardless, either team will be a huge underdog in the Finals with TiTs awaiting.
American Conference
#4 VS #3
SEX! Offenders showed some cracks in the armor on GoliathCaves, but rallied back to take Orbital and McSwartzly in convincing fashion. ph34r took a huge dump all over snky invoked the ancient Inca spirits to give strength to his team in his absence, and for the first time in centuries, they listened. Cloud 9 managed to get their remaining top 5, Bretzky, Guybrush, khemz, Imperium, and rootsoft to show up and they took it to nomike's somf squad in straight maps. Caspah's shenanigans definitely had an impact on this match, but I honestly think the result would have been the same either way.SEX! Offenders showed some cracks in the armor on GoliathCaves, but rallied back to take Orbital and McSwartzly in convincing fashion. ph34r took a huge dump all over this match, closing it out with a shutout playing snipe-heavy flag D in the tiebreaker. The matchup with Cloud 9 is intriguing. The fragging edge definitely goes to Shatt's team with the likes of Blizz and ph34r. But Cloud 9 may have more chemistry considering the long-standing love affair between Guybrush and Bretzky. My gut feeling: SEX! Offenders in 3 as Shatt finagles another favorable tiebreaker map.
#1 VS #2
Dray's team pulled off the upset against cort's resilient GrumpyCats in The Boys Of Summer got a walkover in the quarters as it became clear that The Gamble would never field 5 players. I don't really see their extended rest as a problem; most of their players know to expect from each other. They showed some weakness in the regular season on larger, more teamwork-oriented map, so they'll have much to prove in the semis.Dray's team pulled off the upset against cort's resilient GrumpyCats in a match marred by kud's lag. But I don't think should take anything away from their win, which they earned well by hanging tough in OT on Terra. As always, their biggest shortcoming is Woody's lack of adequate comms, and it could prove fatal against a team as dangerous as sorn's Boys. Tune in tonight to see n1ne and sLY renew their rivalry on MLUTLive!
Standings : Final
Posted By: mattdjoh @ Thu Jul 18, 2013 10:26 pm \\ Comments : 0
zmrzlina and We Hate Angelus retroactively removed from the tournament. All mathces count as 6 point victories for the opponent, and additionally, 6 caps were awarded to the receiver of the forfeit (3 for each map).
XhackZ and reptil suspended for 1 match.
Posted By: chicken- @ Fri Jul 12, 2013 5:11 am \\ Comments : 2
Round 3 match: SEX vs ADD Map 2 (Azcanize) has been changed to a forfeit loss for SEX due to ringing.
xhackZ aka Ryu aliased as reptil and while normally the penalties are much more severe (up to complete elimination of the team) in this case the captain of the opposing team agreed that there was little harm was done but we can't just look the other way and open the doors to others thinking the penalty isn't a big deal. The ruling is that the map is forfeited, SEX will receive 0 points for that map, and Team ADD will receive the 3 pts for the map victory. The result from the first map, bollwerk, is unchanged.
XHackZ and reptil came clean and admitted to it, and both say that the other members of SEX were not aware this took place and this is why I don't feel that any overly harsh actions are needed. I believe them because reptil is very soft spoken and doesn't always talk a lot on teamspeak (plus they have the same country flag/pings).
I don't want to blow this out of proportion and cause unnecessary drama, clearly the skill gap between xhackz/reptil is little if any and it didn't really affect the outcome of the match. I'll use this as a warning to anybody else who might consider doing this, I WILL find out!!
Week Four Schedule
Posted By: mattdjoh @ Sun Jul 07, 2013 5:24 pm \\ Comments : 0
Reschedules
The Guys From Tomorrowland plays 00001000 Wednesday July 10th @ 21 CET
The Guys From Tomorrowland plays 00001000
Week Three Standings
Posted By: mattdjoh @ Thu Jul 04, 2013 5:58 pm \\ Comments : 0
Week Three Schedule
Posted By: mattdjoh @ Sat Jun 29, 2013 2:40 pm \\ Comments : 0
Reschedules
The Guys From Tomorrowland plays 00001000 Thursday July 4th @ 21 CET
SEX! Offenders plays Team A.D.D. Wednesday July 3rd @ 9 EST
The Guys From Tomorrowland plays 00001000SEX! Offenders plays Team A.D.D.
Week Two Standings
Posted By: mattdjoh @ Thu Jun 27, 2013 8:36 pm \\ Comments : 0
Reschedules
EPIC plays The Guys From Tomorrowland : Wednesday July 3rd @ 21 CET (Skaarj)
entropic thunder plays The Boys of Summer : Monday July 1st @ 9 EST (Warcow)
Week Two Schedule
Posted By: mattdjoh @ Sun Jun 23, 2013 6:57 pm \\ Comments : 0
Week One Standings
Posted By: mattdjoh @ Thu Jun 20, 2013 3:03 pm \\ Comments : 1
Week One Schedule
Posted By: mattdjoh @ Sun Jun 16, 2013 5:04 pm \\ Comments : 0
Week One Schedule
Week of Sunday June 16th - Saturday June 22nd
Divisions/Week 1 Schedule
Posted By: mattdjoh @ Mon Jun 10, 2013 5:13 pm \\ Comments : 0
Week One Schedule
Week of Sunday June 16th - Saturday June 22nd
Europe
Nali Division
d1sc vs Hektor
JV vs meloo
tOmy vs Paetaulik
Skaarj Division
DreaM vs h0ntr
Rocky vs nudla
Nintendo vs Angelus
America
Xan Division
linoleum vs nomike
ShatteredX vs m3ss
Dray : BYE
Warcow Division
met vs snky
sorn vs cort
Slayer : BYE
LINK TO SCHEDULING FORUM
Draft Results
Posted By: mattdjoh @ Mon Jun 10, 2013 5:12 pm \\ Comments : 0
MLUTLive Draft Replay
North American Conference Live Draft Replay with m3ss/zack (Twitch.TV)
North American Conference Live Draft Replay with m3ss/zack (YouTube)
European Conference Live Draft Replay with rAvje/Paetaulik (Twitch.TV)
Reminder: Let admins know your Co-Captain selections and team channels asap!
European Conference
$5201 d1sc - cr3s - kepa - liquidstorm - xmarin - humpty - nme - twister
$5154 DreaM - FIZIEK - Tiensin - alpha - Wrekah - Penny - Xenomorph - d1scmum
$5138 Hektor - Trigger - kalias - eeleeass - smk - Jewbear - Chaos|Matt - Imperator
$5078 h0ntr - Banny - Aiwon - faky - Kr4zY - cryinman - Lithium - zork
$5040 JV - fraggass - mighty - cartman - abeoFFS - talje - [crocodile] - avi
$5033 Rocky - B4dzhootEr2 - bleh - creepz - biomm - xkoz - zE - meteor
$5021 meloo - frodo - parafan - breach - wolfi - ace` - Vola - kixo
$4984 nudla - GeK - valco - rruby - Random_Monk - gazz - Kess - loleq
$4959 tOmy` - daniz yeslifer - Hanni - Mermaid - corn3y - flakkbunz0r - rAvje
$4947 Nintendo - od^ - lockpick - bounce - habbi - Xsjado - lagunz - twnz
$4925 Paetaulik - Alby - cR4zY-n^ - blz- - xiphias - Deepah - z0rf - x2storm
$4648 Angelus - Seijuro - bazyl - aMiGo - XpLoD - sheeva - Tom-chan - mrGA
American Conference
$5750 - Linoleum - Sonic - NecroNinja - wesdog[R] - ballistic - JYB - Keep - Goten
$5639 - Met - sidrar - mintek - Porsche - tou - chicken- - diff`lx - Joseph
$5483 - nomike - nevermind - n1ne - desolation - pithon - hedz - Cooltown -SM - - technika
$5421 - snake - csnafk - ph34r - BRETZKY - imperium - rootsoft - kappa - raildemon
$5406 - ShatteredX - Kalamazoo - Blizzard - Guybrush - reptil - khemikal - Cronicle - Ricochet
$5378 - sorn - sup3r - sly1838 - kidsins - spydee - BOBOBO - cafe - Sunny
$5337 - m3ss - InfamousRaider - lemon - kaz - Beady1 - RC - BizMonkey - mattdjoh
$5319 - nexus - bone - Ultranova - jesse - kud - jay666 - Lenneth - Darth|UA|
$5310 - Dray - FuzzyLogic - zack - druid - invictus - woods7 - caspah - frank_castle
$5284 - Slayer. - reaven - noaimnomoves - boots - CirO - BigV - darkvirus - thesexiestman Reminder: Let admins know your Co-Captain selections and team channels asap!$5201 d1sc - cr3s - kepa - liquidstorm - xmarin - humpty - nme - twister$5154 DreaM - FIZIEK - Tiensin - alpha - Wrekah - Penny - Xenomorph - d1scmum$5138 Hektor - Trigger - kalias - eeleeass - smk - Jewbear - Chaos|Matt - Imperator$5078 h0ntr - Banny - Aiwon - faky - Kr4zY - cryinman - Lithium - zork$5040 JV - fraggass - mighty - cartman - abeoFFS - talje - [crocodile] - avi$5033 Rocky - B4dzhootEr2 - bleh - creepz - biomm - xkoz - zE - meteor$5021 meloo - frodo - parafan - breach - wolfi - ace` - Vola - kixo$4984 nudla - GeK - valco - rruby - Random_Monk - gazz - Kess - loleq$4959 tOmy` - daniz yeslifer - Hanni - Mermaid - corn3y - flakkbunz0r - rAvje$4947 Nintendo - od^ - lockpick - bounce - habbi - Xsjado - lagunz - twnz$4925 Paetaulik - Alby - cR4zY-n^ - blz- - xiphias - Deepah - z0rf - x2storm$4648 Angelus - Seijuro - bazyl - aMiGo - XpLoD - sheeva - Tom-chan - mrGA$5750 - Linoleum - Sonic - NecroNinja - wesdog[R] - ballistic - JYB - Keep - Goten$5639 - Met - sidrar - mintek - Porsche - tou - chicken- - diff`lx - Joseph$5483 - nomike - nevermind - n1ne - desolation - pithon - hedz - Cooltown -SM - - technika$5421 - snake - csnafk - ph34r - BRETZKY - imperium - rootsoft - kappa - raildemon$5406 - ShatteredX - Kalamazoo - Blizzard - Guybrush - reptil - khemikal - Cronicle - Ricochet$5378 - sorn - sup3r - sly1838 - kidsins - spydee - BOBOBO - cafe - Sunny$5337 - m3ss - InfamousRaider - lemon - kaz - Beady1 - RC - BizMonkey - mattdjoh$5319 - nexus - bone - Ultranova - jesse - kud - jay666 - Lenneth - Darth|UA|$5310 - Dray - FuzzyLogic - zack - druid - invictus - woods7 - caspah - frank_castle$5284 - Slayer. - reaven - noaimnomoves - boots - CirO - BigV - darkvirus - thesexiestman
Revised Maplist
Posted By: mattdjoh @ Sun Jun 09, 2013 10:10 pm \\ Comments : 0
Revised Maplist
White=Shared
Green =Europe
Orange =America
CTF-AreaN23-LE103
CTF-Azcanize-LE102
CTF-Azcanize-MLUT
CTF-Bleak-CE100
CTF-BollWerK105
CTF-Cynosure][LE105
CTF-Gataka-SE
CTF-Gauntlet
CTF-Glacier][-CE105
CTF-GoliathCaves-LE102
CTF-Infested-UGL-LE202
CTF-Julius
CTF-Lavagiant
CTF-McSwartzly][
CTF-November-CE110
CTF-November-FINAL
CTF-Orbital-LE102
CTF-P4ce-LE101
CTF-Ranel-JoltEdition
CTF-Revelation
CTF-Revenge-LE102
CTF-Ronsico][
CTF-Terra-LE102
CTF-Vaultcity-LE102
CTF-Vengeance-CE103 White=Shared=Europe=America
MLCTF XXV : Announcement
Posted By: mattdjoh @ Sun Apr 28, 2013 12:05 pm \\ Comments : 0Kemono Friends director and animator TATSUKI stated on Twitter on Tuesday that he does not currently have plans to create another unofficial short episode. "There is no episode 12.2," TATSUKI said. "Everyone please get some proper rest lol."
TATSUKI continued, "I wanted to keep on foolishly wasting time and money, but first I'm working on the packaging cover art for the main Kemono Friends series and other stuff. If I did [another short] on top of that, I'd collapse and die, thank you very much."
TATSUKI posted an unofficial "episode 12.1" earlier this month, but emphasized that this "indie" video "made just for fun" is not the upcoming "new screen project" that has been green-lit for the franchise.
The Kemono Friends television anime premiered on TV Tokyo and TV Osaka on January 10 and ended on March 25. Crunchyroll streamed the series as it aired.
Nexon launched the smartphone game last year. In the RPG, animals around the world have transformed into girls and players could recruit them into their party for battle.
The original app game ended service on December 14. Nexon announced in February that the app will not return despite the anime's popularity, but a spokesperson for the company later stated last month that the app's return "is possible."
[Via Otakomu]iPad Pro 10.5 Illumina v2.0 Bluetooth Keyboard Case
Original CaseBuddy. Fits iPad Pro 10.5
Turn your Apple iPad Pro 10.5 into a Netbook with this case with featuring a illuminated bluetooth keyboard
Casebuddy’s Illumina Keyboard Cover is the thinnest and lightest out there, and that its 800 mAh battery stores enough juice for months of use between charges, even using the backlight (we’re assuming fairly moderately). The keyboard is equipped with hinges on one side to keep it attached to your iPad as a cover when not in use. To use the keyboard, just pull it off and drop the iPad into a magnetic slot; a wedge also pops up to support the iPad.
Add the ability of backlight keys and you’ve got what sounds like a sudden contender for champion iPad keyboard. Oh, and it’s less expensive than most keyboard cases — even non-backlit ones. It comes in classy black, bronze, gun metal and silver.
Bluetooth version:3.0
Modulating System:GFSK
Operating Voltage:3.0-5.0V,Working Current:<4.0mA
Standby current: ＜ 1mA,Sleep Current:<200uA
Standby Time: 30Days,Operation Distance:10meters
Battery capacity:800mAh
Anyone that uses an iPad Pro 10.5 or other tablet computer a lot knows how cumbersome it can be to type on the virtual keyboard. With a regular keyboard, typing is much more efficient, for more effective entry of emails, blog entries, text messages, Facebook comments, etc. Having the Bluetooth keyboard built right into this iPad 2 case just makes everything so much easier.
When this combination iPad Pro 10.5 case/keyboard is in use, it can prop up the iPad for easy viewing. It makes it a lot like working on a compact laptop/netbook computer. This not only makes typing much quicker, it is more ergonomic to help cut down on back-aches. Plus the keyboard is designed to be silent, allowing someone to type without disturbing others.
Illumina Apple iPad Pro 10.5 Case with Bluetooth Keyboard
Perfect combination for iPad Pro 10.5.
Spill proof, space saving design.
Use the iPad Pro 10.5 in a variety of positions.
Keyboard made of hard plastic, case made of high quality ABS.
You can use this keyboard with most device that have bluetooth or USB adapter.
Works with Windows, Mac, Linux, iPad / iPad 3G, iPad 2 / iPad 2 3G, iPhone 4, iPhone 3G S if upgraded to IOS4.
Silence design, it won't affect other people's rest.
Built-in Lithium Battery: 450mAh which can last for about 1 week.
Case Buddy offers the same iPad Pro 10.5 cases found at most retail stores but a far larger range of colours, sizes and options.The Tesla Semi truck is a hulking and menacing hauler, with the presence of Darth Vader lurking from above when cast in the black hue, or more like an apparition in metallic silver-white. In other words: it’s exactly what we expect to see from Tesla, as it attempts to make a semi truck that lives up to the brand’s DNA of making the future seem cool.
I sat in the driver’s seat hours before the truck was revealed at Tesla’s Hawthorne, California facility on Thursday. Apart from the glass area and the two screens on either side, it feels as badass as any big truck. The center-mounted seat, however, does feel weird. I noticed several elements from the Model 3, including a turn signal and gear lever, but it had a different steering wheel since it doesn’t require an airbag.
The center-mounted seat does feel weird
Whether Tesla can actually impact the freight truck market remains to be seen, but design is certainly part of that statement, as Tesla makes it clear that it wants to do things differently — staging a full-scale media event blitz to emphasize that point — it is perhaps the first reveal of an 18-wheeler to take the stage to the tune of trance music. Tesla is taking a page from its Model 3 playbook (a game plan that’s currently a roll of the dice), but it’s one that tends to generate tons of hype and whip the media and Musk fans into a frenzy.
It’s a delicate moment for Tesla, with both fans and investors watching the rollout of its first mass-market car intensely. Now they are tuning in to see a truck, because it’s Tesla. The usual audience for freight innovation is far more niche. But when Elon Musk talks trucks, his fans whistle and shout.
The reveal event was held in the shadow of two of Musk’s other pet projects: SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and a mile-long hyperloop tunnel. Both served as reminders that this was no ordinary company, and no ordinary truck.
Musk appeared Thursday night in Hawthorne, California, to show off his company’s newest vehicle, promising a range in the neighborhood of 500 miles for the Class 8 heavy-duty vehicle. Earlier reports pegged the range between 200 and 300 miles, but Musk delighted in besting those numbers in his remarks, including his claim that the truck has a 400-mile range with 30 minutes of charging. Musk had also promised self-driving abilities, and Tesla says this delivers at least semi-autonomous capability.
Tesla showed not one, but two trucks
In the hours before the official reveal, Tesla showed not one, but two trucks to journalists ahead of the unveiling: a standard model and another with an aerodynamics package. There were tense moments leading up to the reveal, with Tesla employees buzzing around nervously.
The vehicles were parked in a studio facing up to competing diesel-powered trucks from Freightliner and International. Compared to the internal combustion engine models, the Tesla Semi has smoothed-off sides covering its electric parts, including the grille up front. Yes, there’s a “frunk” up there, with some storage and access points for some service repairs. The door handles are flush-mounted, too, because they come off a Model 3.
The streamlined look of the Tesla Semi truck is made possible by the battery pack mounted under the floor of the cab, and the driver’s seat mounted significantly more forward than of those the Freightliner or International trucks. Behind the cab, the two rear axles have electric motors attached on either side, for four in total. They also come off of existing Tesla models. The design gives the Tesla Semi truck a lower center of gravity than diesel-powered models, something the company has said about its cars relative to rivals with internal combustion engines. While this is unlikely to make a semi truck handle like a sports car, it may go some way toward increasing high-speed stability.
Inside, a driver’s seat is centrally mounted with a passenger’s behind and to the right of it. This contrasts with the conventional trucks that have two seats mounted side by side, but with little room left in the cab for other storage. Tesla designers say they maximized the space left over from the battery pack’s positioning to create more space to walk around inside, as well as creating more storage — something decided after the company spoke to commercial truck drivers. There isn’t a version with sleeping accommodations, however, but it sounded like a future model change might include this feature.
Two screens dominate either side of the steering wheel, also from the Model 3. On the semi truck, however, the screen to the left controls vehicle functions and settings specific to the trunk portion, while the one on the right has more typical navigation and radio controls. A Tesla official indicated those could be made more configurable in the future.
Enhanced Autopilot is standard
While there are large, conventional truck mirrors mounted outside the vehicle, each interior screen shows images of the sides of the truck through cameras mounted under the exterior mirrors. Tesla says those are part of the Autopilot system (there are also forward-facing cameras mounted at the base of the windscreen), but they will likely help drivers get used to sitting in the middle of the cab.
After the reveal, it’s clear Tesla hopes its innovative packaging and approach will resonate with truck drivers and fleet managers who are tired of the way the vehicles have been designed for decades. After all, it won’t be alone in the electric truck market. Companies with experience in large trucks, such as Cummins and Daimler, have already announced plans for electrified models, with immense pressure coming from cities and countries anxious to reduce air pollution in heavily populated areas.
The appearance of a large truck that breaks into completely uncharted territory for Tesla comes at a time when its last big announcement, the Model 3 sedan, has yet to be delivered to the roughly 500,000 customers who’ve paid $1,000 to reserve the car. Tesla and Musk have been on the defensive over the last several weeks after admitting to “production hell” at the Fremont assembly plant and the Nevada Gigafactory, where the batteries are assembled. Model 3 production hurdles were one of the reasons given when in October Musk postponed the semi truck reveal to this evening. Tesla also reported earlier this month its worst financial quarter ever, losing nearly as much money so far this year as it did in all of 2016.
Telsa has already secured an order for four of its trucks from Meijer Inc, the big-box chain headquartered in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Each reservation required a $5,000 deposit, according to Bloomberg.
What Tesla has done today is shown that it wants to invigorate a segment, rather than just make something to comply with more stringent emissions regulations. Through the design and packaging alone, Tesla is applying some of its most notable brand cues to a type of vehicle it’s never made before. And in the process, it’s trying to do for heavy-duty commercial vehicles what it did for luxury cars — plough forward in its own lane.
Update November 17th, 10:31 AM ET: Corrected the location of Grand Rapids, Michigan.The American Dream
April 7, 2012
If you own a cell phone, you might as well kiss your privacy goodbye. Cell phone companies know more about us than most of us would ever dare to imagine. Your cell phone company is tracking everywhere that you go and it is making a record of everything that you do with your phone. Much worse, there is a good chance that your cell phone company has been selling this information to anyone that is willing to pay the price – including local law enforcement. In addition, it is an open secret that the federal government monitors and records all cell phone calls. The “private conversation” that you are having with a friend today will be kept in federal government databanks for many years to come. The truth is that by using a cell phone, you willingly make yourself a prisoner of a digital world where every move that you make and every conversation that you have is permanently recorded. But it is not just cell phone companies and government agencies that you have to worry about. As you will see at the end of this article, it is incredibly easy for any would-be stalker to hack you and track your every movement using your cell phone. In fact, many spyware programs allow hackers to listen to you through your cell phone even when your cell phone is turned off. Sadly, most cell phone users have absolutely no idea about any of this stuff.
The next time that you get a notice from your cell phone company about “changes” to the privacy policy, you might want to play close attention. Your cell phone company might be about to sell off your most personal information to anyone that is willing to write a big enough check. The following is from a recent CNN article….
Your phone company knows where you live, what websites you visit, what apps you download, what videos you like to watch, and even where you are. Now, some have begun selling that valuable information to the highest bidder. In mid-October, Verizon Wireless changed its privacy policy to allow the company to record customers’ location data and Web browsing history, combine it with other personal information like age and gender, aggregate it with millions of other customers’ data, and sell it on an anonymous basis.
So who is buying this information?
We just don’t know.
But we do know that local law enforcement agencies all over the country are increasingly using cell phone data to nail suspects, and often it is the cell phone companies that are the ones selling them the cell phone data that they need.
According to a recent New York Times article, many local police departments are doing this without getting a warrant first….
“Law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight.”
That same article says that cell phone companies have standard prices that they charge to local law enforcement officials for information that they request….
“Cell carriers, staffed with special law enforcement liaison teams, charge police departments from a few hundred dollars for locating a phone to more than $2,200 for a full-scale wiretap of a suspect.”
So if you are breaking the law, your cell phone may be used to gather evidence and to track you down. In the United States, cell phone companies are required by law to be able to pinpoint the locations of their customers to within 100 meters. So if you are a criminal, your cell phone could be leading the police right to you even as you are reading this article.
Sometimes the police don’t even use the cell phone companies. Recently, the Wall Street Journal ran an article that discussed the capabilities of the “stingray devices” that many local law enforcement agencies are using now.
A “stingray device” acts like a cell phone tower and it can gather any information that a normal cell phone tower can. The following is how a recent Wired article described these “stingrays”….
You make a call on your cellphone thinking the only thing standing between you and the recipient of your call is your carrier’s cellphone tower. In fact, that tower your phone is connecting to just might be a boobytrap set up by law enforcement to ensnare your phone signals and maybe even the content of your calls. So-called stingrays are one of the new high-tech tools that authorities are using to track and identify you. The devices, about the size of a suitcase, spoof a legitimate cellphone tower in order to trick nearby cellphones and other wireless communication devices into connecting to the tower, as they would to a real cellphone tower. The government maintains that the stingrays don’t violate Fourth Amendment rights, since Americans don’t have a legitimate expectation of privacy for data sent from their mobile phones and other wireless devices to a cell tower.
Isn’t that just great?
The attitude that law enforcement agencies seem to have is that once we use a cell phone we are essentially willingly throwing our Fourth Amendment rights out the window.
In some areas of the United States, police are physically extracting data from cell phones any time they want as well. According to the ACLU, state police in Michigan have been using “extraction devices” to download data from the cell phones of motorists that they pull over. This is taking place even if the motorists that are pulled over are not accused of doing anything wrong. The following is how an article posted on CNET News describes the capabilities of these “extraction devices”….
The devices, sold by a company called Cellebrite, can download text messages, photos, video, and even GPS data from most brands of cell phones. The handheld machines have various interfaces to work with different models and can even bypass security passwords and access some information.
Fortunately these “extraction devices” are being challenged in court. Let us hope that they will be banned.
But what local law enforcement officials are doing pales in comparison to what federal agencies are doing.
For example, the FBI claims that it can demand to see your cell phone data whenever it would like to.
Not only that, the FBI has also been remotely activating the microphones on the cell phones of suspects that they want to listen to. This can be done even when the cell phone is turned off….
The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone’s microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations. The technique is called a “roving bug,” and was approved by top U.S. Department of Justice officials for use against members of a New York organized crime family who were wary of conventional surveillance techniques such as tailing a suspect or wiretapping him.
Could the FBI be listening to you right now?
If there is a cell phone in the room they could be.
But some other federal agencies listen to a lot more cell phone calls than the FBI does.
It has been an open secret for a long time that the federal government monitors and records all cell phone calls that are made for national security reasons.
In fact, the federal government is even trying to collect records for calls that have been made in the distant past. Accordingto USA Today, the goal is “to create a database of every call ever made”….
The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.
In addition, the federal government has been constructing the largest data center in the history of the world out in the Utah desert. This data center will be used to house an almost unimaginable amount of digital data (including your cell phone calls). The following is how a recent Wired article described this new facility….
Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.”
But isn’t it illegal for the federal government to intercept our phone calls?
Well, the cold, hard reality of the matter is that they use all kinds of loopholes and legal technicalities to get around that.
For example, if a call is “intercepted” outside of the United States and then routed to a government building inside the United States that is considered to be okay.
Of course that is a bunch of nonsense, but that is how they think.
And it is very frightening thing for governments around the world to be able to monitor and track us like this.
Increasingly, governments around the world are using cell phones to hunt down people that they do not like and haul them off to prison. For example, a recent Bloomberg article detailed how the Iranian government is aggressively using cell phones to crack down on dissidents….
The Iranian officers who knocked out Saeid Pourheydar’s four front teeth also enlightened the opposition journalist. Held |
, and their relation to the world. When scientists perform these operations, however, they will not report that they are doing them to give meaning to terms in a formal axiomatic system. This disconnect between methodology and the details of actual scientific practice would seem to violate the empiricism the Logical Positivists, or Bridgman, were committed to. The view that methodology should correspond to practice (to some extent) has been called historicism, or intuitionism. We turn to these criticisms and responses in section 3.4.[4]
Positivism also had to contend with the recognition that a purely inductivist approach, along the lines of Bacon-Newton-Mill, was untenable. There was no pure observation, for starters. All observation was theory laden. Theory is required to make any observation, therefore not all theory can be derived from observation alone. (See also the entry on theory and observation in science). Even granting an observational basis, Hume had already pointed out that one could not argue for inductive conclusions without begging the question by presuming the success of the inductive method. Likewise, positivist attempts at analyzing how a generalization can be confirmed by observations of its instances were subject to a number of criticisms. In his riddle of induction, Goodman (1965) pointed out that for a set of observations, there will be multiple hypotheses that are equally supported. For example, the observation that all emeralds examined before today were green would support equally the two generalization ‘all emeralds are green’ and ‘all emeralds are grue’ where ‘x is grue’ iff either x has been examined before today and is green or x has not been examined before today and is blue. Goodman suggested that one could distinguish between generalizations that were supported by their instances and those that were not by comparing the entrenchment of their predicates—that is, the degree to which they have formed part of generalizations that have successfully been projected to account for new instances. In this way ‘all emeralds are green’ could be distinguished as more entrenched than ‘all emeralds are grue’. In the ‘Raven Paradox’, Hempel (1965) pointed out that if an observation confirms a given hypothesis, it also confirms all other hypotheses that are logically equivalent to it. For example, the generalization ‘all ravens are black’ is logically equivalent to the generalization ‘all non-black objects are non-ravens’, and the observation of a black raven, a red herring and a white shoe would therefore all confirm the hypothesis that ravens are black. Many find this paradoxical, but Hempel maintained that our intuition is based on a tacit appeal to background knowledge on the prevalence of ravens and non-ravens that prompt us to give more weight to evidence of ravens being black than to evidence of non-black items being non-ravens. (for more on these points of criticism as well as how they have been met, see the entries on confirmation and the problem of induction). We shall return to more recent attempts at explaining how observations can serve to confirm a scientific theory in section 4 below.
The standard starting point for a non-inductive analysis of the logic of confirmation is known as the Hypothetico-Deductive (H-D) method. In its simplest form, the idea is that a theory, or more specifically a sentence of that theory which expresses some hypothesis, is confirmed by its true consequences. As noted in section 2, this method had been advanced by Whewell in the 19th century, as well as Nicod (1924) and others in the 20th century. Often, Hempel’s (1966) description of the H-D method illustrated by the case of Semmelweiss’ inferential procedures in establishing the cause of childbed fever has been presented as a key account of H-D as well as a foil for criticism of the H-D account of confirmation (see, for example, Lipton’s (2004) discussion of inference to the best explanation; also the entry on confirmation). Hempel described Semmelsweiss’ procedure as examining various hypotheses that would answer the question about the cause of childbed fever. Some hypotheses conflicted with observable facts and could be rejected as false immediately. Others needed to be tested experimentally by deducing which observable events should follow if the hypothesis were true (what Hempel called the test implications of the hypothesis), then conducting an experiment and observing whether or not the test implications occurred. If the experiment showed the test implication to be false, the hypothesis could be rejected. On the other hand, if the experiment showed the test implications to be true, this did not prove the hypothesis true. Although the confirmation of a test implication does not verify a hypothesis, Hempel did alow that “it provides at least some support, some corroboration or confirmation for it” (Hempel 1966: 8). The degree of this support then depends on the quantity, variety and precision of the supporting evidence.
Another approach that took off from the difficulties with inductive inference was Karl Popper’s critical rationalism or falsificationism (Popper 1959, 1963). Falsification is deductive and similar to H-D in that it involves scientists deducing observational consequences from the hypothesis under test. For Popper, however, the important point was not whatever confirmation successful prediction offered to the hypotheses but rather the logical asymmetry between such confirmations, which require an inductive inference, versus falsification, which can be based on a deductive inference. This simple opposition was later questioned, by Lakatos, among others. (See the entry on historicist theories of scientific rationality.)
Popper stressed that, regardless of the amount of confirming evidence, we can never be certain that a hypothesis is true without committing the fallacy of affirming the consequent. Instead, Popper introduced the notion of corroboration as a measure for how well a theory or hypothesis has survived previous testing—but without implying that this is also a measure for the probability that it is true.
Popper was also motivated by his doubts about the scientific status of theories like the Marxist theory of history or psycho-analysis, and so wanted to draw a line of demarcation between science and pseudo-science. Popper saw this as an importantly different distinction than demarcating science from metaphysics. The latter demarcation was the primary concern of many logical empiricists. Popper used the idea of falsification to draw a line instead between pseudo and proper science. Science was science because it subjected its theories to rigorous tests which offered a high probability of failing and thus refuting the theory. The aim was not, in this way, to verify a theory. This could be done all too easily, even in cases where observations were at first inconsistent with the deduced consequences of the theory, for example by introducing auxiliary hypotheses designed explicitly to save the theory, so-called ad hoc modifications. This was what he saw done in pseudo-science where the theories appeared to be able to explain anything that happened within the field to which they applied. In contrast, science is risky; if observations showed the predictions from a theory to be absent, the theory would be refuted. Hence, scientific hypotheses must be falsifiable. Not only must there exist some possible observation statement which could falsify the hypothesis or theory, were it observed, (Popper called these the hypothesis’ potential falsifiers) it is crucial to the Popperian scientific method that such falsifications be sincerely attempted on a regular basis.
The more potential falsifiers of a hypothesis, the more falsifiable it would be, and the more the hypothesis claimed. Conversely, hypotheses without falsifiers claimed very little or nothing at all. Originally, Popper thought that this meant the introduction of ad hoc hypotheses only to save a theory should not be countenanced as good scientific method. These would undermine the falsifiabililty of a theory. However, Popper later came to recognize that the introduction of modifications (immunizations, he called them) was often an important part of scientific development. Responding to surprising or apparently falsifying observations often generated important new scientific insights. Popper’s own example was the observed motion of Uranus which originally did not agree with Newtonian predictions, but the ad hoc hypothesis of an outer planet explained the disagreement and led to further falsifiable predictions. Popper sought to reconcile the view by blurring the distinction between falsifiable and not falsifiable, and speaking instead of degrees of testability (Popper 1985: 41f.).
From the 1960s on, sustained meta-methodological criticism emerged that drove the philosophical focus away from scientific method. Something brief about those criticisms must be said here, but recommendations for further reading can be found at the end of the entry.
Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) begins with a well-known shot across the bow for philosophers of science:
History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed. (1962: 1)
The kind of image Kuhn wanted to transform was the a-historical, rational reconstruction sought by many of the Logical Positivists, though Carnap and other positivists were actually quite sympathetic to Kuhn’s views. (See the entry on the Vienna Circle). Kuhn shares with other of his contemporaries, such as Feyerabend and Lakatos, a commitment to a more empirical approach to philosophy of science. Namely, the history of science provides important data, and necessary checks, for philosophy of science, including any theory of scientific method.
An examination of the history of science reveals, according to Kuhn, that scientific development occurs in alternating phases. During normal science, the members of the scientific community adhere to the paradigm in place. Their commitment to the paradigm means a commitment to the puzzles to be solved and the acceptable ways of solving them. Confidence in the paradigm remains so long as steady progress is made in solving the shared puzzles. Method in this normal phase operates within a disciplinary matrix (Kuhn’s later concept of a paradigm) which includes standards for problem solving, as well as defines the range of problems the method should be applied to. An important part of a disciplinary matrix is the set of values which provide the norms and aims for scientific method. The main values that Kuhn identifies are prediction, problem solving, simplicity, consistency, and plausibility.
An important by-product of normal science, however, is the accumulation of puzzles which cannot be solved utilizing the resources of the current paradigm. Once the accumulation of these anomalies has reached some critical mass, it can trigger a communal shift to a new paradigm and a new phase of normal science. Importantly, the values that provide the norms and aims for scientific method may have transformed in the meantime. Method may therefore be relative to discipline, time or place
Feyerabend also identified the aims of science as progress, but argued that any methodological prescription would only stifle that progress (Feyerabend 1988). His arguments are grounded in re-examining accepted “myths” about the history of science. Heroes of science, like Galileo, are shown to be just as reliant on rhetoric and persuasion as they are on reason and demonstration. Others, like Aristotle, are shown to be far more reasonable and far-reaching in their outlooks then they are given credit for. As a consequence, the only rule that could provide what he took to be sufficient freedom was the vacuous “anything goes”. More generally, even the methodological restriction that science is the best way to pursue knowledge, and to increase knowledge, is too restrictive. Feyerabend suggested instead that science might, in fact, be a threat to a free society, because it and its myth had become so dominant (Feyerabend 1978).
An even more fundamental kind of criticism was offered by several sociologists of science from the 1970s onwards who dismissed what they saw as a false distinction between philosophical accounts of the rational development of science and sociological accounts of the irrational mistakes. Instead, they adhered to a symmetry thesis on which any causal explanation of how scientific knowledge is established needs to be symmetrical in explaining truth and falsity, rationality and irrationality, success and mistakes by the same causal factors (see, e.g., Barnes and Bloor 1982, Bloor 1991). Movements in the Sociology of Science, like the Strong Programme, or in the social dimensions and causes of knowledge more generally led to extended and close examination of detailed case studies in contemporary science and its history. (See the entries on the social dimensions of scientific knowledge and social epistemology.) Well-known examinations by Latour and Woolgar (1979/1986), Knorr-Cetina (1981), Pickering (1984), Shapin and Schaffer (1985) seemed to bear out that it was social ideologies (on a macro-scale) or individual interactions and circumstances (on a micro-scale) which were the primary causal factors in determining which beliefs gained the status of scientific knowledge. As they saw it, in other words, explanatory appeals to scientific method were not empirically well grounded.
By the close of the 20th century the search by philosophers for the scientific method was flagging. Nola and Sankey (2000b) could introduce their volume on method by remarking that “For some, the whole idea of a theory of scientific method is yester-year’s debate …”.
Despite the many difficulties that philosophers encountered in trying to providing a clear methodology of conformation (or refutation), still important progress has been made on understanding how observation can provide evidence for a given theory. Work in statistics has been crucial for understanding how theories can be tested empirically, and in recent decades a huge literature has developed that attempts to recast confirmation in Bayesian terms. Here these developments can be covered only briefly, and we refer to the entry on confirmation for further details and references.
Statistics has come to play an increasingly important role in the methodology of the experimental sciences from the 19th century onwards. At that time, statistics and probability theory took on a methodological role as an analysis of inductive inference, and attempts to ground the rationality of induction in the axioms of probability theory have continued throughout the 20th century and in to the present. Developments in the theory of statistics itself, meanwhile, have had a direct and immense influence on the experimental method, including methods for measuring the uncertainty of observations such as the Method of Least Squares developed by Legendre and Gauss in the early 19th century, criteria for the rejection of outliers proposed by Peirce by the mid-19th century, and the significance tests developed by Gosset (a.k.a. “Student”), Fisher, Neyman & Pearson and others in the 1920s and 1930s (see, e.g., Swijtink 1987 for a brief historical overview; and also the entry on C.S. Peirce).
These developments within statistics then in turn led to a reflective discussion among both statisticians and philosophers of science on how to perceive the process of hypothesis testing: whether it was a rigorous statistical inference that could provide a numerical expression of the degree of confidence in the tested hypothesis, or if it should be seen as a decision between different courses of actions that also involved a value component. This led to a major controversy among Fisher on the one side and Neyman and Pearson on the other (see especially Fisher 1955, Neyman 1956 and Pearson 1955, and for analyses of the controversy, e.g., Howie 2002, Marks 2000, Lenhard 2006). On Fisher’s view, hypothesis testing was a methodology for when to accept or reject a statistical hypothesis, namely that a hypothesis should be rejected by evidence if this evidence would be unlikely relative to other possible outcomes, given the hypothesis were true. In contrast, on Neyman and Pearson’s view, the consequence of error also had to play a role when deciding between hypotheses. Introducing the distinction between the error of rejecting a true hypothesis (type I error) and accepting a false hypothesis (type II error), they argued that it depends on the consequences of the error to decide whether it is more important to avoid rejecting a true hypothesis or accepting a false one. Hence, Fisher aimed for a theory of inductive inference that enabled a numerical expression of confidence in a hypothesis. To him, the important point was the search for truth, not utility. In contrast, the Neyman-Pearson approach provided a strategy of inductive behaviour for deciding between different courses of action. Here, the important point was not whether a hypothesis was true, but whether one should act as if it was.
Similar discussions are found in the philosophical literature. On the one side, Churchman (1948) and Rudner (1953) argued that because scientific hypotheses can never be completely verified, a complete analysis of the methods of scientific inference includes ethical judgments in which the scientists must decide whether the evidence is sufficiently strong or that the probability is sufficiently high to warrant the acceptance of the hypothesis, which again will depend on the importance of making a mistake in accepting or rejecting the hypothesis. Others, such as Jeffrey (1956) and Levi (1960) disagreed and instead defended a value-neutral view of science on which scientists should bracket their attitudes, preferences, temperament, and values when assessing the correctness of their inferences. For more details on this value-free ideal in the philosophy of science and its historical development, see Douglas (2009) and Howard (2003).
In recent decades, philosophical discussions of the evaluation of probabilistic hypotheses by statistical inference have largely focused on Bayesianism that understands probability as a measure of a person’s degree of belief in an event, given the available information, and frequentism that instead understands probability as a long-run frequency of a repeatable event. Hence, for Bayesians probabilities refer to a state of knowledge, whereas for frequentists probabilities refer to frequencies of events (see, e.g., Sober 2008, chapter 1 for a detailed introduction to Bayesianism and frequentism as well as to likelihoodism). Bayesianism aims at providing a quantifiable, algorithmic representation of belief revision, where belief revision is a function of prior beliefs (i.e., background knowledge) and incoming evidence. Bayesianism employs a rule based on Bayes’ theorem, a theorem of the probability calculus which relates conditional probabilities. The probability that a particular hypothesis is true is interpreted as a degree of belief, or credence, of the scientist. There will also be a probability and a degree of belief that a hypothesis will be true conditional on a piece of evidence (an observation, say) being true. Bayesianism proscribes that it is rational for the scientist to update their belief in the hypothesis to that conditional probability should it turn out that the evidence is, in fact, observed. Originating in the work of Neyman and Person, frequentism aims at providing the tools for reducing long-run error rates, such as the error-statistical approach developed by Mayo (1996) that focuses on how experimenters can avoid both type I and type II errors by building up a repertoire of procedures that detect errors if and only if they are present. Both Bayesianism and frequentism have developed over time, they are interpreted in different ways by its various proponents, and their relations to previous criticism to attempts at defining scientific method are seen differently by proponents and critics. The literature, surveys, reviews and criticism in this area are vast and the reader is referred to the entries on Bayesian epistemology and confirmation.
Attention to scientific practice, as we have seen, is not itself new. However, the turn to practice in the philosophy of science of late can be seen as a correction to the pessimism with respect to method in philosophy of science in later parts of the 20th century, and as an attempted reconciliation between sociological and rationalist explanations of scientific knowledge. Much of this work sees method as detailed and context specific problem-solving procedures, and methodological analyses to be at the same time descriptive, critical and advisory (see Nickles 1987 for an exposition of this view). The following section contains a survey of some of the practice focuses. In this section we turn fully to topics rather than chronology.
A problem with the distinction between the contexts of discovery and justification that figured so prominently in philosophy of science in the first half of the 20th century (see section 2) is that no such distinction can be clearly seen in scientific activity (see Arabatzis 2006). Thus, in recent decades, it has been recognized that study of conceptual innovation and change should not be confined to psychology and sociology of science, but are also important aspects of scientific practice which philosophy of science should address (see also the entry on scientific discovery). Looking for the practices that drive conceptual innovation has led philosophers to examine both the reasoning practices of scientists and the wide realm of experimental practices that are not directed narrowly at testing hypotheses, that is, exploratory experimentation.
Examining the reasoning practices of historical and contemporary scientists, Nersessian (2008) has argued that new scientific concepts are constructed as solutions to specific problems by systematic reasoning, and that of analogy, visual representation and thought-experimentation are among the important reasoning practices employed. These ubiquitous forms of reasoning are reliable—but also fallible—methods of conceptual development and change. On her account, model-based reasoning consists of cycles of construction, simulation, evaluation and adaption of models that serve as interim interpretations of the target problem to be solved. Often, this process will lead to modifications or extensions, and a new cycle of simulation and evaluation. However, Nersessian also emphasizes that
creative model-based reasoning cannot be applied as a simple recipe, is not always productive of solutions, and even its most exemplary usages can lead to incorrect solutions. (Nersessian 2008: 11)
Thus, while on the one hand she agrees with many previous philosophers that there is no logic of discovery, discoveries can derive from reasoned processes, such that a large and integral part of scientific practice is
the creation of concepts through which to comprehend, structure, and communicate about physical phenomena …. (Nersessian 1987: 11)
Similarly, work on heuristics for discovery and theory construction by scholars such as Darden (1991) and Bechtel & Richardson (1993) present science as problem solving and investigate scientific problem solving as a special case of problem-solving in general. Drawing largely on cases from the biological sciences, much of their focus has been on reasoning strategies for the generation, evaluation, and revision of mechanistic explanations of complex systems.
Addressing another aspect of the context distinction, namely the traditional view that the primary role of experiments is to test theoretical hypotheses according to the H-D model, other philosophers of science have argued for additional roles that experiments can play. The notion of exploratory experimentation was introduced to describe experiments driven by the desire to obtain empirical regularities and to develop concepts and classifications in which these regularities can be described (Steinle 1997, 2002; Burian 1997; Waters 2007)). However the difference between theory driven experimentation and exploratory experimentation should not be seen as a sharp distinction. Theory driven experiments are not always directed at testing hypothesis, but may also be directed at various kinds of fact-gathering, such as determining numerical parameters. Vice versa, exploratory experiments are usually informed by theory in various ways and are therefore not theory-free. Instead, in exploratory experiments phenomena are investigated without first limiting the possible outcomes of the experiment on the basis of extant theory about the phenomena.
In recent years, the development of high throughput instrumentation in molecular biology and neighbouring fields has given rise to a special type of exploratory experimentation that collects and analyses very large amounts of data, and these new ‘omics’ disciplines are often said to represent a break with the ideal of hypothesis-driven science (Burian 2007; Elliott 2007; Waters 2007; O’Malley 2007) and instead described as data-driven research (Leonelli 2012; Strasser 2012) or as a special kind of “convenience experimentation” in which many experiments are done simply because they are extraordinarily convenient to perform (Krohs 2012).
The field of omics just described is possible because of the ability of computers to process, in a reasonable amount of time, the huge quantities of data required. Computers allow for more elaborate experimentation (higher speed, better filtering, more variables, sophisticated coordination and control), but also, through modelling and simulations, might constitute a form of experimentation themselves. Here, too, we can pose a version of the general question of method versus practice: does the practice of using computers fundamentally change scientific method, or merely provide a more efficient means of implementing standard methods?
Because computers can be used to automate measurements, quantifications, calculations, and statistical analyses where, for practical reasons, these operations cannot be otherwise carried out, many of the steps involved in reaching a conclusion on the basis of an experiment are now made inside a “black box”, without the direct involvement or awareness of a human. This has epistemological implications, regarding what we can know, and how we can know it. To have confidence in the results, computer methods are therefore subjected to tests of verification and validation.
The distinction between verification and validation is easiest to characterize in the case of computer simulations. In a typical computer simulation scenario computers are used to numerically integrate differential equations for which no analytic solution is available. The equations are part of the model the scientist uses to represent a phenomenon or system under investigation. Verifying a computer simulation means checking that the equations of the model are being correctly approximated. Validating a simulation means checking that the equations of the model are adequate for the inferences one wants to make on the basis of that model.
A number of issues related to computer simulations have been raised. The identification of validity and verification as the testing methods has been criticized. Oreskes et al. (1994) raise concerns that “validiation”, because it suggests deductive inference, might lead to over-confidence in the results of simulations. The distinction itself is probably too clean, since actual practice in the testing of simulations mixes and moves back and forth between the two (Weissart 1997; Parker 2008a; Winsberg 2010). Computer simulations do seem to have a non-inductive character, given that the principles by which they operate are built in by the programmers, and any results of the simulation follow from those in-built principles in such a way that those results could, in principle, be deduced from the program code and its inputs. The status of simulations as experiments has therefore been examined (Kaufmann and Smarr 1993; Humphreys 1995; Hughes 1999; Norton and Suppe 2001). This literature considers the epistemology of these experiments: what we can learn by simulation, and also the kinds of justifications which can be given in applying that knowledge to the “real” world. (Mayo 1996; Parker 2008b). As pointed out, part of the advantage of computer simulation derives from the fact that huge numbers of calculations can be carried out without requiring direct observation by the experimenter/simulator. At the same time, many of these calculations are approximations to the calculations which would be performed first-hand in an ideal situation. Both factors introduce uncertainties into the inferences drawn from what is observed in the simulation.
For many of the reasons described above, computer simulations do not seem to belong clearly to either the experimental or theoretical domain. Rather, they seem to crucially involve aspects of both. This has led some authors, such as Fox Keller (2003: 200) to argue that we ought to consider computer simulation a “qualtitatively different way of doing science”. The literature in general tends to follow Kaufmann and Smarr (1993) in referring to computer simulation as a “third way” for scientific methodology (theoretical reasoning and experimental practice are the first two ways.). It should also be noted that the debates around these issues have tended to focus on the form of computer simulation typical in the physical sciences, where models are based on dynamical equations. Other forms of simulation might not have the same problems, or have problems of their own (see the entry on computer simulations in science).
Despite philosophical disagreements, the idea of the scientific method still figures prominently in contemporary discourse on many different topics, both within science and in society at large. Often, reference to scientific method is used in ways that convey either the legend of a single, universal method characteristic of all science, or grants to a particular method or set of methods privilege as a special ‘gold standard’, often with reference to particular philosophers to vindicate the claims. Discourse on scientific method also typically arises when there is a need to distinguish between science and other activities, or for justifying the special status conveyed to science. In these areas, the philosophical attempts at identifying a set of methods characteristic for scientific endeavors are closely related to the philosophy of science’s classical problem of demarcation (see the entry on science and pseudo-science) and to the philosophical analysis of the social dimension of scientific knowledge and the role of science in democratic society.
One of the settings in which the legend of a single, universal scientific method has been particularly strong is science education (see, e.g., Bauer 1992; McComas 1996; Wivagg & Allchin 2002).[5] Often, ‘the scientific method’ is presented in textbooks and educational web pages as a fixed four or five step procedure starting from observations and description of a phenomenon and progressing over formulation of a hypothesis which explains the phenomenon, designing and conducting experiments to test the hypothesis, analyzing the results, and ending with drawing a conclusion. Such references to a universal scientific method can be found in educational material at all levels of science education (Blachowicz 2009), and numerous studies have shown that the idea of a general and universal scientific method often form part of both students’ and teachers’ conception of science (see, e.g., Aikenhead 1987; Osborne et al. 2003).
Although occasionally phrased with reference to the H-D method, important historical roots of the legend in science education of a single, universal scientific method are the American philosopher and psychologist Dewey’s account of inquiry in How We Think (1910) and the British mathematician Karl Pearson’s account of science in Grammar of Science (1892). On Dewey’s account, inquiry is divided into the five steps of
(i) a felt difficulty, (ii) its location and definition, (iii) suggestion of a possible solution, (iv) development by reasoning of the bearing of the suggestions, (v) further observation and experiment leading to its acceptance or rejection. (Dewey 1910: 72)
Similarly, on Pearson’s account, scientific investigations start with measurement of data and observation of their correction and sequence from which scientific laws can be discovered with the aid of creative imagination. These laws have to be subject to criticism, and their final acceptance will have equal validity for “all normally constituted minds”. Both Dewey’s and Pearson’s accounts should be seen as generalized abstractions of inquiry and not restricted to the realm of science—although both Dewey and Pearson referred to their respective accounts as ‘the scientific method’.
Occasionally, scientists make sweeping statements about a simple and distinct scientific method, as exemplified by Feynman’s simplified version of a conjectures and refutations method presented, for example, in the last of his 1964 Cornell Messenger lectures.[6] However, just as often scientists have come to the same conclusion as recent philosophy of science that there is not any unique, easily described scientific method. For example, the physicist and Nobel Laureate Weinberg described in the paper “The Methods of Science … And Those By Which We Live” (1995) how
The fact that the standards of scientific success shift with time does not only make the philosophy of science difficult; it also raises problems for the public understanding of science. We do not have a fixed scientific method to rally around and defend. (1995: 8)
Reference to the scientific method has also often been used to argue for the scientific nature or special status of a particular activity. Philosophical positions that argue for a simple and unique scientific method as a criterion of demarcation, such as Popperian falsification, have often attracted practitioners who felt that they had a need to defend their domain of practice. For example, references to conjectures and refutation as the scientific method are abundant in much of the literature on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM)—alongside the competing position that CAM, as an alternative to conventional biomedicine, needs to develop its own methodology different from that of science.
Also within mainstream science, reference to the scientific method is used in arguments regarding the internal hierarchy of disciplines and domains. A frequently seen argument is that research based on the H-D method is superior to research based on induction from observations because in deductive inferences the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises. (See, e.g., Parascandola (1998) for an analysis of how this argument has been made to downgrade epidemiology compared to the laboratory sciences.) Similarly, based on an examination of the practices of major funding institutions such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Biomedical Sciences Research Practices (BBSRC) in the UK, O’Malley et al. (2009) have argued that funding agencies seem to have a tendency to adhere to the view that the primary activity of science is to test hypotheses, while descriptive and exploratory research is seen as merely preparatory activities that are valuable only insofar as they fuel hypothesis-driven research.
In some areas of science, scholarly publications are structured in a way that may convey the impression of a neat and linear process of inquiry from stating a question, devising the methods by which to answer it, collecting the data, to drawing a conclusion from the analysis of data. For example, the codified format of publications in most biomedical journals known as the IMRAD format (Introduction, Method, Results, Analysis, Discussion) is explicitly described by the journal editors as “not an arbitrary publication format but rather a direct reflection of the process of scientific discovery” (see the so-called “Vancouver Recommendations”, ICMJE 2013: 11). However, scientific publications do not in general reflect the process by which the reported scientific results were produced. For example, under the provocative title “Is the scientific paper a fraud?”, Medawar argued that scientific papers generally misrepresent how the results have been produced (Medawar 1963/1996). Similar views have been advanced by philosophers, historians and sociologists of science (Gilbert 1976; Holmes 1987; Knorr-Cetina 1981; Schickore 2008; Suppe 1998) who have argued that scientists’ experimental practices are messy and often do not follow any recognizable pattern. Publications of research results, they argue, are retrospective reconstructions of these activities that often do not preserve the temporal order or the logic of these activities, but are instead often constructed in order to screen off potential criticism (see Schickore 2008 for a review of this work).
Philosophical positions on the scientific method have also made it into the court room, especially in the US where judges have drawn on philosophy of science in deciding when to confer special status to scientific expert testimony. A key case is Daubert vs Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals (92-102, 509 U.S. 579, 1993). In this case, the Supreme Court argued in its 1993 ruling that trial judges must ensure that expert testimony is reliable, and that in doing this the court must look at the expert’s methodology to determine whether the proffered evidence is actually scientific knowledge. Further, referring to works of Popper and Hempel the court stated that
ordinarily, a key question to be answered in determining whether a theory or technique is scientific knowledge … is whether it can be (and has been) tested. (Justice Blackmun, Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals; see Other Internet Resources for a link to the opinion)
But as argued by Haack (2005a,b, 2010) and by Foster & Hubner (1999), by equating the question of whether a piece of testimony is reliable with the question whether it is scientific as indicated by a special methodology, the court was producing an inconsistent mixture of Popper’s and Hempel’s philosophies, and this has later led to considerable confusion in subsequent case rulings that drew on the Daubert case (see Haack 2010 for a detailed exposition).
The difficulties around identifying the methods of science are also reflected in the difficulties of identifying scientific misconduct in the form of improper application of the method or methods of science. One of the first and most influential attempts at defining misconduct in science was the US definition from 1989 that defined misconduct as
fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, or other practices that seriously deviate from those that are commonly accepted within the scientific community. (Code of Federal Regulations, part 50, subpart A., August 8, 1989, italics added)
However, the “other practices that seriously deviate” clause was heavily criticized because it could be used to suppress creative or novel science. For example, the National Academy of Science stated in their report Responsible Science (1992) that it
wishes to discourage the possibility that a misconduct complaint could be lodged against scientists based solely on their use of novel or unorthodox research methods. (NAS: 27)
This clause was therefore later removed from the definition. For an entry into the key philosophical literature on conduct in science, see Shamoo & Resnick (2009).
The question of the source of the success of science has been at the core of philosophy since the beginning of modern science. If viewed as a matter of epistemology more generally, scientific method is a part of the entire history of philosophy. Over that time, science and whatever methods its practioners may employ have changed dramatically. Today, many philosophers have taken up the banners of pluralism or of practice to focus on what are, in effect, fine-grained and contextually limited examinations of scientific method. Others hope to shift perspectives in order to provide a renewed general account of what characterizes the activity we call science.
One such perspective has been offered recently by Hoyningen-Huene (2008, 2013), who argues from the history of philosophy of science that after three lengthy phases of characterizing science by its method, we are now in a phase where the belief in the existence of a positive scientific method has eroded and what has been left to characterize science is only its fallibility. First was a phase from Plato and Aristotle up until the 17th century where the specificity of scientific knowledge was seen in its absolute certainty established by proof from evident axioms; next was a phase up to the mid-19th century in which the means to establish the certainty of scientific knowledge had been generalized to include inductive procedures as well. In the third phase, which lasted until the last decades of the 20th century, it was recognized that empirical knowledge was fallible, but it was still granted a special status due to its distinctive mode of production. But now in the fourth phase, according to Hoyningen-Huene, historical and philosophical studies have shown how “scientific methods with the characteristics as posited in the second and third phase do not exist” (2008: 168) and there is no longer any consensus among philosophers and historians of science about the nature of science. For Hoyningen-H |
a few of our retail outlets for some months now, and the response has been encouraging. This has allowed us to go ahead and introduce it formally," an executive director from an oil marketing company said on condition of anonymity as he is not allowed to talk to reporters.
Currently, state-run fuel retailers—Indian Oil Corp. Ltd (IOCL), Bharat Petroleum Corp. Ltd (BPCL) and Hindustan Petroleum Corp. Ltd (HPCL)—revise petrol and diesel prices on the 1st and 15th of every month based on average international price of the fuel in the preceding fortnight and the currency exchange rate.
“Due to the fortnightly revision of fuel prices, petroleum dealers were applying breaks (not lifting fuel daily) on uplifting of fuel. If the prices go up on the 1st or 15th of every month, there would be a rush to uplift products, else, the upliftment would be impacted. This would result in losses for OMCs and we wanted that this price predictability should go away. So dynamic pricing will be a good bet," said a senior official from an oil marketing company on the condition of anonymity.
Shares of Indian Oil fell 0.07% to Rs408.90 on BSE, Bharat Petroleum rose 1% to Rs717.60, Hindustan Petroleum rose 1% to Rs542.45 while India’s benchmark Sensex fell 0.49% to 29,643.48 points.
Although state-run fuel retailers have the capability to revise petrol and diesel prices on a daily basis, what needs to be monitored is how consumers react to price volatility, industry experts say.
“If there is heightened volatility in global markets due to geopolitical developments, it could get reflected in domestic retail prices too. Therefore, companies are doing the right thing in testing the model in pilot projects to see how its impact and consumer response. In the medium- to long-term, daily price revision may be a good idea as is practised elsewhere," said R.S. Butola, a former chairman of Indian Oil.
Indian Oil chairman B. Ashok and Hindustan Petroleum chairman and managing director M.K Surana didn’t immediately respond to phone calls seeking comment.
Besides, global fuel prices and currency exchange rate, central and state taxes account for a major part of the fuel prices. It accounts for half of retail petrol price and 46% of retail diesel price. The central government collected Rs64,509 crore from petrol as excise duty in 2016-17 up to end-February, 20% more than what was collected in the whole of FY16. Excise receipts from diesel jumped 36% in the same period to Rs1.37 trillion.Just three days after Lady Gaga took home a Golden Globe for her performance on American Horror Story: Hotel, the FX anthology series went up but ended down. While jumping 22% in both the 18-49 demo and viewership from its January 6 episode, AHS: Hotel hit a finale low with the end of its fifth season.
Wrapping up lives, story lines and pointing towards the future, with a bit of what seems like a Golden Globes bounce in action, the 71-minute “Be Our Guest” season ender drew 2.25 million total viewers and a 1.1 rating with 1.45 million among adults 18-49.
That is a Live + Same Day finale low among both viewers and the demo for the Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk created series that also stars Kathy Bates, Denis O’Hare, Matt Bomer, Sarah Paulson and Angela Bassett, among others. The previous low was the American Horror Story: Asylum finale of January 23, 2013. That second season ender pulled in 2.29 million viewers with a 1.3 rating among the demo. Finale-to-finale, last night’s Hotel ender was down 27% among the 18-49s from the January 21, 2015 AHS: Freak Show ender. Viewershipwise, Wednesday’s Season 5 finale declined 30% from the Season 4 finale.
Like several other outlets, FX is more inclined to look at their shows through the lens of delayed viewing. Under the barometer of Live + 3 ratings, last week’s AHS: Hotel saw a 123% among the 18-49s and a 115% lift in total viewers. Over, the run of AHS: Hotel, up to and including last week’s episode, the show has averaged an 87% jump among adults 18-49 in Live + 3 ratings and moved up 83% in its total audience. That viewership has been around 5.62 million in the DVR metric with 3.78 million in the key demo.
To pull back to a larger perspective, according to FX, AHS: Hotel is averaging 10.5 million total viewers across all linear and non-linear platforms. Looking at digital streaming in isolation, AHS: Hotel is up 21% in viewers over AHS: Freak Show – so maybe in a season or two we’ll be seeing AHS: Online?
A sixth season of American Horror Story is set to debut later this year.FILE - This Nov. 1, 2012, file photo shows former Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel speaking in Omaha, Neb. President Barack Obama's possible pick of Republican Chuck Hagel to run the Pentagon raises serious concerns among some of his former Senate colleagues, who question his pronouncements on Iraq, Israel and the Middle East. The reservations publicly expressed by a few Republicans and even a Democrat hardly rival the unyielding GOP objections to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, who withdrew from consideration last week for secretary of state in the face of relentless attacks mostly over her public statements about the Sept. 11 assault on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik, File)
You might have seen that on Monday President Obama will likely nominate former Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, to be Secretary of Defense.
But what you probably haven't seen -- because everyone has forgotten -- is that back in 2007, Chuck Hagel went totally crazy and told the truth about our invasion of Iraq. Here's what he said:
People say we're not fighting for oil. Of course we are. They talk about America's national interest. What the hell do you think they're talking about? We're not there for figs.
Whew! Wouldn't it put a spring in your step to read the news each morning and see Hagel's name? If he's willing to say that about Iraq, who knows what he'll bust out with next! He might mention that the sky is blue, or two plus two equals four... or even that we should change the name of the Department of Defense back to what it was before World War II -- the Department of War.
Now, I'm not saying Hagel is the best qualified choice for Secretary of Defense. (That would be Andrew Bacevich.) I'm not even saying he's the best qualified senator or ex-senator. (There are 19 of those -- the surviving senators who voted against invading Iraq in the fall of 2002. Hagel voted yes.)
But what I am saying is: thank you, Chuck Hagel. We may not agree on much, but we agree that politicians should tell the truth about war and peace and life and death. We're all in your debt for that -- especially since, when it comes to Iraq and oil, President Obama's first Republican Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, couldn't manage it.by Rob Moseley
Editor, GoDucks.com
Oregon kicked off the second week of preseason camp this morning with the first of two practices today.
Venue: Outdoor practice fields
Format: Shells
Situations: Another morning heavy on positional drills and play installation, as the first session Saturday was. Special teams did some coverage drills, and there were field goals to close it out.
Highlights: The day concluded with an 11-on-11 situation, and the offense trying to drive the ball for a score. The first unit managed to get on the board with an : The day concluded with an 11-on-11 situation, and the offense trying to drive the ball for a score. The first unit managed to get on the board with an Alejandro Maldonado field goal, but the defense got the better of it when the twos and threes were out there.
The day ended with the field-goal kickers getting a shot from 47 yards out, and the entire team and staff huddled closely around them as a distraction. In this case it was advantage, crowd, as Matt Wogan Hayden Crook and Maldonado were unable to connect. This was just the second day of work for kickers with the full team, rather than off on their own, and there will no doubt be many more chances for them to try to deliver.
Most entertaining period: Getting the chance now to watch : Getting the chance now to watch Marcus Mariota not just on Saturdays but each day in practice is something I won't take for granted. During seven-on-seven this morning, he was as locked-in as you can be. Three completions to Eric Dungy, another to Daryle Hawkins, and a rifled screen that was deftly hauled in by Thomas Tyner, who spent a series of the drill with the ones. There was also a nifty short pass to De'Anthony Thomas who made for the sideline and then, just as Ifo Ekpre-Olomu arrived to make the "tackle," deftly cut back and was off to the races.
After the series with Tyner, Mariota took a minute on the sideline to put his arm around the freshman's shoulders and talk through a couple things. It was a subtle example of what a leader Mariota is. After each series by a unit in seven-on-seven, they're supposed to run off the field, touch the sideline and then join the rest of the offense in the middle of the field, behind the play. Most guys run off on their own, quickly touch the sideline and then head back. Mariota is first off the field, but then waits at the sideline to greet each of the other offensive guys before returning to the field. A small detail, but worth noting I thought.
Other observations: Tight end : Tight end John Mundt is starting to remind me of Dungy in that, while I don't have near the technical knowledge or insight to say how well he's doing in other facets, man, can he catch the ball. Another nice grab today during seven-on-seven, in traffic and despite the pass being rifled at him. … Freshman quarterback Damion Hobbs reminds me, in terms of body type, of former NFL quarterback David Garrard. … Dior Mathis anticipated a throw for a pretty interception during seven-on-seven.
Up next: The Ducks will be back outside for another practice this afternoon.CNN said that it “passed” on having top Donald Trump aide Kellyanne Conway appear on the network’s “State of the Union” program on Sunday.
Conway denied in a tweet posted Monday that she was passed over for the show as a result of issues with her “credibility.”
“False,” Conway tweeted, linking to a Mediaite story citing reporting by the New York Times. “I could do no live Sunday shows this week BC of family. Plus, I was invited onto CNN today & tomorrow.”
CNN refuted her claim, saying that Conway “was offered to SOTU on Sunday by the White House” but the network turned down the offer.
“We passed,” the CNN communications team tweeted. “Those are the facts.”
MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski suggested that “Morning Joe” had done the same.
“You are not the first,” she tweeted.
False. I could do no live Sunday shows this week BC of family. Plus, I was invited onto CNN today & tomorrow. CNN Brass on those emails https://t.co/LVOUWIytLK — Kellyanne Conway (@KellyannePolls) February 6, 2017Bloomberg Charles Evans, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, sees no lift-off until 2016
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Charles Evans, a leading dove on the Federal Reserve, said Friday that he was able to support the latest policy statement because it did not rule out the U.S. central bank keep rates at zero for a lengthy period.
“I believe we would be well served by being cautious and be in no hurry to raise interest rates,” Evans told reporters after an event at the Brookings Institution.
Evans said the statement was “serviceable” and was easily consistent with the Fed not raising rates ”for quite some time” or “with raising rates in June if conditions warrant.”
Evans said the key for a move is whether inflation picking up.
On Wednesday, the Fed dropped the word “patient” from its statement, and signaled that a rate hike will be on the table as soon as June. In a separate appearance, Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockhart said a rate hike would be in play at the June, July and September meetings.
Several analysts thought that Evans would dissent from Wednesday’s statement.
He told reporters that he still thinks that a rate hike in 2016 is more likely than an earlier move based on the economic conditions as he sees them.
The Chicago Fed president dismissed suggestions that the Fed might want to raise interest rates above zero to deflate any potential asset bubbles. He said that macro-prudential and regulatory tools were the best way to combat financial market excesses.
He said he was not worried about volatile financial markets once the Fed actually does raise interest rates.
In a paper released Thursday, Evans argued that the biggest risk for the Fed was a premature rate hike damaging the economy and forcing the Fed to retreat and lower rates.The AAA overnight survey of gasoline prices found that the national average price for gasoline is at $4.108, and the cheapest gasoline in the U.S. is still $3.930. With prices that high, SUV drivers are increasingly finding themselves members of an unfortunate group, the triple-digit club, people whose large gas tanks and low mileage make every fill-up cost over $100. As more and more people have budget for high fuel prices, their support for environmental conservation has fallen and their support for more energy development and exploration has increased. According to last week’s Pew Research Center for the People and the Press report, support for energy conservation has fallen 10% and support for more energy exploration and development (drilling, mining, etc.) has increased by +12% from February to June and support for opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling has increased 8% to 50% of the survey respondents.
If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that 60% of the country (up 6% from February) supports new energy development, while 34% support protecting the environment. The problem is convincing people that the two aren’t mutually incompatible, and that “new energy development” cannot equal “drill more oil and gas wells, mine more coal, and grow more corn for ethanol”. And with most of the energy technologies that have been featured by the Carboholic over the months, new energy development is eminently possible without relying on even more coal or natural gas power plants and more domestic oil production (that won’t come on line for at least a decade anyway).
———-
High oil prices aren’t going away anytime soon no matter what Congress and the President do to try and bring them down again. Plans that supposedly curb speculation are specious at best. Plans to increase oil supplies are too far out in the future to matter, and humanity needs to wean itself off oil, not drill more to extend the pain. The best way to adapt to high oil prices is to reduce the amount that you drive, and the best way to do that is to live close enough to where you work and shop that you don’t need to drive and can take mass transit, walk/run, bicycle, or use some method other than the single occupant automobile. The problem is that twenty years or so of low gasoline prices has not only convinced people to buy overly-powered and over-large vehicles, but low gasoline prices also created the low population density suburb. And so long as people live in suburbs and commute long distances, oil demand and prices will both remain high.
According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, cities are exploring how to increase their population density as an answer to high oil prices, falling home values, traffic, and the problems associated with urban sprawl. The Journal article is a detailed look at the city of Sacramento’s “smart growth” plans and how they’re progressing, especially now that a California State University-Sacramento poll found 12% of Sacramento-area respondents had moved or changed jobs to shorten their commute.
According to the article, Mike McKeever, the head of Sacramento’s regional planning agency, is he person most directly responsible for the largely successful, albeit voluntary, push for new development to become transit-focused and higher density than the usual single-family home on a large suburban lot. He developed a software program that enabled attendees at public planning meetings to observe the changes in traffic, job growth, and pollution as they changed the amount and type of housing, and in the process he convinced not only the regional city governments to do things his way, but he also largely convinced the public and property developers too. The reason it worked was that developers and governments realized that their property values would be less susceptible to to housing bubbles and their inevitable pops if cities had a mix of residential development – apartments, lofts, condos, and single-family homes. People realized that denser development with local transit access would enable them to get around Sacramento to and from their jobs, and that having groceries, schools, restaurants, and shopping within walking distance would also reduce the need for a car. And as a result, Sacramento is now being looked to by much of the rest of the country, where suburban sprawl still dominates, as a possible template for a new American culture, without the singular focus on the automobile.
The popping of the housing bubble combined with high oil prices may well be the Armageddon bell for the suburb, and if that’s the case, the U.S. probably has a great deal more economic pain to go through before we’ve transitioned our culture sufficiently away from a car culture. But as Sacramento-based architect David Mogavero said in the Journal article, “Expensive oil is going to transform the American culture as radically as cheap oil did.”
———-
A couple of weeks ago, the Carboholic reported that the United States Bureau of Land Management (BLM) had issued a 22-month moratorium on all new solar power generation permits on federal land in the desert southwest. As of July 3, the BLM has reversed that position and will continue to accept new solar permit requests while the 22-month environmental study is in process. According to the New York Times article, lobbying by the solar power industry, citizens groups, and interested members of Congress pressured the BLM to reverse course for the time being.
———-
Generally speaking, flat screen liquid crystal display (LCD) computer monitors consume less power and generate less heat than equivalently sized cathode-ray tube (CRT) monitors. Not only does this mean that your monitor costs less to run, but because it’s operating cooler, LCD monitors require less energy than CRT monitors for climate control around the computer station, saving yet more money. Its for these excellent reasons that most energy conservation experts claim that switching over to an LCD monitor is better for energy conservation and thus also better for addressing global heating. Unfortunately, it may not be quite that simple. According to an article in the Telegraph last week, an industrial compound used in the manufacturing of LCD products known as “NF3” is a potent, and totally unregulated, greenhouse gas.
There are two problems with NF3. The first is that it’s 17,000 times more potent a greenhouse gas (GHG) than carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), and according to the Telegraph article, Professor Michael Prather from the University of California at Irvine estimates that the 4000 tons of NF3 emitted yearly equates to roughly 67 million tons of CO 2. The second problem is that NF3, along with many other synthetic industrial compounds, are totally unregulated. If they weren’t used or hadn’t been invented when the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated, they weren’t regulated accordingly. Thankfully, however, the Telegraph article quoted a spokesman for the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs as saying “This is an issue that affects every country, and we’re working with other members of EU to ensure that all new synthetic greenhouse gases, including NF3, are covered as part of any future UN climate change agreements.”
So if you’re inclined to estimate your computer monitor’s CO 2 emissions, don’t forget to add the additional emissions of industrial GHGs too. Assuming you can figure out how much of which gas is emitted per monitor, that is.
———-
According to the Dayton Daily News, a new project undertaken by the Midwest Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership aims to demonstrate the commercial feasibility of CO 2 sequestration in a huge underground saline aquifer, the Mount Simon Sandstone formation. The test will compress and inject 1 million tons of CO 2 produced as a byproduct of the Andersons Marathon Ethanol LLC corn ethanol plant and inject them into the aquifer to gather data on both sequestration technologies and whether the Mount Simon Sandstone formation aquifer will safely store CO 2 without causing small earthquakes. If the test, slated to be completed in 2014, is successful, then much of the rest of the aquifer may also be viable for carbon sequestration. And if that’s the case, the National Energy Technology Laboratory (part of the U.S. Department of Energy) estimates that the aquifers could hold up to 653 billion tons of CO 2. For reference, if we use the U.S. Energy Information Agency’s CO 2 emissions data from 2005 as the baseline, the aquifer could store as much as 108 years worth of emissions."You know what I've noticed?
Is that no one panics when things go "according to plan"
even if the plan is horrifying.
If tomorrow I tell the press that like a gang banger will get shot or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up..
Nobody panics,
because ‘it's all part of the plan.'" -
The Dark Knight, The Joker played by Heath Ledger
Miami did what they were supposed to in week 1 against an undersized and not as talented 1AA team in Bethune-Cookman. The Canes held BCC to less than 100 total yards and zero scores on offense and on the reverse side bludgeoned them to the tune of 45 points. Yes, Miami didn’t start out so well and will need to "bring it" Friday night against the high scoring FAU Owls but Miami fans should be encouraged by what they saw and have a positive outlook with what’s ahead.
The reasons for my optimism centers specifically on how the team is playing (based on one game), the way their schedule is playing out (what I like calling "the pacing of it") and the injuries that are occurring to their upcoming opponents.
As stated in the opening salvo, Miami played efficiently and effectively in their first game. I wouldn’t say I was overly impressed with the offense. However, what I noticed was that as the game went on Kaaya found his go-to target through the air in Rashaun Scott and it seemed that maybe offensive coordinator James Coley may have found his rhythm on the ground with three headed monsters of Mark Walton, Joe Yearby and Trayone Gray.
On the defensive side of the ball I’m more bullish. I think the offense maybe a little suspect but I believe the defense is for real. Compared to the last few years where Miami’s offense has had to pace the defense (a la the NC State game three or four seasons ago) I think this year the defense may take a leadership role and have to dictate the tempo for this team. By the end of this season I think the Miami defensive line will collectively be one of the better units in the ACC. Will one of the guys rack up seven to ten sacks? I don’t think so but I do believe collectively they’ll put up good numbers and limit the run game of their opponents.
Besides the team itself getting better and starting to believe in themselves I believe their schedule is setting up perfectly for them to succeed. If a team has four out of conference games scheduled, odds are an AD wants to stagger them from easiest to hardest, Miami has done that. They just beat up on a 1AA opponent. They play a non-power five conference team this upcoming week. They then play a mentally drained Nebraska team at home in two weeks and lastly they play a potentially up and coming Cincinnati team on their turf up north. The pacing is there for the young Canes to learn as they go, to adjust and get better. They aren’t playing Ohio State in week two or at Louisville to open up. The schedule is trending in Miami’s favor, make no mistake.
Lastly, every week brings injuries; you just hope it’s not your team that makes the hospital ward’s list. This weekend we saw Pittsburgh’s James Connor go down for the season, Virginia Tech’s Michael Brewer say "it will take a lot more to injure me" then two plays later get crunched and be done for at least four to eight weeks and lastly see junior phenom wide receiver Mike Williams crash into the field goal post and receive a fractured bone in his neck which will sideline him for possibly the entire season. The point is not to wish for injuries. All I’m saying is that they’re a part of the game and right now many important players on Miami’s upcoming schedule are losing big pieces of their puzzle.
We’re only one week into this journey but, to me anyways, the long term outlook looks pretty bright for the Canes. I am a tad bit worried about their upcoming opponent in FAU but it should be a good litmus test for the Canes. If the Canes are as good as I think they can be then the defense should shut down the opposition (which will be a tall task, FAU can play ball) and the offense I think will need to find their identity during this game like they did in the second half last week. If Brad Kaaya and James Coley can get into a rhythm, watch out.Fighters all have something in common that goes much deeper than some cliché about brotherhood among martial artists, or all of them growing up watching The Karate Kid and old Bruce Lee movies before strapping on a set of gloves for the first time.
The real heart of fighting comes down to competition—one winner and one loser—and it's pretty safe to say no man or woman who steps inside the cage or ring ever wants to walk out defeated.
Fighters have a visceral need to succeed.
Certainly, a fight that fans love or the bosses adore will lessen the sting of defeat just a little bit, and a nice fat bonus check from the higher-ups never hurts either.
But it's hard to imagine that any fighter on planet Earth wouldn't give up the accolades or even a little bit of cash to erase a loss and replace it with a win.
It's the very nature of that beast, that thirst that cannot be satisfied, that is the heart of a fighter's need to avenge a loss.
UFC welterweight Carlos Condit understands that concept all too well.
While the former interim champion hasn't lost many fights during his nearly 11-year career, any time a fighter has gotten the best of him, he's always yearned for a chance to right that wrong.
It's impossible to know if Condit will ever get the chance to avenge all of his past losses, but he gets at least one crack at his next fight when he takes on Martin Kampmann at UFC Fight Night 27 in Indianapolis.
When the pair of welterweights first fought, it was Condit's UFC debut after his time spent as champion in the WEC. The two battled it out in a war of attrition over 15 minutes. The judges were split in their decision, but ultimately the win came for Kampmann.
The fact that the fight was so close haunts Condit even more than if he truly knew he just lost to the better man that night.
"I would definitely agree with that," Condit said when asked if rematches are always important to a fighter. "Especially close fights, close decision fights. Judging is subjective, and especially in the cases of a split decision, a lot of people would have scored (the first Kampmann) fight the other way around.
"I felt I could do better, and I guess anyone that loses a fight feels they could do better, but I definitely felt I could have done better. I'm excited that I have the opportunity to come in and fight a better Martin Kampmann. I think he's improved quite a bit from our first fight, but I know I have as well."
There's something ingrained in human nature to be competitive. Whether it's a friendly game of chess or playing video games online, everybody wants to win, to feel that sense of accomplishment in victory. Now, if you take that feeling, multiply it 1,000 times over, and compound that over a lifetime, it might equal out to the competitive spirit flowing through the average MMA fighter.
Unlike other sports like basketball where there are 82 games in a season, in MMA there's rarely a second chance to relive a first mistake. One fight can be the difference between greatness or mediocrity, having a job or not paying the bills. Even if a loss doesn't necessarily have longstanding ramifications, it's still a feeling a fighter like Condit never wants to suffer through.
"We’re all super-competitive people to be at this level of the sport," Condit stated. "Everybody is a competitor at heart, and none of us take losing lightly. We always want redemption and revenge."
When Condit attempts to satisfy the anguish he feels from his last loss to Kampmann, the look on his face probably won't be much different than any other time he steps into the cage.
Condit is usually a laid-back, very soft-spoken person carrying a veneer that quietly screams calm, cool and collected. It's the moment that the cage door closes that Condit curls his lip, bites down on his mouthpiece and proceeds to unleash violence on his opponents so viciously that when it's over, they are left blood-soaked, bruised and looking like they are ready for a guest spot on The Walking Dead.
Condit also goes through the rigors of those battles, so when a decision is read that doesn't lead with his name as the winner, it's like a gunshot to the gut that bleeds out for days.
The former UFC champion never wants to feel that way again. When he's done with Kampmann this time, he plans on leaving little doubt who stands as victor and who might need a plastic surgeon when the fight is over.
"I think we're two of the best welterweights in our primes. We're both hungry, we're both coming off losses and we're trying to get back in the win column," Condit said. "That's going to make for an explosive combination.
"We had a close fight the first time around, we're both looking for redemption in a sense. A bigger part of that is we're both coming off losses, so we're trying to get back on track to our goals of being the best, being champion."
Condit's focus is like never before because he's had to taste two defeats in a row, something he's only experienced one other time in his career.
The aftershock from the last time Condit lost two in a row?
He proceeded to win eight consecutive fights while becoming the WEC welterweight champion, eviscerating all eight opponents by TKO or submission. The loss that stopped his streak the last time was the fight against Martin Kampmann.
Condit certainly remembers, and he will remind Kampmann of it as well with every punch thrown and every kick landed until the referee is tackling him and screaming, "Stop, the fight is over!"
Damon Martin is a Featured Columnist for Bleacher Report, and all quotes were obtained firsthand unless otherwise noted.I want to point this out for a number of reasons. First, it’s important to all people whom the issue affects, not just the individuals, but their family members, loved ones, friends and associates. It’s not just about the transgendered, or the LGBT community as a whole, but the world around them as well. Anyone who cares about anyone in this community is affected by these issues. That’s a whole lot of people.
Second, it’s important to identify the real differences between Republicans and Democrats, who as Joe Biden shows, are polar opposites on identity issues. You can argue their relative sameness on economic issues — lord knows I’ve been doing that — but on identity issues it’s trogs and eloi without much doubt.
And third, I think Biden is right. This is a world-historical turning point, just as the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s (broadly considered) was a world-historical turning point. It did not solve all race problems, but it made race a bridge too far. And 50 years later, race is still a bridge too far — it’s race that’s peeling corporate support from ALEC (click to see why). Good to see this corner turned for members of the LGBT community, and about time too.
That’s said, here’s Biden via the Huffington Post (thanks to the email correspondent who alerted me; my emphasis and some reparagraphing):
Vice President Joe Biden said transgender discrimination is “the civil rights issue of our time” during a visit to a Florida field office on Tuesday, according to pool reports. Biden was meeting with volunteers at an Obama for America office in Sarasota, Fla., when he singled out one woman “who he thought had beautiful eyes,” reads the pool report. The woman said something to Biden that was inaudible to the pool reporter, but Biden responded to her by saying it was the “civil rights issue of our time.” The woman, Linda Carragher Bourne of Sarasota, later said her daughter was Miss Trans New England and that she had asked Biden if he would help them. “A lot of my friends are being killed, and they don’t have the civil rights yet. These guys are gonna make it happen,” Bourne told the reporter.
There’s more in the article, including other statements of LGBT support from Biden. Note the comment by Obama that Biden “got out a little bit over his skis” with his public remarks last May, just shortly ahead of Obama’s own “evolution.” Was Biden pushing the president at the time? Analysis of that dynamic was mixed when it occurred, but in retrospect — and in the context of other comments by the vice-president — this may well have been his intention.
Either way, good call on the historical importance, and a welcome and needed statement of support.
GP
To follow or send links: @Gaius_PubliusA Dallas-area plus size model's Facebook video of her confronting a man on a flight after she felt shamed for her weight has gone viral.
Natalie Hage promotes body positivity on Instagram to more than 100,000 followers.
"I just don't think it's fair to not be able to live your life because you look a certain way," Hage said.
Hage said her confidence was tested Thursday after she boarded a flight from DFW to L.A. She tells us she paid extra for a seat with leg room so she could fly comfortably, but Hage said it apparently still didn't sit will with the man next to her.
"I can hear him just audibly upset," she said.
She says his huffing and puffing continued. Then, she saw a conversation over text on his phone. She snapped a picture of his private text messages and posted them online. Someone texted him, "Hopefully she didn't have any Mexican food." He responded, "I think she ate a Mexican," followed by, "If the news reports [an airbus] leaving a runway without rotating, that would be my flight."
"I was crumpled like this. I literally was like this the whole flight with my water bottle and my phone just trying to be as small as I could just to not dare to be in his way. And then I started getting more angry," Hage said.
Hage tweeted American Airlines, "I paid for this seat and now I'm sitting next to someone harassing me."
The airline replied by telling her to speak to a flight attendant. Hage says the flight was sold out with no open seats. So she decided to confront the man and recorded their conversation. His face isn't shown and his identity wasn't revealed. The video from the plane went viral. It has been viewed more than 1.5 million times.
Hage said that interaction was dehumanizing and people should not feel unworthy because of their appearance.
"You're constantly being told you're not good enough as you are. You need makeup, you need the cool clothes and you need to lose ten pounds and you need to wear these heels and tan and get your nails done to be worth anything, and it's just simply not true."
We do not know who the man is in the video so we were unable to contact him for comment.Bacopa monnieri and the constituents of this plant, especially bacosides, possess various neuropharmacological properties. Like drugs, some herbal extracts and the constituents of their extracts alter cytochrome P450 (CYP) enzymes, causing potential herb-drug interactions. The effects of Bacopa monnieri standardized extract and the bacosides from the extract on five major CYP isoforms in vitro were analyzed using a luminescent CYP recombinant human enzyme assay. B. monnieri extract exhibited non-competitive inhibition of CYP2C19 (IC50/Ki = 23.67/9.5 µg/mL), CYP2C9 (36.49/12.5 µg/mL), CYP1A2 (52.20/25.1 µg/mL); competitive inhibition of CYP3A4 (83.95/14.5 µg/mL) and weak inhibition of CYP2D6 (IC50 = 2061.50 µg/mL). However, the bacosides showed negligible inhibition of the same isoforms. B. monnieri, which is orally administered, has a higher concentration in the gut than the liver; therefore, this herb could exhibit stronger inhibition of intestinal CYPs than hepatic CYPs. At an estimated gut concentration of 600 µg/mL (based on a daily dosage of 300 mg/day), B. monnieri reduced the catalytic activities of CYP3A4, CYP2C9 and CYP2C19 to less than 10% compared to the total activity (without inhibitor = 100%). These findings suggest that B. monnieri extract could contribute to herb-drug interactions when orally co-administered with drugs metabolized by CYP1A2, CYP3A4, CYP2C9 and CYP2C19 |
HIV, based on research that has been called both ethically and scientifically questionable. Shouldn’t women get some of that grant money too? Men get 100% of the genital cutting in America, and women get none. It’s time to change that. Female circumcision shouldn’t just be legal, it should be federally subsidized like birth control. Women should be in the streets protesting religious groups that refuse to pay for their employees female circumcision. It is our duty to support women in whatever they need to express their sexuality, including removing parts of their sex to make the sex they have safe sex.
Activists against male genital cutting say that condoms already prevent HIV transmission better than any surgery. While that may be true of the penis, who uses a dental dam when going down on a woman? Anyone? As comedian Patrice O’Neal humorously notes most women shame men who try to use protection when going down on a woman. Men are so thirsty, they will literally drink cancer before risk offending their female partners.
It’s time to make sex safe again. It’s time for equality. It’s time for female circumcision.
Read More: Negative HIV Tests For SaleI’ve been immersed in neo-Kantianism this whole year between reading and rereading Weber as well as the literature that surrounds his work. This last quarter, I worked through a handful of texts that came from the Baden School of neo-Kantianism, spending most of my time in Heinrich Rickert’s The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science. Two seemingly unrelated questions were raised as I worked my way through it: (1) What sort of discipline is theology? and (2) What is the status of valuation in critical discourse. I have a number of friends working on the relationship between theology and science, something I too have waded into since my time in seminary, and I think Rickert provides some ways of thinking about the relationship between the natural sciences and the humanities/social sciences that have begun to change how I think about theology’s place in that spectrum. It also, I think, provides another way of conceiving materiality in relation to theology and some good reasons for why a materialist theology, carefully defined, is ultimately the most fruitful way forward.
This is going to take a few posts. In this one, I’m just going to lay out Rickert’s philosophy of history, and at the end, I’ll allude to what I’m going to do in the next post, which is to start talking about theology in relation to Rickert.
Rickert’s primary aim is to illuminate a logical opposition between concept formation in the human (historical) sciences and the natural sciences as a means of establishing what it means to conceptualize what he calls “historical individuals.” When Rickert is writing at the turn of the 20th century, historical study (broadly, what we call the humanities) is still emerging as a collection of disciplines in its own right over against the natural sciences with its own methodology and authority. Prior to Rickert, the study of history was regarded more or less as one of two things: the study of antiquity (what we call “Classics” today) or the far more contepmorary positivist sociology. The latter, championed by the French positivist philosopher Auguste Comte, argued that the study of history was just like the study of the natural sciences: the goal is to collect the data and abstract from it general categories and universal laws. This was untenable for Rickert, who, following his mentor Wilhelm Windelband, argued that general concepts destroy that which precisely makes history what it is: uniqueness and individuality.
Rickert is neo-Kantian in the sense that he doesn’t think that our knowledge is about reality as such. So when he’s setting up this logical opposition between concept formation in the natural and human sciences, it’s on the basis of how we regard our experience of reality. In other words, the difference between the natural and the human science is not in the ontology of their objects but the phenomenology of them. They share the same real objects as they come to us in experience but regard that experience differently. That experience, Rickert says, comes to us as an infinite stream of individuals. It’s actually doubly infinite in that there is an infinite number of individuals (extensive infinity) and each individual itself is infinitely complex (intensive infinity.) Because this is how we experience reality, general concepts are always less real than our immediate experience, i.e. they can never represent our experience of reality as that infinite stream of individuals. That doesn’t mean that they don’t produce knowledge though. General concepts still hold validity for empirical reality. They just can’t give us any knowledge of individuals in their unique individuality. This is a logical impossibility, says Rickert, because the very definition of general concept precludes uniqueness. The goal of the scientific method is to erase anomaly (uniqueness) in favor of repeatability (which we usually call verifiability.)
It’s also, then, logically impossible for general concepts to apply to history. History is by definition unique and therefore unrepeatable in that uniqueness–at least, the history that interests us (more on this in a minute.) The data that eventually becomes “history” in the sense Rickert is after has the same nature as empirical reality (doubly infinite) and, by definition, cannot be made sense of in the same way that natural science makes sense of the infinite manifold. Rickert’s explication of concept formation in natural science shows us that there is this piece missing from our knowledge that natural science cannot provide–a concept of the individual. But now there’s a further problem: How is a concept of the individual possible if individuals are doubly infinite and unique? Up until this point, concepts have only ever been general. Historical concepts have to be something else that isn’t abstracted from the exact historical material in question but is instead formed out of something else.
This ‘something else’ also can’t be arbitrary, which is the other problem facing historical concept formation. As we’ve seen, natural science has the advantage of repeatability in forming its general concepts. Kant showed us this. Scientific observation is about the perception of a sequence (not a sequence of perceptions.) The repeatability of any sequence of perceptions is what eventually becomes knowledge in natural science. Clearly, historical knowledge doesn’t have that advantage within the data itself because in order for a datum to qualify as “historical” it cannot be repeatable. Returning to the idea of interest that I mentioned earlier, Rickert acknowledges that there are many more individuals (infinitely more, actually) within empirical reality than what we could actually study according to the methods of historical science. You can look at every leaf on a tree, every dog, every lump of coal in its unique individuality. But why would anyone do that? Though these individuals, in our immediate experience of them, are unique and individual, they are almost just as quickly subsumed under a general concept, which is what allows us to take in an infinite manifold and not be driven insane by the unique individuality of an infinite number of objects who are infinitely complex. So instead of trying to take in and consider each individual leaf, dog, rock, etc. we instead have leaves, dogs, and rocks as general concepts
But why don’t we do this with every individual? What’s the difference between Goethe and a guy at Tuesday’s open mic night? We can just as easily refer to both as “poets,” “humans,” “men,” etc. as we can examine them in their individuality and uniqueness. What non-arbitrary ground could there be for selecting one over the other as the proper object of historical study? How can we justify our interest in one over the other? Rickert’s answer is that there are two types of individuals: those which become automatically subsumed and “in-dividuals”–those whose uniqueness simply isn’t subsumable under a general category because of the values that intersect it.
Values, for Rickert, are very similar to general concepts in natural science. They have no empirically real content–they are ideal–but they do hold validity for reality. In other words, they are true insofar as they are valid. (“Truth,” by the way, is also a value for Rickert, which may be a problem in how he defines values, but we’ll table that for now.) Thus, Rickert establishes a number of “spheres” which he believes exist in every society–but they have variable content. Examples include art, religion, science, ethics, sexuality, etc. Each sphere has a value relation attached to it, i.e. art-beauty, religion-spirituality, science-truth, ethics-morality. The claim, then, is that the scholar selects historical individuals of interest to conceptualize based upon the ways in which they intersect these values as those values hold validity within the culture and time period in question. Goethe, rather than the guy at the open mic night, intersects beauty, spirituality, etc. in a way that one can identify within German culture at the time that he was alive but also perhaps today and certainly within other cultures as well (especially in the West.) The open mic guy just doesn’t do that in the same way.
That last paragraph probably made anyone familiar with critical discourse cringe. There’s an obvious tendency in this theory that leans toward old white guys deciding what’s culturally valuable, and certainly that’s how this panned out during the majority of the 20th century in the social sciences and humanities. Without giving Rickert more credit than he’s due on this point, I actually don’t think he was interested in the superiority of any one culture (unlike Hegel who clearly thought Germany represented the pinnacle of all civilization and that the history of any non-Western civilization was totally irrelevant to the progression of absolute spirit.) Rickert insisted on a rigorous value neutrality when it came to the scholar’s own personal valuations. This should be familiar to any of us in a social scientific field. It’s one of the challenges of being a theologian in a religious studies department. Value neutrality is still one of the most important aspects of good social science today.
The story should sound much more familiar now. The combination of these two aspects of Rickert’s method, value relations without valuation, inadvertently introduced into humanities/social science discourse the possibility for a normative colonial, patriarchal, bourgeois, and even Protestant agenda disguised as value neutrality, intentional or not–a truly catastrophic combination if there ever was one. This has in turn created the necessary space for genealogical critiques of social scientific disciplines (Foucault), particularly religious studies (Asad), as well as the post-structural critiques of social science found in Derrida, et. al.
All of those discourses have been and continue to be necessary tools, helping to pry open the door for important voices to speak in all of the humanities and social science disciplines, and theology has been no different. In the next post, I’m going to turn to the earliest theological critic of modern sociology, Ernst Troeltsch. Troeltsch is more often than not seen as the first theologian to embrace the modern social scientific method–and he is–but he did not do so uncritically. It is in his critique of the value neutrality found in Rickert and his close friend Max Weber that we begin to find the answers to the two questions we started with: In what sense can theology be a science and given critical discourse, can theology engage in positing normative values?
AdvertisementsThe story of Founders Brewing Company is, in general, the sort of tale that exemplifies the excel-or-perish nature of craft brewing—especially in the era that Founders came into being. Born in 1997 as Canal Street Brewing Co., the brewery that became Founders came barreling headfirst into an American market that was just experiencing the burst of its first big craft beer bubble, a downturn in the craft market that persisted until 2002 or 2003 with very slow growth across the entire industry. One could argue that Founders was literally founded at the worst possible moment, and their early offerings didn’t exactly set the local beer community on fire, either. Times were tough.
Times were so tough, in fact, that the brewery commemorated its 15th anniversary in 2012 by releasing a burly, barrel-aged barleywine called Bolt Cutter—a direct reference to the time co-founder Dave Engbers received a call from the bank, threatening to chain the doors of the building if they didn’t pay off half a million dollars within the space of a week. Ready to make a stand, he instead bought a set of bolt cutters, which still remain in his office as a memorial of how close Founders came to the brink.
In terms of the beer, though, it was fitting that Founders should choose to celebrate that anniversary with a high-gravity barrel-aged offering. It was exactly these kinds of beers that helped the brewery finally realize its true identity, build a rabid fanbase and eventually conquer the American craft beer market with a series of critically and popularly adored releases. Over time, the Founders name has come to be synonymous with several varieties of barrel-aged beer—but notably, not with every style. For all its growth and all its popularity, Founders remains a brewery that seemingly answers to no one. Its brewers have retained the ability to make what they want, rather than what the literati of the beer geek world might demand.
These are all observations I was able to make in person when I visited the Grand Rapids brewery in mid-April to attend the 15th annual “Black Party,” a celebration of Founders’ many dark beers. At their invitation, I tagged along as a media representative with a small group of drinkers who one might categorize as lucky superfans—-just 10 winners among the more than 2,000 who submitted writing prompts about Founders to win a trip to the Black Party. I heard some incredible stories from those lovely folks, who you can see in the video below. You can also read their stories here, featuring tales of young love blossoming over snifters of KBS, among others.
The funny thing is, if the same contest had been held eight years ago, I might very well have been one of the people submitting an entry. As a then 21-year-old on the campus of the University of Illinois, Founders was one of the very first breweries I identified as specifically representing my nascent taste in craft beer. I can still recall my first taste of Breakfast Stout (at Champaign’s Blind Pig Co.) with crystal clarity, because it was the first time I ever felt more strongly about a beer than “liking” it. Credit that glass of Breakfast Stout with igniting a craft beer obsession.
And so, I naturally jumped at a chance to return to Founders, which I’d visited once before years ago while taking a brewery-centric road trip through Michigan. While attending the Black Party and touring the facilities alongside the contest winners, I somehow found time to also sit down with Founders’ Brett Kosmicki, the brewery’s cellar manager and brother of brewmaster Jeremy Kosmicki. Over pints of porter—which Paste ranked #1 in a blind taste test, by the way—we discussed the history and future of Founders brewing, and his philosophy on barrel-aging in particular.
“When we get ahold of a barrel these days, we don’t have a defined set of expectations of what we want or even what we expect to happen with it,” said the bearded cellarman, now five years into his Founders tenure. “We really have a wait-and-see sort of perspective with new barrel-aged projects, because that’s the spirit of experimentation. With the trajectory of growth we’ve had, we’ve had a lot more freedom to do that.”
Kosmicki pulls beer for drinkers straight from the barrel.
Kosmicki is referring to the continuing experimentation that results in many of the ultra-small batch barrel-aged brews that Founders kicks around as ideas, often in only one or two barrels at a time. The batch sizes are small enough to necessitate taproom-only releases, if those beers ever even see the light of day, but the fact that such experimentation happens at all on this scale is likely something that only a larger regional brewery of Founders’ size could pull off. After all, your local brewpub down the street likely isn’t going to have the resources to acquire spent bourbon barrels from Heaven Hill or Buffalo Trace with the intention of filling them with beer that may never get released. Founders, on the other hand, now has the leeway to truly experiment however they please, which unsurprisingly yields some very heady brews. To cite just one example, look for a cherry beer coming down the pipe … one aged in bourbon barrels that have then been used to mature maple syrup. That kind of release is a direct result of those ultra-small batches that quest for what Kosmicki referred to as “a home run beer.”
How easy it is to forget, though, that the phenomenon of barrel-aged beer is still a relatively new one. Despite occasional one-offs from a variety of brewers, commercially released barrel-aged beer was virtually nonexistent before 2003, which is when Bourbon County Stout first appeared at the brewpubs of Chicago’s Goose Island. Founders was right on the forefront as well, scaling up their already decadent Breakfast Stout into the barrel-aged recipe for Kentucky Breakfast Stout in 2004. The two beers have inevitably been compared by Midwestern beer geeks ever since, for obvious reasons. They’re two of the earliest examples of the now-ubiquitous bourbon barrel-aged imperial stout, but they could scarcely be more different in character. Of the two, KBS has always been much more reserved, with a character that Kosmicki would characterize as perhaps more refined, compared to the veritable sledgehammer of oak and whiskey in a bottle of BCBS.
“As much as those two beers are similar, they have a lot of different properties,” Kosmicki said, mulling over the requested comparison. “We want different flavors to showcase, not just that hard-driving alcohol and huge whiskey presence. The intense oak, I find that overwhelming. We think KBS is really all about the blend of those chocolate flavors, and certainly the coffee addition; it really helped hone in the identity for that beer.”
Indeed, in Kosmicki’s mind it was the creation of KBS that truly crystallized the Founders philosophy that has continued on to this day. By 2005, the beer had already built the beginnings of its cult. By the beginning of the 2010s, it had become the sort of thing that people drive across the country to acquire. That goes double for the extra rare maple syrup variant, Canadian Breakfast Stout, which I myself was lucky enough to buy a single bottle of the sole time it was commercially released in 2011. At the Black Party, the afternoon arrival of CBS in the taproom was heralded by a processional of the Canadian flag and national anthem, accompanied by raucous cheering and a crush of human flesh flowing in the general direction of the bar.
The Black Party crowd at full strength on the Founders patio.
And yet, despite their barrel-aging prowess in beers like KBS or Backwoods Bastard, it’s important to note that Founders is a brewery that picks and chooses its arenas fairly judiciously. Think of just about any other major regional brewery also known for barrel-aging—from New Belgium, on down through the likes of Deschutes and Firestone Walker—and the thing they all have in common is a well-developed “sour program.” As any observer of the beer market would have seen in the last half decade, tart styles and wild ales have fully come into maturity in American craft brewing, and have become all but expected. In 2016, if you’re making barrel-aged beers, then you’re also making sours—but notably, not Founders, and not by coincidence.
“All I can say is that so far, a program like that just hasn’t fit into the profile of beers we want to make and the identity we want to put out to our customers,” Kosmicki said. “So far, we’ve not found a way to have it make sense. The first thing we consider with any beer is ‘How do we make it Founders?’, and we’re never going to do something just because everyone else is doing it. If we do it, it will be because it’s true to us. And of course, purely in terms of logistics that’s a huge step to take for a brewery of this size. There’s an incredible contamination risk, and we regard sanitation so highly that we might not be any good at making sours, quite frankly. I know that sounds funny, but it might be true.”
In the same vein, the cellarman is also cognizant of how fickle the average beer geek can be in which breweries they choose to support and even in their assessment of the same beer, a year later. More than most hobbies, beer geeks (myself included) at their worst project a wicked sense of entitlement and the attention spans of decadent Roman emperors—oh, it’s only a barrel-aged imperial chocolate coffee stout? Had a million of ‘em. Yawn. We complain online about a lack of interesting product when five years earlier we might have been losing our minds in ecstasy over beers currently collecting dust on the shelf. But Kosmicki is unfazed.
“We understand how that goes; ‘oh look, another barrel-aged imperial stout, whoop de doo’,” he said. “That’s the reason why you don’t see half a dozen different barrel-aged stouts from Founders. We know what we do well and what people look forward to, and we don’t really invest more experimentation into what we already do really well. KBS thankfully has no problem selling out, and I doubt it ever will. If anyone thinks it’s gotten stagnant, then don’t purchase it and let someone just getting into craft beer find that bottle. I mean really, what resources can we devote to control for that sort of perception? Better to simply not chase after what is trendy, or chase the latest style.”
Of course, the politics of craft beer and brewery ownership are another facet of beer geek interest that Founders can hardly ignore. Since the acquisition of 30 percent of the company by Spanish brewers Mahou-San Miguel in 2014, the brewery has gone through what has now become the standard acquisition cycle in this industry: Assurances that nothing will change, beer geek complaints and vehement criticism, and finally grudging acceptance. Kosmicki, as the employee, naturally assures that nothing is being done differently, but as an outside observer I certainly can’t find reason to disagree. Founders has remained Founders, even if the Brewers Association will categorize them as outside the realm of “craft beer” in the years that follow, alongside the likes of Ballast Point and Lagunitas. If anything, Kosmicki makes it sound like the company’s Spanish investors are primarily interested in learning as many secrets of barrel-aging technique as they can, and there aren’t many breweries more qualified to teach them.
What then, does the future hold for the Founders barrel-aged empire, laying in silent, underground rows of oak in the gypsum mines below Grand Rapids? Kosmicki believes that the future of barrel-aging involves an expansion of diversity, of the sort that we’re already seeing from many small breweries. As the market gobbles up every available liquor and wine barrel, creativity becomes a necessity.
“Logistically, we craft brewers have been lucky that the popularity of American whiskey grew alongside craft beer, or there wouldn’t have been nearly enough barrels to go around,” he said. “That possibility of running short, though, is certainly a driving force in pushing brewers to experiment with new barrels. There’s a lot of other liquor out there: Gin, tequila, scotch and even rum—that’s a pretty fun one to experiment with. Certain beer styles may have reached the climax of experimentation, but there’s a whole bunch of mediums to age that beer and achieve a variety of unique new flavors. I think that over the next 10 years you’ll see a whole lot more variety.”
And with the assurance that yes, there will still be yearly KBS, it’s a premonition that beer geeks will no doubt anticipate for years to come.
Jim Vorel is Paste’s news editor, and he could go for a Breakfast Stout right now, regardless of when you might be reading this. You can follow him on Twitter.After it emerged that former Port Authority official David Wildstein oversaw the George Washington Bridge lane closures, Chris Christie explained that he barely knew his appointee and high-school classmate (though they were photographed together during the debacle). Now MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki reports that another person Christie grew up with was on the bridge the day the epic traffic jam started. Lieutenant Thomas “Chip” Michaels, a Port Authority police officer whose family has been friends with Christie’s for decades, gave Wildstein a tour of the traffic snarl and texted him about its impact on Fort Lee.
Robert Durando, the general manager of the George Washington Bridge, testified in December that Wildstein visited his facility on Sept. 9, then “left the communications desk with a police lieutenant assigned to the George Washington Bridge, to ride around the facility for some period of time to see the impact on traffic.” Documents Wildstein submitted to a New Jersey legislative committee show Michaels was that officer. Wildstein emailed Durando, “Going to take a ride with chip and see how it looks.” Though his name was redacted, that suggests Michaels was the person Wildstein was simultaneously texting about where to pick him up.
“Want me to pik u up? Its fkd up here,” Michaels, whose phone does not appear to have autocorrect, texts Wildstein, adding, “I may hav idea to mak ths beter,” and, “Local ft lee trafic disaster.” Also, the night before the lanes were closed, Michaels emailed his superior to ask if a “new traffic pattern” was going into effect.
There’s nothing obviously incriminating in Michaels’s texts and emails (it’s unclear how he wanted to “mak ths beter,”) but they reveal that another person close to Christie had first-hand knowledge of the lane closures long before the governor says he found out about the incident. A 2010 Newark Star-Ledger article described Michaels as part of “a tight circle of friends” Christie formed while growing up in Livingston. “We break his chops a little bit, just saying, ‘You’re the governor?,’ looking at him laughing,” Michaels told the paper. “It’s crazy. He grew up like everyone else in New Jersey. So to see him as a celebrity, it’s just really odd. But he’s the same guy. He’s a grounded guy.”
His brother, Jeffrey Michaels, has even closer ties to Christie. Jeffrey Michaels was a campaign adviser when Christie ran for governor in 2009, and was reportedly the person who told him he’d won. He went on to form a lobbying venture that flourished under the Christie administration, and has contributed large sums to various Christie-affiliated groups.
In a public television interview, Jeffrey Michaels said of the governor, “We went to high school with – we – our families knew each other from Livingston, and just stayed in close contact with him over the years and was very pleased to help his campaign out with policy.” Presumably, Christie has also stayed in touch with Chip Michaels, who was the head coach of his son Patrick’s little league hockey team in 2010. Looks like Christie is going to have to go with “betrayed by those closest to me” rather than “we’re not even friends” on this one.'The Flash' and 'Arrow's' Andrew Kreisberg has also boarded the drama as a writer and executive producer.
CBS' Supergirl continues to add to its already impressive cast.
The DC Comics take has enlisted Grey's Anatomy alum Chyler Leigh and Homeland vet David Harewood for regular roles, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. Additionally, The Flash and Arrow's Andrew Kreisberg has joined the Greg Berlanti and Ali Adler drama as a writer and executive producer.
See more Broadcast TV's Returning Shows 2015-16
The hourlong drama, which received a hefty series commitment, centers on Kara Zor-El (Melissa Benoist), Superman's cousin, who was born on the planet Krypton and escaped amid its destruction years ago. After arriving on Earth, Kara was taken in by a foster family, the Danvers, who taught her to be careful with her extraordinary powers (which she shares with her famous cousin, Superman).
Harewood will co-star as DC Comics character Hank Henshaw. In the CBS take, the character is a onetime CIA agent who now runs the Department of Extra-Normal Operations (DEO), which tracks extraterrestrial threats on Earth. In the comics on which the potential series is based, Hank Henshaw is Cyborg Superman. Harewood, whose credits also include ABC's Selfie and the feature Blood Diamond, is with APA, Conway van Gelder Grant and Authentic Talent.
Read more TV Pilots 2015: The Complete Guide
Leigh, whose credits include NBC's Taxi Brooklyn, will play Alexandra "Alex" Danvers, the confident foster sister of Kara. Fascinated by Kara's powers from a young age, Alex developed a lifelong obsession with science that inspired her to become a doctor.
Leigh is repped by UTA, manager Joannie Burstein and Stone Meyer.
They join a cast that also includes Brothers & Sisters and Ally McBeal alum Calista Flockhart as DC Comics character Cat Grant, True Blood's Mehcad Brooks as Jimmy Olsen and recurring player Laura Benanti.
Arrow and Flash's Berlanti and his No Ordinary Family cohort Adler (The New Normal) will pen the script and executive produce the drama via Berlanti Productions' Warner Bros. Television-based banner. Berlanti Productions' topper Sarah Schechter also is on board to executive produce.
Email: Lesley.Goldberg@THR.com
Twitter: @SnooditA man who abducted his estranged wife from the Lincoln hair salon where she works killed himself, authorities said Sunday, hours after the wife emerged from a field in the area where the two were last seen.
A state police official said searchers found 37-year-old Dwayne Lawrence's body in a cornfield outside of Imperial Sunday night, The Imperial Republican reported. He had shot himself.
His estranged wife, 38-year-old Julie Hanes, could be seen walking and talking to people at the search staging area after before she was taken by ambulance to a hospital.
Police say Lawrence abducted Hanes from the salon where she works at around noon on Saturday. Her parents and some other family members live in Imperial, which is 260 miles west of Lincoln near Nebraska's borders with Colorado and Kansas.
Authorities say Lawrence abducted Hanes at around noon on Saturday from the salon where she works in Lincoln. Imperial is about 260 miles west of Lincoln near Nebraska's borders with Colorado and Kansas, and several of Hanes' family members, including her parents, live in Imperial.
Local, state and federal law enforcement officers began searching an eight-square-mile area west of Imperial on Sunday after an Imperial police officer spotted Lawrence's gold 1998 Chrysler Concorde before dawn. Lawrence sped off, and the car was later found abandoned in the rural area outside of the city.
A motorist reported seeing the couple later walking along a country road in the area, the newspaper reported.
Court records show that Hanes filed for divorce July 30, about two weeks after she got a protection order against Lawrence, who she married in 2001. She told a judge that Lawrence had threatened her several times, and he was facing several charges related to a July 8 incident.
Hanes told police that Lawrence fired a gunshot into their bedroom wall and threatened to kill himself in front of her in the hope that she would take her own life. She said in order to get him to lower the gun, she told her husband she would stay with him.
Lawrence had been charged with false imprisonment, making threats and using a weapon to commit crimes. When he posted $25,000 bond on July 16, he was ordered to stay away from Hanes and any firearms.Image copyright Chicago Police Image caption All four suspects have been charged with unlawful restraint and aggravated battery.
Four black people face hate crime and kidnapping charges for the Facebook Live-aired torture of a mentally disabled white man.
Jordan Hill, 18, Tesfaye Cooper, 18, Brittany Covington, 18, and Tanishia Covington, 24, are expected to appear in a Chicago court on Friday.
In the video, the assailants can be heard making derogatory statements against white people and Donald Trump.
Chicago police have described the incident as a "sickening".
The suspects have also all been charged with aggravated unlawful restraint and aggravated battery with a deadly weapon.
Image copyright Facebook Image caption The victim was made to drink from a toilet bowl and had a gag placed over his mouth
Mr Hill is further charged with robbery and possession of a stolen motor.
All the suspects, apart from Tanishia Covington, also each face a count of residential burglary.
In an assault that went on for two days in a flat on the Illinois city's west side, the victim was made to drink from a toilet bowl, had part of his scalp removed with a knife, and was bound, gagged and beaten.
Enable it in your browser or download Flash Player here Sorry, you need Flash to play this. Shelby, Black Lives Matter supporter: "Black Lives Matter wasn't referenced at all in the video" Exit player Media caption Shelby, Black Lives Matter supporter: "Black Lives Matter wasn't referenced at all in the video"
The unnamed 18-year-old - a school acquaintance of one of the alleged attackers - was found disorientated, walking the streets.
He was taken to hospital, traumatised, and had difficulty communicating with police, but was later discharged.
"It makes you wonder what would make individuals treat somebody like that," said Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson.
Enable it in your browser or download Flash Player here Sorry, you need Flash to play this. Supt Eddie Johnson: "What would make individuals treat somebody like that?" Exit player Media caption Supt Eddie Johnson: "What would make individuals treat somebody like that?"
"I've been a cop for 28 years, and I've seen things that you shouldn't see in a lifetime, but it still amazes me how you still see things that you just shouldn't."
Another police spokesman said earlier that the four black suspects had made "terrible racist statements" during the assault.
But he said investigators suspect the victim was targeted because he has "special needs", not because he is white.
In the 30-minute video, the attackers can be seen cutting the victim's clothes, dropping cigarette ash on him, pushing his head back with a foot and drawing blood by cutting off some of his hair with a knife.
More on violence in Chicago
Enable it in your browser or download Flash Player here Sorry, you need Flash to play this. Life and death on the lost streets of Chicago Exit player Media caption Life and death on the lost streets of Chicago
Several people can be seen drinking, laughing and smoking, while their captive cowers in the corner of the room.
In other videos posted online the young man is beaten, made to drink from a toilet bowl and forced at knife-point to say: "I love black people".
An African-American woman talks to the camera, sometimes with slurred speech. At least two male African-Americans are also visible in the footage.
The incident has provoked a strong reaction on Twitter, especially among the alt-right - the fringe group that celebrated US President-elect Trump's election win with Nazi salutes.
They said the mainstream media was slower to react, and the police more hesitant to label it a hate crime, than if a black person had been assaulted by white people.
The hashtag #BLMKidnapping was adopted by users suggesting the Black Lives Matter campaign was in some way involved.
But police have not mentioned the organisation in connection with the incident.The U.S. unemployment rate fell last month to its lowest level in more than two and a half years as employers stepped up hiring in response to the slowly improving economy.The Labor Department said Friday that the unemployment rate dropped to 8.6 percent last month from 9 percent in October. The rate hasn't been that low since March 2009, during the depths of the recession.Still, 13.3 million Americans remain unemployed. And a key reason the unemployment rate fell so much was because roughly 315,000 people had given up looking for work and were no longer counted as unemployed.________________________________________________________
URGENT: End of America’s Middle Class Now a Startling Reality
________________________________________________________The presidential election is less than a year away, which means President Barack Obama will almost certainly face voters with the highest unemployment rate of any president since World War II. Rival Republicans have made the nation's joblessness a key campaign issue.Meanwhile, Europe's financial crisis threatens to slow U.S. growth next year. A recession in Europe could reduce U.S. exports, hurt global financial markets and dampen business confidence.Employers added 120,000 jobs last month. And the previous two months were revised up to show that 72,000 more jobs added — the fourth straight month the government revised prior months higher.Private employers added a net gain of 140,000 jobs last month. Governments, meanwhile, shed another 20,000 jobs, mostly at the local and state level. Governments at all levels have shed almost a half-million jobs in the past year.More than half the jobs added were by retailers, restaurants and bars, a sign that holiday hiring has kicked in. Retailers added 50,000 jobs, the sector's biggest gain since April. Restaurants and bars hired 33,000 new workers. The healthcare industry added 17,000.Paul Ashworth, an economist at Capital Economics, estimates that the economy will expand 2.5 percent in the last three months of this year. But he expects growth to slow to 1.5 percent in 2012, partly because of the crisis in Europe. And if Congress fails to extend the Social Security tax cut and long-term unemployment benefits this month, growth is likely to slow even further.Weak job growth means companies don't have to raise pay to keep their employees. Fewer jobs and lower pay leaves consumers with less money to spend. That's holding back economic growth.In the past three months, the economy has added an average of 143,000 net jobs per month. That's enough to keep up with population growth and better than the previous three months, when the economy averaged just 84,000.Other recent economic reports have been positive, too.Factory output expanded last month. Retailers reported a strong start to holiday sales over the Thanksgiving weekend, consumer confidence surged in November to the highest level since July, and Americans' pay rose in October by the most in seven months.Car sales also rose sharply in November, normally a lackluster month for the auto industry. Chrysler, Ford, Nissan and Hyundai all reported double-digit gains on Thursday, compared to a year ago."Now is not the time to slam the brakes on the recovery, right now it's time to step on the gas," |
scene of a 1982 massacre by the military, the eastern city of Deir al-Zor, the southern city of Deraa and several north-western towns in a province bordering Turkey.
"The regime seems intent on breaking the bones of the uprising across the country this week, but the people are not backing down. Demonstrations in Deir al-Zor are regaining momentum," one activist in the city said.
Mr Assad has been repeatedly warned by the United States, European Union and Turkey but his government is signalling to its legion of critics abroad that it will not bow to calls for change that have swept across the Arab world, and to its people that it is prepared to wade through blood to stay in power.
In Deir al-Zor, residents say the army has pulled out anti-aircraft guns from the city, but armoured personnel carriers remain at main junctions and troops, accompanied by military intelligence, storming houses looking for wanted dissidents.
Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu has told Mr Assad to halt such military operations now or face unspecified consequences.
"This is our final word to the Syrian authorities, our first expectation is that these operations stop immediately and unconditionally," Mr Davutoglu said in Turkey's strongest warning yet to its once close ally and neighbour.
Turkish leaders, who have urged Mr Assad to end violence and pursue reforms in Syria, which has a 75 per cent Sunni majority, have grown frustrated. Mr Davutoglu held talks with the Syrian leader in Damascus only last week.
Mr Assad, who inherited power in 2000 from his father, clearly believes overwhelming force will extinguish calls for the dismantling of the police state and the Assad clan's power monopoly, free elections and an end to corruption.
For Mr Assad to enact the reforms he has been promising since he came to power in 2000, he would have to purge the Syrian establishment of his most powerful allies and cronies, and end the control of the security apparatus over the state. Since they are the foundation of his power, that is unlikely.
Reuters
Topics: unrest-conflict-and-war, world-politics, government-and-politics, syrian-arab-republic
First postedCanadian Giro d’Italia champion wins Roeselare critérium ahead of travel to London
Ryder Hesjedal (Garmin-Sharp) has declared himself fit for the Olympic Games road race in London on Saturday, following his ‘victory’ in the post-Tour critérium in Roeselare, Belgium. The Canadian Giro d’Italia champion, dressed in the Maglia Rosa that he won in May’s race, beat Giro third place Thomas De Gendt (Vacansoleil-DCM) and Guillaume Van Keirsbulck (Omega Pharma-Quick Step) in the exhibition race, after the three of them broke away in the closing kilometres.
Hesjedal started the Tour de France with a view of taking a possible Giro/Tour double - or at least improving on his sixth place of 2010 - but pulled out of the race after coming down hard on the crash-strewn seventh stage.
"In the stage to Metz I took a heavy impact been on my left leg,” the Canadian told Het Nieuwsblad. “After my abandon I returned home to Girona where I could start my rehabilitation. I only stayed off the bike for one day because I wanted to keep my muscles as smooth as possible.
“Naturally it was frustrating. I had won the Giro and also wanted to show some things in the Tour, but it was not to be.”
Having fully recovered from his injuries, Hesjedal is fit enough to compete in the Olympic Games in London. He will compete in Saturday’s road race, and the time trial next Wednesday, where hopes that his enforced rest will stand him in good stead.
“On Wednesday I travel from Kortrijk to London to join up with the national team,” he said. “I hope I can go well in the Olympics. I will be fresher than the guys who finished the Tour, we'll see how it goes.”Aaron Malin at the always interesting Show-MeCannabis site has some more great reporting on the feckless and pointless silliness of the police task forces fighting our hopeless and insane war on drugs.
I blogged last month on how Malin found them stonewalling him over petty terminological issues when he tries to use a sunshine law to get info on a drug "task force" that an official insists doesn't exist since its official name was "Metro Multi-jurisdictional Undercover Drug Program."
This new story by Malin is actually also from last month, but just digested by me today, and at any rate represents a timeless problem: government using its own power to propagandize for itself.
As Malin reports:
According to the Clay County Drug Task Force, at a taxpayer funded conference supposedly dedicated to law enforcement training, Missouri’s narcotics officers were taught the latest anti-legalization talking points. What’s more, they received training credit hours (POST Certification) for their attendance at the class — all to become well-versed in the latest drug war propaganda..... Taxpayers should be troubled by the notion that their money, allocated for the training of our law enforcement officers, is used to fund political propaganda. Missourians should be troubled by the notion that learning the latest anti-legalization talking points counts as training hours for law enforcement. Cannabis policy reform activists should be troubled by the fact that dismantling an 80-year-old marijuana-prohibition complex, already an uphill battle, becomes even harder when we are forced to fund political training for our opposition with tax dollars...
Malin, who does much of his reporting via rigorous public record requests, informs us that "the Department of Public Safety only began redacting the name of this conference from documents I requested on task force grant funding after I began asking specific questions about these conference expenditures."More than a dozen male employees working for the Roslagsbanan train services in the Swedish capital have been wearing skirts in order to keep cool.
One of the drivers, Martin Åkersten, explained that temperatures can hit 95F (35C) in the train cab during the summer.
Uniform regulations by the train company Arriva state that skirts or long trousers are acceptable. At a meeting last year, drivers were told that shorts were not allowed.
They have given their blessing to the men wearing skirts however.
"To say anything else would be discrimination," Thomas Hedenius, the communications head, told the local Mitti newspaper, cited by the Local website.
He added that the regulations were in place so staff looked presentable and tidy, adding that shorts appeared "more relaxed" than a skirt.
A meeting is due in September to discuss the issue of uniforms.
The Roslagsbanan train service carries around 45,000 people per workday.The Secret Cabal Gaming Podcast is a weekly talk show about board games, card games, miniatures and role playing games. In our flagship podcast, The Secret Cabal Gaming Podcast, the five founders of The Secret Cabal, Jamie, Brian, Chris, Tony and Steve start the show off with talk about what gaming they've been up to followed by a walkthrough and feature review of a tabletop game. Then Tony T brings you gaming industry news while the rest of the gang throws in our two cents. And finally we host a round table discussion focused on tabletop gaming.
In The Lords of the Dungeon releasing every second Wednesday of the month, Jamie is joined by Jesko, Aaron, Jess and Bender to discuss their current roleplaying campaign, they tackle a short topic submitted by a listener and then host a roundtable discussion on RPGs.
Finally, on the fourth Wednesday of the month, Jamie hosts The Secret Cabal Express featuring a grab bag of guests, interviews, and generally irreverent nonsense - you never know what you're gonna get.
Download the latest show at our website
Subscribe on iTunes
Like us ok Facebook
Follow us on TwitterThe freezing cold of the cave seemed almost supernatural. The gravely silence could have made the hearts of many heroes shiver and stop, frightened for the danger that could lurk at any corner. The darkness was intense, and the torches just barely managed to light up the immediate way before the blackness swallowed the road.
Nothing is scarier than the unknown, and no one knew absolutely nothing of this place.
Still, once you've been to hell and back, some ice cave in the middle of nowhere doesn't really impresses you. However, Lion pressed on carefully, taking special care for a fatal slip, or a natural trap that could get him unprepared.
"Are you sure this being is here, Lion?"
"Would you doubt the master, Axe?"
Lion rarely referred to his allies by their names. He was once just, honorable, a strong defender of the light and all that was good, but his greed was stronger. He had left behind his origins, his compassion, and his roots to search forever power, power overwhelming. He had lost all he held dear, but little did he care, for his memory of his life before he made the pact with the demon and was then betrayed was vague, once he went to hell itself to take bitter revenge on the beast that abandoned him. Now he was a grostesque monster, vaguely resembling his orcish origins, his left hand a fair warning of not crossing him, if his entire pressence somehow had managed to not prepare his enemies.
"Of course not. I am not sure what we're looking for, though"
"Not many people do. There are many creatures which are completely alien to our nature. People don't need to know about them. People don't want to know about them."
"I'd have preferred if this particular one had taken refuge somewhere else warmed. This forsaken ice cave is awful."
Lion sneered and looked at his partner, raising his torch. There was an inherent elitism amongst magic users to look down on their most brutish, less intelligent comrades, but Mogul Khan was someone to respect. He was relentless, fearless, and remorseless. An enormous beacon of destruction, who would stop at nothing to do his Master's bidding. He still did not think he was more than an ally, a trusted one, and irritated him to no end that he used his real name instead of his title, despite his constant reminders and his reluctance to call him anything else than Axe.
"You have no idea what we are looking for, am I right?"
"An apparition? A ghost? Some sort of creature that's more ancient than this world?"
"This is Kaldr we're talking about. This is not just'some creature', Axe. Kaldr has existed since the beginnings of time. Millions of years he has witnessed, waiting patiently to rise and unleash his grip of ice upon this existence... and negate everything."
Axe, though used to these kind of descriptions coming from Lion, was still unnerved at the thought. He had long since stopped fearing death... but 'negating everything' seemed quite drastic as a mean to win a war.
"Are you... scared, Axe?"
Axe quickly shook those thoughts. There was a reason why he preferred to be in the battlefield, drenched in the blood of his enemies, and hunting his foes, leading his armies to a decisive strike upon the Tree of Mana, to end a war that had gone on for far too long. Limitless resources to both sides had meant an exhausting war of attrition, and so there needed to be a silver stake, something that could pull on the odds towards them. That something could prove to be here, in this cave.
To Hell with consequences, even if it had to mean babysitting this orcish abomination in this frozen cave.
"Of course not. "
"I hoped so, because I'd like to direct your attention to the temperature..."
It had dropped a few degrees, but, most importantly, the atmosphere seemed much more dense than seconds ago. It was obviously not a natural cave, but he never expected this to happen. The cold was biting on his skin, and his reaction was to pull the torch close to him, to try and get some heat from the fire. Lion, however, seemed completely oblivious to the sudden lack of light. When Axe realized that his torch had gone off, he also realized that the light hadn't dimmed. He rose his sight to meet what they had been looking for.
It could take awhile to make sense of its body, but Kaldr was an impressive sight to behold, shining from the power that he radiated, feeding from the heat, creating entire continents of ice to hold his physical manifestation on this plane of existence. He resembled a group of stalagmites, joined together as to form the upper part of a man, a featureless face, and its arms floated disjointed from its shoulders. Around it, pieces of apparent ice moved slowly around him. This apparition seemed to take no notice from its two visitors, and, undisturbed, sat motionless, floating perfectly in the center of the cave.
The two dire warriors approached the creature, slowly but firmly, trying to caught its attention. Finally, not known for his patience, Axe broke the silence.
"Kaldr?"
Neither the Demon Witch or the Axe could have been prepared to the thunderous, impossible deep voice that broke from the entire cave. Both warriors fell to their knees, overtaken by the power of the ancient apparition directing its virtual omniscience at two mortals.
"You come here with a purpose. And I do have knowledge that purpose."
Heavily breathing and coughing, Lion rose to his feet quickly to meet his gaze. The apparition wasn't looking at them, it was just staring into space. How do you refer to a being older than creation itself without risking incurring in its wrath?
"There is no need for introduction, Demon Witch. You have come here to try to convince me to help you defeat these Radiant forces and put an end to the Tree of life. And I will comply, as it suits my purposes."
LiIon stood, mouth open, without any clue how to act. Still shaken by the forces of the entity, he nodded.
"I was prepared for your omniscience, ancient. Forgive my ignorance, but how shall we expect you to act?"
Kaldr moved its body closer, and Lion could feel his bones freeze. His left hand, his demonic hand,however, felt strong and clash of temperatures was really uncomfortable, and he struggled to keep his face straight, and to hide his pain.
"Do not expect anything."
As Lion and Mogul Khan left the cave dumbfounded, they didn't utter a word. The Axe felt as if their life energy had been drained by the experience, but he couldn't bring himself to ask the Witch if it was the case. Finally, the rays of daylight somewhat heated their bodies and morale, and Lion slowly spoke "Let's meet up with the rest. We have much work to do."
"Do you think Kaldr will arrive soon?"
"He will know when to appear. Don't try to understand, his rationale is way too alien for us to understand. We better just hope he will arrive."
Mogul watched over his shoulder, and felt a sudden need for violence. As the Demon Witch prepared the enchantment to go back to their outpost, he muttered "There will be pain", and the pair disappeared from sight.Flight 214 update: Coroner trying to determine if teen passenger from China was killed after being hit by fire truck responding to jet crash.
Jaxon Van Derbeken, San Francisco Chronicle:
An autopsy was being conducted Sunday to determine whether one of the two teenage passengers killed on the Asiana Airlines flight had been run over by a San Francisco fire rig at the crash scene. The 16-year-old girl was found near the evacuation slide near the left wing of Asiana Flight 214 that crashed Saturday during a landing at San Francisco International Airport. San Francisco Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White said Sunday her injuries are consistent with having been run over. “As it possibly could have happened, based on the injuries sustained, it could have been one of our vehicles that added to the injuries, or another vehicle,” Hayes-White said. “That could have been something that happened in the chaos. It will be part of our investigation.” Hayes-White said a runway video recording of the first seconds of the crash could help unravel what occurred. “Part of it was a pretty good vantage point,” she said.
KTVU-TV:
While federal investigators began piecing together what led to the crash, San Mateo County Coroner Robert Foucrault disclosed that he was looking into the possibility that one of the two teenage passengers who died Saturday actually survived the crash but was run over by a rescue vehicle rushing to aid victims as the plane burst into flames. Remarkably, 305 of 307 passengers survived the crash and more than a third didn’t even require hospitalization. Only a small number were critically injured. Foucrault, the coroner, said senior San Francisco Fire Department officials notified him and his staff at the crash site on Saturday that one of the 16-year-olds who was killed may have been struck on the runaway. Foucrault said an autopsy he expects to be completed by Monday will involve determining whether the girl’s death was caused by injuries suffered in the crash or “a secondary incident.” Foucrault said one of the bodies was found on the tarmac near where the plane’s tail broke off when it slammed into the runway. The other was found on the left side of the plane about 30 feet away from where the jetliner came to rest after it skidded down the runway.
KCBS Radio:
Authorities said Sunday that the girl, found near the west wing of the aircraft, suffered injuries consistent with being run over by a vehicle. She also did not suffer extensive burns. San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee described the situation for first responders to the crash site as “very chaotic” with “lots of smoke” as he spoke with reporters at San Francisco General Hospital, where many of the surviving crash victims are being treated. Lee said given that scene, it might be possible a vehicle could have run over the girl – but he said that determination would have to be made by the coroner and crash investigators.Woman, 26, 'high on bath salts strips naked at park for SECOND time'
A woman has been charged with stripping naked in a public park while apparently under the influence of bath salts - for the second time.
Samantha J. Edwards, 26, stood naked on top of a maintenance building at Jordan Valley Ice Park in Springfield, Missouri, threw her bra onto a walking trail and exposed herself to passersby, police said.
Two people alerted authorities after seeing the nude woman around 7pm on May 27, and the responding officer saw her too, the report noted.
Charged: Samantha Edwards allegedly stripped naked in a public park
It added that surveillance footage shows her exposing her genitals and leaning over the balcony of the building over a 30-minute period.
Police believe two cyclists and two ice park employees saw Edwards as she paraded naked.
'Defendant was likely high on bath salts at the time,' a bond recommendation report added, the Springfield News-Leader reported.
She 'ripped the covers off two electrical boxes and removed two fire extinguishers from the building,' it said.
Troubled: Edwards has been arrested numerous times in the past, including for credit card fraud. Park rangers also found her naked in the park previously
'Drug abuse': Police believe she was under the influence of bath salts
The document added that police have previously responded to Edwards being naked in the park, although noted no further details.
She has now been charged with second-degree sexual misconduct and second-degree property damage, which are misdemeanor charges.
She is in custody at the Greene County Jail.
It is not her first brush with the law; Edwards is also facing a felony charge of fraudulent use of a credit or debit device.
A $2,500 bond has been set in that case and authorities recommended a $1,500 bond in the latest charges.
Scene: She allegedly stood naked on top of a building at the Jordan Valley Ice Park, pictured, and exposed herself to two cyclists and two rangers
She pleaded not guilty to the most recent charges on August 22. A preliminary hearing on the fraud charge is set for September 13.
It is just the latest in a string of naked violent outbursts after suspects have been believed to be under the influence of the synthetic drug.
In north Miami in June, Shane Shuyler exposed himself to a three-year-old girl while under the influence of the drug.Use this earthquake kit list to build your own DIY earthquake survival kit. Make your own earthquake kit without spending a fortune on more gear.
Earthquakes are disastrous events on a large scale that can hit without any real warning. An earthquake kit list can help you build your own earthquake preparedness kit for the “Big One” we keep hearing about as well as “normal” earthquakes too.
If your home or work is in a known earthquake zone it’s a good idea to at least have a backpack handy with a basic earthquake survival kit inside. An earthquake kit list like ours with a few simple items is cheap to put together and it’s easy to find the recommended gear.
As with all things preparedness, it’s better to prepare for the event long in advance, so needless to say you should make your own earthquake kit before it’s needed, so use our earthquake survival kit checklist below to build your own homemade earthquake kit.
There’s no such thing as the “best earthquake kit” because every area (big city or suburbs or country) and every individual person or family has it’s own unique needs.
A simple DIY earthquake kit built with your needs in mind and stashed somewhere that’s easy to get to is all you need, ignore the expensive pre-made earthquake kits you see online.
So then, the question is, what to put in an earthquake kit?
A Very Simple Earthquake Kit List
The goal of this earthquake kit list is to be simple, cheap to build, lightweight, and effective at keeping your butt safe and providing some basics for the days after.
Remember… help could take days to reach you after an earthquake, be prepared to take care of yourself and get out of the area asap.
Depending on the size earthquake you’re preparing for, and how often they occur in your area, your kit will vary. So, I’ve divided this list into two simple phases. Pick the phase that best fits your needs and budget and go from there.
I assume you will be lucky enough to grab your cell phone since most people never walk more than a few feet away from their smartphone without having a panic attack nowadays. If not you’ll still have everything you need to survive in this emergency earthquake kit, but communications with help or family will be harder.
You also have to consider three things after an earthquake:
You cannot count on having a vehicle, it could be trapped in debris and the roads could be flooded or full of debris. A good reason to own a motorcycle or bike. You could be trapped for days with literally a building of debris over your head. There may be major flooding, fires, and gas leaks along with serious aftershocks.
There’s more to consider too, like the weather, where you live, your need for daily prescription medications, and how physical fit you are.
So with all that in mind, lets create an earthquake kit list.
Phase 1 – the basics
A backpack to store everything. One that’s high quality, tear resistant, and water resistant is preferred. Your emergency earthquake kit should be portable because hopefully you’ll be moving around a lot, so a duffel or gym bag isn’t a good idea. You may even want a hiking backpack if you plan to walk a long distance.
A first aid kit. You can build your own homemade first aid kit to save money or buy something pre-made to save time, or you could make a special earthquake first aid kit that would have a suture kit and go heavy on things like antibacterial ointments, gauze pads, and regular and inflatable splints to deal with crushing injuries, broken bones, and deep cuts as best you could.
A flashlight, preferable a small LED with a metal case. If you live in a city (or suburbs with natural gas) there will be gas leaks so consider a intrinsically safe flashlight, meaning it is certified safe to use around gas and won’t cause an explosion.
An emergency whistle. You can only yell for so long but as long as you’re still conscious and breathing you can blow a whistle, and a whistle carries a longer distance than yelling.
Thick and heavy work gloves, leather is best.
Thick soled work boots. Imagine putting a house in a giant blender. Now imagine pouring it out on the street and walking on it. Flip-flops aren’t going to cut it.
A change of clothes that fits the season.
A lightweight poncho and/or raincoat.
Petty cash in $5-$20 bills. The more the better, especially if you want to rent a hotel or pay for a cab once you’re out of the worst areas.
Water, and lots of it. As much as you can pack and carry.
Phase 1 is a bare minimum earthquake kit checklist and includes things you should have set aside in case of any natural disaster. If you really want to be prepared, you should move into phase 2:
Phase 2 – everything from phase 1 plus….
Motorcycle or bicycle helmet. The biggest danger of an earthquake isn’t a fissure full of lava swallowing you up like some portal straight to hell, it’s your stupid bowling ball falling off the shelf and straight on to your head. The same goes for roofs, having a helmet to protect your skull from falling trusses will give you a HUGE edge statistically speaking.
Backup charger for your cell phone. A solar cell phone charger or, even better, an emergency radio with a built in charger could mean the difference between calling for help if you’re trapped or getting in touch with family.
Emergency radio. Like I said above it should have a charging USB port, and it should be able to keep you updated on what’s going on. In an emergency, cell reception may be impossible or the system may be flooded so you need another way to know what’s going on.
Emergency food bars. Three days worth of food is lightweight and only about $13. If you’re trapped you’ll have food to keep your core temperature and spirits up. Even if you’re not trapped you may not have a way to get food for a couple of days, especially if the roads are blocked.
Food bars are slightly better than MRE’s in the aftermath of an earthquake for one main reason: they are easier to prepare. You just open the pack and chew. If you’re pinned down this could matter. An MRE may need a fork or have packs inside of packs that need to be opened or mixed. It’s a thought worth considering. Speaking of injuries, if you have any abdominal injuries, like a house laying on your gut for instance, you shouldn’t eat anything because you may have major internal problems and eating can make things much worse.
A water filter for any found water (remember that your hot water heater and the backs of toilets can be good sources of potable water).
A high quality multi-purpose knife (something like a leatherman) and the tools it comes with are more important than a fixed blade knife after an earthquake.
A flat prybar. I like to have a small and a large prybar because one more pound of weight isn’t that big of a deal but getting in and out of doors or busting through a wall is a big deal.
A fire starter kit because you may need light, warmth, or a way to cook without the grid for days afterwards. NOTE: remember, gas leaks + fire = bad… so make 1000% sure there are no leaks before you make a single spark.
A couple of mylar emergency blankets to reflect your body heat back at you, great for laying on. Plus the things are so dang loud you might attract an entire emergency crew.
A thick wool blanket for serious warmth.
if you work or live in a multi-story building get a map of the layout laminated.
With a Phase 2 earthquake emergency kit packed and ready, out of the way but easy to get to, in a closet or corner of your bedroom you’ll be ready for a major earthquake (or a tornado, or hurricane too).
The Aftermath
So you’ve made it through the initial earthquake. You’re alive, and hopefully not trapped. Now you need to think about the circumstances that you’ll be stuck in after an earthquake.
The water and power are almost certainly out, stores are definitely closed, streets may be blocked, your car could be totaled under your garage. With those things in mind, you need to be prepared to travel on foot to the nearest relief center or to family outside of the affected area. Hotels for many miles will be full, you can try to get in but good luck.
With a charged cell phone you may be able to call for a cab once you get to open roads, but there’s no guarantee what the roads look like elsewhere. They may not be able to get to you or get to where you want to go, if the drivers are even willing to come into work at all. Be prepared to hike.
You should learn where relief centers would most likely be setup in your town, along with their emergency routes and the local emergency channels for tv and radio.
What To Leave Out Of Your Earthquake Survival Kit
The last thing you want is an earthquake kit so heavy that you can’t carry it, so keep it light. You don’t have to pack a whole house.
Your earthquake disaster kit should be portable (i.e. in a backpack or hiking backpack) and if you have a family member who would be with you and is able to carry something, you should consider splitting your earthquake supplies between two bags.
Put the absolute necessities into one bag and make sure you know which. Then, in the event of an earthquake, if you have someone to carry the other bag that holds the less-needed items (sorry grandma), you can divide the weight and move quicker.
If you only have enough hands for one bag, pack accordingly. You should focus on the absolute necessities that you will need for your own survival, that is: water, first aid, a way to communicate with others, and a change of clothes.
Civil Unrest
Now it’s time for me to destroy all of your faith in humanity. There are many helpful people in this world and generally the best comes out of people during an emergency. But a certain percentage of the population have a different plan in mind.
It never fails, no matter how small the disaster some people will take this opportunity to loot, or worse. It’s not uncommon for these people to steal right from a destroyed house or even directly from an injured or dying person in the aftermath of an earthquake or other disaster.
For this reason you should consider adding a weapon to your earthquake emergency kit checklist. I don’t believe it’s time to drag around an AR in plain sight because of the amount of emergency personnel you may encounter, and the relief center isn’t going to take too kindly to it either. A pistol however can get the job done just as well for the threats you might face after an earthquake. It’s also much easier to conceal.
Storing Your Bag
In case I haven’t harped on it enough, you should store your bag somewhere that’s easy to get to, and in a place that you’ll remember in the panic of an emergency. Your fancy emergency earthquake kit won’t do you a bit of good if it’s buried under your house.
However you won’t necessarily be home when the earthquake hits. For that reason, you should ideally keep a similar kit in your car and consider having a W.E.B. (Work Emergency Bag) at your office. This is especially true if you work in the city.
You may even be able to keep a small kit at your work desk. These kits should contain enough to help you get home or reach a relief center.
Take Your Location Into Account
If you live in a city or highly populated area, relief centers will quickly be set up and roads will be cleared as a first priority. There will also be hundreds of other people and buildings nearby to assist you.
However, if you live in the suburbs or country you’ll have to go it alone until rescue finds you. If that’s your case, alter the list accordingly to include more long term supplies like food and water, and make sure you include a good radio or possibly a CB or ham radio if you want to go through the licensing procedure.
Also, keep your climate in mind. This list assumes the best: that the earthquake hits when it’s nice out. What if it’s pouring rain? What if it’s in the middle of winter? If applicable, you should prepare for cold, stormy weather as you see fit.
Long-Term Survival
Depending on your location and how soon you believe rescue would find you, you may want to seriously consider a long-term survival plan and prep for several days or even weeks on your own and possibly injured. If that’s the case, pack things like:
Emergency food supply (dehydrated or freeze dried)
Plenty of water
A way to filter water
Fire starting kit
Extra batteries for flashlights
You’re not trying to live like a king, just the bare minimums. When choosing a food supply, keep in mind that dehydrated food will likely need to be rehydrated with water and that water will have to be potable. Having tasty (or at least tolerable) food packed will help raise your spirits and keep you alert.
Final Word
You can never be too prepared, especially when it comes to natural disasters like earthquakes. The devastation can take days or weeks for rescue to arrive and years to fully repair. Planning and preparing now can help save your life (or your family’s, or your neighbors).
Once you have your emergency bag packed, do go raiding it until it’s needed. Using your emergency supply when you’re too lazy to shop is a bad idea, especially if you don’t replenish these supplies in time.
Your earthquake safety kit should only be used for emergencies. Make sure to rotate specific items, like plastic water bottles and food, as needed to keep them fresh.In 1971, legendary rock writer Dave Marsh, then a newbie working for CREEM magazine, went to see? and the Mysterians play in a club near Flint, Michigan. The band were all Mexican kids, the children of migrant workers who settled in Michigan. They grew up loving rock and blues, and scored a hit with the 1966 garage anthem “96 Tears” (In fact, it is probably the only all-Latino rock band to ever have a number one original song on the Billboard Hot 100.)
After the show, he went back to the CREEM office and “in a fit of enthusiasm” he came up with the idea that? and the Mysterians were playing “punk rock.” It was the first time, according to the historians, that anyone wrote down that word.
“It was crazed and beautiful and even angry. [Lead singer]? had an edge to him on stage that not many performers from the mid-60s had,” says Marsh. “It was not as simple as it sounded, but it sounded real simple. It was not pretentious, and it wasn’t afraid to embarrass itself.”
The music? and the Mysterians made wasn’t punk rock as we know it today. But with singer?’s ahead-of-his-time look and attitude, there is a clear line between the band and today’s punk.
The band recorded a few albums and had several singles, but faded into the shadows after the 60s. Since then, there have been occasional articles and appearances by?, the group’s enigmatic singer.
Latino USA producer Marlon Bishop set off on a quest to find him and learn about the man behind punk’s origin story.
Featured image:? (Photo by Terry Murphy)A “bunch of migrants”. That’s how David Cameron saw fit to describe refugees living in conditions so desperate few of us can even imagine. A tide of anger has spilled out on social media, and it’s well worth pointing out Cameron’s callousness in dehumanising fellow human beings. Even if it’s a “dead cat” strategy to shift the focus from the Government’s “sweetheart” deal with Google. But while most retreat to the moral high ground to look down on the PM, we should also take the time to consider how we got here.
Demonising people from abroad is no new phenomenon in British politics; Cameron’s comment is the product of virulent, and at times subtle, anti-immigration sentiment that’s been simmering for the past ten years. Politicians have whipped up anti-immigration feeling to direct public anger at anywhere other than their own dodgy dealings with companies like Google, say, or their inequality-increasing policies.
Poverty and inequality are mostly the product of governments’ wrongheaded and often questionable decisions. Why would they let the public cotton on to the full extent of that, when they could just blame migrants? It’s time for Labour to step up to the plate and set the record straight with an unashamedly pro-immigration message.
There’s a lingering idea that public opinion on immigration is uncontrollably toxic; that engaging with the immigration ‘debate’ is a dead end for Labour. Yet research from British Futures last year showed that public opinion isn’t as negative as we’re led to believe. Avoiding the topic or concocting symbolic policies to limit migrants from taking benefits most don’t even claim to begin with, doesn’t sit well with the public. It reeks of untrustworthiness, a feeling that isn’t in short supply when most are talking politics.
Labour can’t keep quiet and hope this debate will go away. So here’s my take: they need to be as bold on immigration as they are on the economy. That means a national pro-immigration message that’s woven into a broader narrative of fairness.
Anxieties and worries over immigration are very real; fears over a changing national landscape and job shortages affect the way sections of the public think about immigration. Labour should listen to these people and talk with them, like Keir Starmer is doing at the moment. That doesn’t mean accepting the stereotypes that undergird anti-immigration sentiment; those have to be countered with truths.
For Labour’s pro-immigration message to be effective and sound, it can’t – and shouldn’t – just exist in the abstract. Eloquent words and lofty numbers that reveal lies spread by xenophobic politicians or opportunistic newspaper editors can only go so far, and usually that isn’t far enough. The campaign must be local as well as national.
While extolling the economic and social positives of immigration, Labour need to make sure people from abroad are included in campaigning. Not to wheel them out for political gain but to change the debate, give them a platform to speak for themselves and challenge the entrenched idea that immigrants are wildly different from the average Briton. Too often immigrants are treated as a homogenous mass; their voices are excluded from a public conversation dominated by politicians and the media. To be seen as human beings and to chip away at negative stereotypes, people from abroad need to be given a platform.
Otherwise, the country is headed down a dangerous path. Theresa May’s unjust proposals to deport people originally from non-EU countries who don’t earn £35 |
that he may be available to no sculptor now. No living architect in the West today can bring to inherited motifs and crafts the sublime freedom with which Luis Domenech y Montaner deployed his Catalan traditions of ironwork, glass, and ceramics in the Palau de la Musica Catalana (1905-08) in Barcelona.
This was partly because no myth of cultural repudiation (as enshrined in Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism) had yet arisen, although there was certainly an emphasis on the renewal of art’s language; and partly because the training of artists had changed little, in its essential emphases, since the sixteenth century. Thus the Belle Epoque’s legacy to later artists, to Miró, Picasso, and Matisse, was fecund and continuous. If Jacopo Pontormo had walked into the life class of one of the big teaching ateliers of Paris in 1890, he would have recognized immediately what was going on. If the same time machine were to deposit him in Walt Disney’s Academy for the Briefly New, in the California Institute of Arts, in 1990, he might not recognize it as an art school at all. Who could blame him?
For nearly a quarter century, late-modernist art teaching (especially in America) has increasingly succumbed to the fiction that the values of the so-called academy—meaning, in essence, the transmission of disciplined skills based on drawing from the live model and the natural motif—were hostile to “creativity.” This fiction enabled Americans to ignore the inconvenient fact that virtually all the artists who created and extended the modernist enterprise between 1890 and 1950, Beckmann no less than Picasso, Miró and de Kooning as well as Degas or Matisse, were formed by the atelier system, and could no more have done without the particular skill it inculcated than an aircraft can fly without a runway.
The philosophical beauty of Mondrian’s squares and grids begins with the empirical beauty of his apple trees. Whereas, thanks to its tedious obsession with the therapeutic, America’s art schools in the 1960s and 1970s tended to become crèches, whose aim was less to transmit the difficult skills of painting and sculpture than to produce “fulfilled” personalities. At this, no one could fail. Besides, it was easier on the teachers if they left their students to do their own thing. It meant they could do their own thing, and not teach; and many of them could not draw either. A few schools, such as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, held out, and tried to give their students a solid grounding. They were very few.
OTHER FACTORS contributed to the decay of the fine-arts tradition in American schools in the 1960s and 1970s. One was the increased attachment of art teaching to universities, which meant that theory tended to be raised above practice. Thinking deep thoughts about histories and strategies was more noble than handwork, and it produced an exaggerated drift toward the conceptual. And this interlocked in a damaging way with the reliance on reproduction of works of art, instead of direct contact with the originals.
Few people now remember a time when the thirty-five-millimeter color slide was not the main fodder of art teaching, for artists and for art historians. For the last quarter century, the major source of most students’ contact with art has been slides, not originals, and this has relentlessly nudged their experience toward the disembodied, the conceptual, the not there. The size and the number of art classes have made the didactic museum visit obsolete, and most art schools are out of convenient reach of great museums. As Cleve Gray recently pointed out, slides and reproductions have reduced, and for some all but destroyed, the sense of uniqueness of works of art, the physical presence that Walter Benjamin called their “aura.”
In the slide or reproduction, no work of art appears in its true size, or with its vital qualities of texture, color, and the recorded movement of the shaping hand intact. A Klee, a Pollock, or a lunette of the Sistine Chapel—all undergo the same abstraction, the same loss of presence. Impartially, they lose one of the essential factors of aesthetic experience, the size of the artwork relative to our sense of our own bodies: its scale. There were reasons why Picasso painted Three Women (1908) on a canvas six-and-a-half by six feet, and Still Life with Chair Caning (1912) on a surface one-fortieth that size. He meant the former to stand up before the eye sculpturally, like the Michelangelo Slaves, which are its distant ancestors, figures locked sleepily in their red stony space, their slow torsion speaking kinesthetically to one’s own sense of bodily weight and size; the latter accepts one’s gaze more intimately, like a view through a little window. When both come out the same apparent size in a plate or a slide, the penumbra of meaning inherent in their actual scale as paintings cannot survive. Does this lie behind the peculiar confusion of size with scale that afflicted so much American painting in the 1980s—the inflation of the artwork in its pursuit of a factitious “importance”?
A slide gives you the subject, the nominal image of the work, without conveying a true idea of its pictorial essence. You cannot, by looking at a slide, think and feel your way back into the manner in which something was made; only by studying the real thing. And no tradition of making can be transmitted without such empathy. Did this help to foster the dull blatancy of so much recent American painting, all impact and no resonance? Have the falsifications of the reproduced image fed back into the new originals, cutting out those very qualities that cannot survive reproduction—subtleties of drawing, touch, and brushwork, of color and tone, that slow up the eye and, beyond the quick look, encourage a slow absorption?
III.
BUT THE REAL disjuncture between the fins de siècle lies deeper than this. A hundred years ago, painting and sculpture were still socially dominant forms. They continued to supply, to an extent now all but lost to us, the visual codes by which one interpreted the world. Mass media, except for print, did not exist. Photography had begun to fill the gap between fantasy and reality, reducing the effort of firsthand experience, but it was not yet a democratic medium: few could take their own pictures (that would begin in 1888, with George Eastman’s preloaded cameras), and halftone reproduction, which put photographs on the pages of the daily press, was still uncommon. Cinema was not quite born (Louis Lumière invented the cinematograph in 1894), and the vast popular reach of movies lay far in the future, outside social imagination. Not until 1925 were recognizable human features transmitted by television. Nor did television become a mass hypnotic in the United States until after 1945. Elsewhere in the West its advent was even longer delayed; if you were born before 1940 in Australia, you could reach college-graduate age without watching, let alone having, a television set.
Because mass visual media hardly existed in the world of our grandparents and great-grandparents, painting and sculpture carried more weight: the weight of tradition, dreams, and social commemoration. The very idea of “radical” change in painting and sculpture gained its impetus from their primacy, and lost it when that primacy was lost. The political leader in 1890 might crave a bronze figure of himself in the square, but that kind of propaganda is now archaic, replaced by the forty-five-second attack commercial, as public oratory has been replaced by the sound bite and the managed press conference.
WHEN PARISIAN gallery-goers in the 1870s recoiled in horror from the “leprous” blue shadows in a Monet, it was because they felt an important contract had been broken—the agreement between painting, as a primary form of social discourse, and reality. No painting can offend anyone in this way today, because painting is no longer our index of the real. Instead, photography enrages the moralist, as in the imbroglio between Jesse Helms and the National Endowment for the Arts over the work of Robert Mapplethorpe. If that overrated photographer, instead of sticking a bullwhip up his ass and pretending to be the devil in front of his Hasselblad, had done it on network television, the fuss would have been even greater. If the image had been painted, however, who would have much cared?
In 1989 the average American spent nearly half of his or her conscious life watching television. Two generations of Americans (including American artists) have now grown up in front of the TV, their consciousness permeated by its shuttle of bright images, their attention span shrunken by its manipulative speed, their idea of success dictated by its collapse of fame into celebrity, their anxiety level (at least among smarter ones, again including artists) raised by its sheer pervasive power.
This has not been a matter of choice, let alone fault. The power of television goes beyond anything that the fine arts have ever wanted or achieved. Nothing like this Niagara of visual gabble was even imagined a hundred years ago. American network television drains the world of meaning; it makes reality seem dull, slow, avoidable. It is our “floating world.” It tends to abort the imagination by leaving the kids nothing to imagine: every hero and demon is there, raucously explicit, pre-cut, in a world of stereotypes too authoritative for imagination to develop or to change. No wonder American artists have been disposed toward stereotypes. Television is stupidly compelling, in a way that painting and sculpture, even in their worst moments of propaganda or sentimentality, are not.
FROM EDGAR DEGAS with his Kodak to Robert Rauschenberg with his silk screens, from Hanne Hoch with her clipped collages of news photos to the use of television and ads by the Fluxus group, modern artists have long been fascinated by the mass media. Rauschenberg or Lichtenstein could play with this fascination but still keep their balance inside the fine-arts tradition. Warhol, a commercial artist to the core, took the step (gingerly, at first) outside it, in his acolyte’s embrace of the value-free apparitions of the Tube. The next generation of American artists, Andy’s children, followed him en masse. They could not imagine a fine-arts tradition that was not overshadowed by television. Accordingly, a peculiarly slack form of thinking (whose institutional site, in New York, was the Whitney Museum of American Art) arose about art and media. Nature is dead, culture is all, everything is mediated (mediation, indeed!) to the point where nothing can be seen in its true quality, representation determines all meaning, and the only way that “so-called high art” can engage with general perception is to step out of its old “elitist” traditions and follow the Yellow Brick Road of the “cutting edge” that leads through Deconstruction Flats and the Forest of Signs to Jeff Koon’s porcelain pigs.
The trip turns out not to be worth taking. It has produced a clever novelty art of diminishing returns. Far from affording artists continuous inspiration, mass media sources for art have become a dead end. They have combined with the abstractness of institutional art teaching to produce a fine-arts culture given over to information, not to experience. This faithfully echoes the general drain of concreteness from modern existence—the reign of unassimilated data, in place of events that gain meaning by being absorbed into the fabric of imaginative life. The numbed eclecticism of 1980s art, its fondness for pastiche and historical deck-shuffling, its vision of art history as a mere box of samples—these were the signs of a culture given over to surfaces. Their imaginative drought reminds one of a sad Russian joke: today you can order a steak by telephone—and get it by television.
THERE ARE extreme differences between the values of painting and sculpture and the values of mass media. The work of art requires the long look. It is a physical object, with its own scale and density as a thing in the world. Its images do not pass. They can be contemplated, returned to, examined in the light of their own history. It is layered and webbed with references to inner and outer worlds that are not merely iconic. It can acquire (although it does not automatically have) a spiritual aspect, which rises from its power to evoke contemplation.
Fine art is infinitely more than an array of social signs awaiting deconstruction. Its social reach is smaller than that of the mass media, and it finds the grounds for its survival in being what the mass media are not. It now seems that if one opens “art” to include more and more of the dominant media that have no relation to art, the alien goo takes over; and the result is, at best, a hybrid form of short-impact conceptualism trying to be spectacle. Static, handmade visual art cannot furnish an answer to big media, or even an effective debunking of them. The working relation of most 1980s artists to them has been that of a fairly tough fly to flypaper.
One saw this in Robert Longo’s work in the early 1980s—an oversized melange of technical sophistication and sentimental blatancy, with more wallop than resonance. It came, in a different form, in Barbara Kruger’s knockoffs of John Heartfield, with their smugly “challenging” slogans about manipulated identity. It was even purer and duller in Jenny Holzer’s plaques and light-emitting-diode readouts—failed epigrams that would be unpublishable as poetry, but that survived in the new art context, their prim didacticism so reminiscent of the virtuous sentiments that the daughters of a pre-electronic America used to embroider on samplers. The work that got into the American limelight after Neo-Expressionism prided itself on its political correctness, but most of its messages might as well have been sent by Western Union. Probably the only American artist of this generation who managed to introduce a real shudder of feeling into media-based work was Cindy Sherman, enacting her parade of gender caricatures, bad dreams, and grotesqueries for the camera.
Not much of the art that really seems to matter is being made in New York today. There is a haunting parallel with Paris at the end of the 1950s, when the French were busy persuading themselves that Soulages, Poliakoff, Hartung, Mathieu, and others formed a generation that could eventually step into the shoes of the patriarchs of the Paris School, most of whom (except Picasso and Braque) were dead. Several important younger artists were, of course, at work: Giacometti, Dubuffet, Balthus, Helion. One could certainly believe that the tanks were not emptying. Yet today, for the first time in 300 years, there is not one really great artist at work in Paris. And so it is with New York. The great city has gone on with frantic energy not as an art center but as a market center, an immense bourse on which every kind of art was traded for ever escalating prices. But amid the growing swarm of new galleries, the premature canonizations and record bids, and the conversion of much of its museum system into a promotional machine, the city’s cultural vitality—its ability to inspire significant new art and foster it sanely—has been greatly reduced.
IN PART this was due to economic pressures, notably from the real estate market. These deprived younger artists—along with small theater companies, dance groups, and the rest—of working space in Manhattan. Complaints about this are an old part of New York life, of course: even in the 1920s people were complaining that Greenwich Village bohemia was dying on its feet, made homeless by what later journalists would call gentrification. But in the 1980s the supply of affordable workspace for artists in Manhattan finally ran out.
The idea of the New York painter in a big white downtown loft--bohemia with industrial spaces—is about as real as the notion that French painters wear berets and live in high studios in Montparnasse. The working bohemia of New York artists made its last stand in the very early 1970s, when SoHo had no name, two galleries (Paula Cooper and Max Hutchinson), and two bars (Fanelli’s and the long-defunct Luizzi’s). All the ground-floor spaces of West Broadway now occupied by fashion boutiques and art galleries then held small, tenacious businesses—hardwood-flooring companies, knife grinders, plastic injection molders, fabric offcut warehouses: survivors of an industrial past that went back to the Civil War, whose pragmatism seemed to underwrite the kind of art that was being made by semilegal tenants with Murphy beds and industrial leases (no heat after 5:30) in the lofts above. The annals of this last American bohemia remain largely unwritten. But the loft on Prince Street that rented for $150 a month in 1971 and sold as a co-op floor for $25,000 in 1974 carried a price tag of $750,000 by 1987.
So artists cross the river to find workspace in Bayonne or Hoboken, and commute to see the shows—at which point they may as well stop calling themselves “New York artists” at all, for they are part of no community. Where a young painter thinking of moving to Manhattan in 1970 might have armed herself for the struggle of life in New York, by the mid-1980s she was more likely to give up the idea altogether and stay in Chicago.
Thus, although Manhattan at the end of the 1980s is rivaled by no other American city as a culture market, its ability to draw in new talent, and to foster it in ways that make sense, has almost gone. This is a poor omen. It was always the work of living artists, made in the belief that their work could grow best there and nowhere else, that fueled New York. The critical mass of talent emits the energies that proclaim the center; its gravitational field keeps drawing in more talent, as in the combustion of a star, to sustain the reaction. This process is now dying. And the sense of entropy is compounded by the decay of civic life in New York. Up to a point, the grit, the dirt, the struggle of Manhattan were a stimulus to artists. All kinds of special poetries and particular looks arose from its aggressive materialism—until the late 1980s, when the sheer inequality of New York became overpowering. Doubt arose. Could a city with such extremes of Sardanapalian wealth and Calcutta-like misery foster a sane culture? Did it take more out of an artist than it put in? Why not stay in San Francisco or Chicago (or Barcelona, or Berlin, or Sydney), visit New York occasionally for its museums and its galleries, and otherwise ignore its pull?
NEW YORK had never been paradise, and living there, below the kind of income level enjoyed by only one American in forty, had never been easy. (Those who complain about the street squalor of Manhattan as though it were something new should consult the chronicles of New York in the 1840s, when such garbage collection as existed on Broadway was done by packs of half-wild pigs.) But it was in New York that the essence of the Reagan years, of its private affluence and public squalor, cavorted in the limelight. Half of the public officials of the Koch administration in New York, like half of those of the Reagan administration in Washington, seemed to be involved in some kind of criminal scam or shameless conflict of interest. Manhattan’s middle class, the protein of urban life, felt squeezed between a small, repellently ostentatious crust of the newly rich and an increasingly demoralized mass of the hopelessly poor, and stepped up its rate of migration to the boroughs across the bridges. Reality shortage, induced by an inflated cult of promotion and celebrity, was acute.The sense of civic space began to collapse under the pressure of real estate greed, the fear of crime, the exploding drug market. And then there was AIDS.
Not one of these woes was confined to Sodom-on-the-Hudson, although New Yorkers (with their appetite for disaster scenarios) were apt to talk as though Manhattan were their special laboratory, a sort of Island of Dr. Moreau in which every kind of deformity was breeding.But social tensions, even plagues, do not in themselves guarantee the decline of a great art center. Delacroix’s Paris was no Utopia, except for the few, and many Londoners 200 years ago experienced their city as New Yorkers do today, as money-mad and dangerous to live in, threatened by a large “criminal class” and sapped by proletarian addiction.
The difference between then and now is that the pattern of world cultural activity has made the very idea of the single, imperial center obsolete. New York, in other words, remains a center, but not, as its art world used to imagine, the center. Its centrality is based mainly on the market, and the market has nothing to do with cultural vitality.
A few years ago a popular neo-Marxist argument held that finesse of taste and connoisseurship were only masks for market activity, genteel ways in which a ravenous commercialism could spin euphemisms about itself. Anyone who believed that should look at the art market today. It is now run almost entirely by finance manipulators, fashion victims, and rich ignoramuses. The collector as connoisseur has been squeezed out of it. Connoisseurship is an impediment to its progress—mere dust on the road down which the inflationary march proceeds. Under the market’s malignant sway, genuine expertise will soon be entirely redundant: the market’s object is to erase all values that might impede anything at all from becoming a “masterpiece.” In this situation, whose epicenter is New York, the role of the museum, like that of the critic, is attenuated. And because it has never paid more than lip service to the idea of state patronage of the arts, the United States has no dominant cultural institutions that are not tied into the market.
IV.
IN THE 1980s more paper wealth was generated in New York than in any other city at any other time in human history. Greenmail, junk bonds, leverage, and the precarious liquidity of an overgeared credit economy transformed the art world into the Art Industry, turnover immense, regulations none. What was a picture worth? One bid below what someone would pay for it. And what would that person pay for it? Basically what he or she could borrow. And how much art could dance for how long on that particular pinhead? Nobody had the slightest idea. What is certain is that nobody foresaw the hyperinflation of the market; and that when the bubble bursts, or softly deflates, as bubbles do, nobody will have foreseen that either.
Twenty years ago the idea that any work of art made in the past century would sell for a million dollars seemed like science fiction to most people. In 1972, when the National Gallery of Canberra paid about $2 million for Pollock’s Blue Poles, the price made headlines and contributed marginally to the Australian public’s acceptance of the fall of the Whitlam government soon afterward. Today, when someone pays 5 or 10 million for a modern painting, the event rates no more than a sentence or two in the auction reports of The New York Times. We have come to take it for granted that art should be alienatingly expensive: it seems normal that its price should violate our sense of decency.
ALTHOUGH ART has always been a commodity, it loses its intrinsic value and its social use when it is treated only as a commodity. To lock it into a market circus is to lock people out of the contemplation of it. This inexorable process tends to collapse the nuances of meaning, and visual experience generally, under the brute weight of price. It is not a compliment to the work. If there were only one copy of each book in the world, fought over by multimillionaires and investment trusts and then hidden in storage, what would happen to one’s sense of literature—the tissue of its meanings that sustain a common discourse? “Where works of art are rare,” young Goethe wrote on first visiting Naples, “rarity itself is a value; it is only when they are common … that one can learn their intrinsic worth.” The truth of these words is nearly lost to us, in a culture wrecked by its own commercialization. What strip-mining is to nature, the art market has become to culture.
At the end of the 1980s there may have been 500 people in the world who could pay more than $25 million for a work of art, and tens of thousands who could pay a million: a situation with no historical precedents. Never before have the impulses of art appreciation and collecting been so nakedly harnessed to gratuitous, philistine social display as in the late 1980s, and nowhere more so than in the United States, especially when the Japanese are buying. The new relations between “price” and “value” were epitomized at Sotheby’s New York auction of Andy Warhol’s collection in 1988, when necrophiles and relic hunters competed to pay $20,000 a piece for the dead artist’s cookie jars.
Yet the game had losers as well as winners, and by the late 1980s the losers, interestingly enough, were American. They were chiefly the American museums, and through the museums the American public. The art market boom has been an unmitigated disaster for the public life of art. It has distorted the ground of people’s reaction to painting and sculpture. Thirty (even twenty) years ago anyone, amateur or expert, could spend an hour or two in a museum without wondering what this Tiepolo, this Rembrandt, this de Kooning might cost at auction. Thanks to the unrelenting propaganda of the art market, this is no longer quite the case; and the imagery of money has been so crudely riveted onto the face of museum-quality art by events outside the museum that its unhappy confusion between price and value may never be resolved. It is like the bind in the fairy tale: at the bottom of the meadow a treasure lies buried, and it can be dug up under one condition, that while digging, you do not think of a white horse.
There are many areas, moreover, in which American museums can no longer buy. (British museums are worse off: as a result of the malignant policies of Margaret Thatcher, they cannot repair their own roofs.) They voice a litany of complaints, a wrenching sense of disfranchisement and weakness, as their once adequate annual buying budgets of $2 million to $5 million are turned to chicken feed by art inflation. The symbol of the plight of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is an annual booklet that used to be titled Notable Acquisitions. In 1986 it was renamed Recent Acquisitions. As the museum’s director wrote in its preface, the rise of art prices “has limited the quantity and quality of acquisitions to the point where we can no longer expect to match the standards of just a few years ago.”
AS THE museum’s buying power fades, public experience of art is impoverished, and the brain drain of gifted young people from curatorship into art dealing accelerates. American museums have been hit, in fact, by a double whammy: art inflation and a punitive rewriting, in 1986, of American tax laws, which destroyed most incentives for the rich to give art away. Tax exemption through donations was the basis on which American museums grew, and it is all but gone, with predictably catastrophic results for the future. Thus, in a historic fit of legislative folly, the government began to starve its museums just at the moment when the art market began to paralyze them.
The inflated market is also eroding the other main function of museums: the loan exhibition. New York’s position as art center of the West was based partly on the range, the scholarship, and the aesthetic importance of its museum shows. There is no question that the last fifteen years in the United States have been the golden age of the retrospective, bringing a sequence of remarkable and (for this generation of museums and the public) definitive exhibitions, done at the highest pitch of curatorial effort: late and early Cézanne, Picasso, Manet, van Gogh, Monet, Degas, Watteau, Courbet, Goya, Velázquez, Poussin—and, in 1989, the greatest Cubist show ever held, “Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism” at MOMA. Most of these trans-Atlantic efforts, if not all, were seen in New York.
This type of serious and argued show must be distinguished from the blockbuster that was so much a feature of American cultural life in the 1970s. Nobody—nobody responsible, anyway—believes anymore that great works of past art should be sent around the world for frivolous or merely political reasons. The blockbuster, that curse of American museology, began with two events: André Malraux’s loan of the Mona Lisa to the United States in 1963 (so that Mona and Jackie could be in the same room at the same time) and the appearance of Michelangelo’s Pieta at the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadow in 1964, looking like a replica of itself in margarine, the viewers carried past it on a moving walkway. It produced, at its height, frenetic events like Tut, and clunkers like the Metropolitan Museum’s 1983 Vatican show. And it ended with that saturnalia of “heritage” nostalgia, “Treasure Houses of Great Britain,” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1988.
THE TIME of the blockbuster is gone, and it is no loss. Yet the loss, or even the winding down, of the great monographic exhibitions will prove very serious. That is what the art market threatens. It is difficult for museums even to contemplate larger retrospectives now, and the 1991 Seurat exhibition arranged for Chicago, New York, London, and Paris may be remembered—if it comes off—was one of the last of its kind. When the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Van Gogh at Aries” was being planned in the early 1980s, it was assigned a global insurance value of $1 billion. Today it would be $5 billion, and the show could never be done. In the wake of the sale of Portrait of Dr. Gachet, every owner of a van Gogh wants to believe that his or her painting is worth $82 million, and will not let it off the wall insured for less. So the circulation of pictures is slowing down, and the chances are that museums will again have to rely, as they did forty years ago, more on their permanent collections than on temporary shows—with the difference that these collections, too, will be relatively static. What effect this will have on the American museum audience, conditioned to expect the ever changing stimulus of new art events, remains to be seen.
The 1980s showed how the fear of contraction could lead institutions (the Whitney Museum, notoriously) to lower standards of curatorial judgment in the scramble for corporate underwriting and audience pull. The museum’s immersion in the art world as a promotional system reduces its independence of taste; it chooses to mirror “what's happening” for fear that it might seem obsolete. It must take its cues from the market, the main determinant of New York's visual culture in the 1980s. But to invoke “what's happening,” as though the museum were just a mirror, is an evasion. There are about 200,000 artists in the United States, each making (at a conservative guess) fifty or so objects a year. From the homeless proletariat of these 10 million works almost anything may be designated as “happening,” but it is not likely to have any more significance in the long historical run than, say, Charles Jencks’s classification of a previously uncataloged subgroup of Japanese neo-Palladians does in architectural history.
Trends can be condensed at will, and young artists, with careers such as those of Jean-Michel Basquiat or (parody of parodies) Jeff Koons held up before them, are less disposed to accept an ideal of slow maturation. This makes them vulnerable to fashion, prone to seize whatever eye-catching stylistic device they can, no matter how sterile it may be in the long run. The moral economy of the American art world has been so distorted by the hype and the premature careerism of the 1980s that a serious painter in New York must face the same unreality and weightlessness as a serious actor in Los Angeles. The idea of the “cutting edge”—the phrase is still used by some curators—is fatuous, a fossil relic of a belief in artistic “progress” that no one, at the agitated and directionless end of the twentieth century, will defend under its own name.
V.
IN THINKING of centers, we remain fixed on the ancient Roman model of cultural imperium, and tend to overlook the possibility that things can work differently. For centuries, they did—as in medieval and early Renaissance Italy. The slow growth of its city-states tended to emphasize what was native, local, and patriotic. They fought wars, but none of them had the size, the military reach, or the wealth to subjugate the rest. Hence no Italian state at the end of the quattrocento, not even Rome, had the gravitational field of an imperial center of culture.
At the height of Donatello’s career, there were perhaps 65,000 people in Florence. There was a modest international art market. Artists did work in cities other than their own, as Leonardo did for the Sforzas in Milan; but travel was difficult, no image could be mechanically reproduced with accuracy, and museums did not yet exist. (The idea of the traveling show was centuries away.) Hence art tended to focus on specific acts of commemoration and propaganda—this fresco of the Last Judgment for our local church, that statue of the hired general who saved us from the baleful Pisans.
The results were regional in the best sense, in the sense that matters. To this day the ancient cities of Italy, big ones such as Florence or little ones such as Todi, convey a satisfying sense of cultural wholeness—of the full use of culture in the interest of local resources. Strictly speaking, this is a relic; they live in the late twentieth century, like us, and can only preserve what remains of the past without significantly adding to it. But at least one can still see the work there within the frame of the landscape, the vernacular architecture, the roots of its meaning.
WHAT ALTERED this regional ecology of the arts of Italy, and throughout Europe, was the rebirth of ancient Rome. The bones of the empire rose from the soil and reconstituted themselves as an aesthetic imperium. When Italian artists began to take a systematic interest in the relics of antiquity, the classical past was seen to contain whole systems of norms and forms for the present, of an authority not apparent in the Gothic. Very soon the rediscovery of Vitruvius’s writings and the digs in the Forum made the journey to Rome a necessary part of an artist’s education. The Florentine, however much he felt that his city was the best of cities, could no longer believe that its aesthetic resources were going to give him all the language he could use. So he went to Rome—like Alberti, like Donatello, like Piero della Francesca, like Michelangelo.
As soon as artists recognize that a place embodies cultural resources whose truth and efficacy exceed the merely local, no matter how fond they are of their own paese, the idea of the cultural capital is born. Once the stuff of this cultural stimulus is seen, systems of interpretation will form around it—the academies, the art schools. Their monopoly of technique adds to the gravitational field of the capital. And so do the works that the visitors leave. Michelangelo’s Sistine and Paoline frescoes, Raphael's Stanze, became fused with the antique as part of the whole authoritative pattern that later artists come to Rome to experience. Only in the capital could schools of art and bodies of art theory make themselves felt. One of the great benefits of the center is centralized argument.
What could Michelangelo Merisi, growing up in the little northern town of Caravaggio, expect to learn about painting? He had to get to Rome; only Rome could open to him the scale of work and the technical proficiency that he sought. Capitals rejuvenate themselves by this pull. They draw their nourishment from the provinces. Caravaggio, Pietro de Cortona, and the Carracci came to Rome more for its dead artists than its uninspired living ones; most Roman painting in the early seventeenth century was as sunk in affectation as the much-touted transavanguardia of the early 1980s. But in the process they transformed Roman painting, and added to the sense of the center for centuries to come. They also changed the work of other foreigners in Rome, so that the Caravaggian style spread all over Europe.
BY 1670, however, Rome’s decline as a center for living art had begun. It was still obligatory for a serious painter or sculptor to study in this great hive of time, and several more generations of foreigners, from Fragonard and Hubert Robert to the German Nazarenes, did so. But papal patronage slowed after the death of Urban VIII Barberini. There would be no more fresco cycles like Pietro de Cortona’s ceilings for the Barberini Palace; no more architectural projects like Bernini’s colonnades. Perhaps the outstanding work of visual art produced in Rome in the eighteenth century was the huge corpus of etchings by the Venetian architect Giambattista Piranesi, whose obsessive subject is nostalgia: from the scale of those tiny figures picking their way over fallen pediments or dwarfed by the immense vaults of the thermae, we infer an acute sense of lost cultural potency.
When power declines and the center cannot hold, its works of art move into the eddy of the market and wash up where power is great, where money is plentiful, where order reigns. Although the image of Rome as cultural capital survived for centuries, its reality was enacted in Paris. This transfer was the work of Cardinal Mazarin, who took effective control of the French administration in the 1640s and began to move huge quantities of Italian art into France, thereby forming the basis of the state collections centralized in the Louvre.The aesthetic rise of Paris in the seventeenth century had the same epic quality as its political and military rebirth. Before long, a cultivated Parisian could congratulate himself on living in a new Rome, a capital of the arts whose destiny was to be fed by whatever was best in the provinces—the talents of |
soft-soled athletic shoes.
As little jewelry as possible.
A water bottle if you need more than the occasional drink from the water fountain.
Throat drops, if you would like, because we do a lot of yelling
Please do not wear perfume or scented products to class. Many students are allergic to it.
Please arrive 10 minutes early for sign-in, so that we can start class on time.
If city-stopping weather, such as a windstorm or ice storm, affects travel on the day of your class, please call 503-823-0260 to learn if your class will occur. If the public schools close because of the weather, we will probably cancel that day's session, and extend your class into the next week to make up the missed session.
Waiting Lists
We register for classes one month at a time, and once a class is full, we begin a waiting list for it. If you are on a waiting list, it is for the current month only. As we receive cancellations, we call those at the top of the waiting list for that class.
Most cancellations are received in two time frames: 1) within a few days after a student has registered, and 2) within a day or two of the first session of class. If you are on a waiting list, please only go to class if you have received a call from us notifying you of an available space. If a space does not open up for you, we hope that you will request a schedule of upcoming classes and will register for another location in the near future.
What to expect at your class
The class you attend could be as small as 15 students, or as large as 40 students. The size of class is determined by the space available in our room and the number of instructors available to teach. Regardless of class size, you will practice physical and verbal skills in a small group with an instructor, and will sit with the entire class for information segments.
All of your instructors will be women who volunteer their time to teach these classes, and many are former students who felt inspired by their instructors to pursue this large commitment of time and energy. Your instructors will have information about the application process and volunteering.
Your instructors will encourage you to challenge yourself, as well as take care of yourself physically and emotionally while in class. Survivors of violence may have memories surface. If you are a survivor, you may feel many conflicting emotions. Self-defense classes can help renew confidence and facilitate healing. They can also be overwhelming. Some of the things that can influence your experience in self-defense training are how recently you have experienced violence, other recovery work you have done, the support you have available, the trust you feel in your instructors, and the structure of your class. Please don't hesitate to ask us questions or tell us what you need. To confirm: All of our instructors are female.
Childcare policy: If you are a parent or caregiver, please note that we do not provide child care and do not allow children who are not registered for class in the classroom. Our class is designed for teenage and adult women, and the material taught is for that level of understanding and experience.
Auditing and chaperone policy: We sometimes get requests for class auditing, or someone wants to observe their child to class without participating. As a principle, we do not allow anyone to attend the class who is not planning on participating – it is awkward for the active participants to feel watched. Of course, this is different from taking a short break from the activities.
If you have a disability or medical condition that affects your involvement in physical activities, please tell us as soon as possible (if you haven’t done so on your registration form) – so that we can best prepare for your participation in our classes. One-on-one instruction is available for those who would benefit from it. There is a lead time for getting a sign language interpreter, so if you need one please inform us immediately. If you have hearing loss, it is easiest to reach us through email or a relay service, but if you prefer a TTY, the Police Bureau's TTY number is 503-823-4736. All our classes are ADA accessible unless otherwise noted.
Thanks again to all of the facilities which host our classes and to the volunteers who teach them!It all began in Evans City, Pennsylvania, the shooting location for George A. Romero‘s game-changing masterpiece, Night of the Living Dead. So where better to celebrate the life and enduring legacy of the late Romero than in, well, Evans City?!
From October 20 – 22, The Living Dead Weekend will take over Evans City, PA, and this year’s event promises to be the biggest and best to date. For starters, the convention will play host to the Pittsburgh premiere of the new 4K restoration of Night of the Living Dead, and a public memorial for George Romero will take place on October 22.
“LDW 2017 is a full weekend of events including Movie Screenings, Film Location Tours, Celebrity Appearances, Film Prop Exhibits, Community Events and much more! We’re inviting everyone to celebrate all things zombies and especially the film that started it all, ‘ Night of the Living Dead ‘ where it all began, Evans City, PA!”
Additionally, stars from Night of the Living Dead, Day of the Dead and even Land of the Dead will be on hand to sign autographs, including Lori Cardille, Howard “Bub” Sherman, Joe Pilato, Tom Savini, Russ Streiner, and Eugene “Big Daddy” Clark.
As if all that wasn’t awesome enough, Romero superfan Lawrence Devincentz will be taking guests on tours of Night of the Living Dead and The Crazies filming locations.
There’s even going to be a “Pet Walk of the Living Dead” and pet costume contest!
For all the details and to grab your tickets, follow The Living Dead Weekend on Facebook and check out The Living Dead Weekend’s official website.Image: martingreffe/Flickr
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft aren't responding to cases of online hate speech fast enough, according to the European Commission, which demands the technology companies review reports of hate speech less than 24 hours after they were first reported.
Only 40 percent of all notifications of hate speech were acted upon within a 24-hour timeframe, found a European Commission report, a report that forms part of the governing body's first evaluation into how Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Microsoft fight online hate speech more than six months after the four signed up to a code of conduct in Europe in May 2016.
European Commissioner for Justice Věra Jourová said in a statement this week, "It is our duty to protect people in Europe from incitement to hatred and violence online. This is the common goal of the code of conduct."
Twelve NGOs based in nine EU countries analyzed the responses to hate speech notifications over a six-week timeframe for the evaluation during October and November 2016. The findings, according to the European Commission, indicate that among the 600 notifications of online hate speech made in total, 28 percent led to a removal, 40 percent of all responses were received within 24 hours, while another 43 percent arrived after 48 hours.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Image: Alessio Jacona/Flickr
The results show that Facebook suffered with the highest amount of illegal hate speech notifications, with 270 incidents reported, compared to 163 cases on Twitter and 123 cases on YouTube. There were no reported incidents of hate speech reported to Microsoft, which owns communications products such as Skype and video game platform Xbox. Both anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim hatred was prevalent in the illegal content notifications, with slurs against ethnic origin, national origin, and race also appearing.
"A large number of cases corresponded to some form of anti-migrant speech," said the European Commission report.
Despite Facebook receiving the highest number of illegal content notifications, the company only removed the content in 28.3 percent of cases. YouTube removed the flagged content in almost half of its reported cases.
"The reactions by Twitter and YouTube upon notification of illegal hate speech seem to diverge depending on the source use to notify content (trusted reporter/flagger system vs normal user tools)," said the report. "The rations of removal for Facebook are similar, whether the user notifies the content through the trusted reporter channel or the normal tool."
Read more: White Supremacists Are Still Using Twitter Ads to Spread Their Message
Facebook told Motherboard by email that it has nothing to say on the matter at this time. Microsoft told Motherboard it had nothing to share on the matter, either. YouTube did not respond to Motherboard's emails. Twitter also failed to respond to Motherboard's emails.
The report comes as all four of the same companies launch a campaign to tackle terror content this week. Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and YouTube pledged to combat extremist content on their platforms by sharing information about those posting the content.
"Starting today, we commit to the creation of a shared industry database of 'hashes'—unique digital 'fingerprints'—for violent terrorist imagery or terrorist recruitment videos or images that we have removed from our services," said the companies.
They hope that by sharing the information with each other, they can identify potential terror content easier on their respective platforms.
But Joe McNamee, director at European digital rights campaign group EDRi, told Motherboard in an email this week that the scheme "means yet another step towards a situation where the internet giants become legislator, judge, jury and executioner regarding our free speech."
"This needs to be understood in a context where the EU is pushing the online companies into a full private law enforcement regime," he said, before pointing to examples such as the Terrorism Directive passed this week in the European Parliament that proposes member states may implement internet service blocking "without prejudice to voluntary action taken by the Internet industry to prevent the misuse of its services."
Get six of our favorite Motherboard stories every day by signing up for our newsletter.COMMENTA E CONDIVIDI
Cosa può succedere ai bambini, in Italia, nel 2017? Che vengano utilizzati per spacciare la cocaina, come in queste ore scopriamo essere avvenuto per mesi nel quartiere difficile di Librino, a Catania. Il compito toccava a un bimbo di appena 6 anni, “danno collaterale” della macchina dello spaccio di cui 36 ingranaggi sono finiti in manette. Immaginatelo con lo zainetto, a far su e giù tra i pianerottoli, con la droga tra i quaderni e i sogni della prima elementare.
Ma ancora non è niente. Nelle stesse ore s'è scoperta la storia agghiacciante di due bambini, sorella e fratello - rispettivamente di 2 anni e di 8 mesi - abbandonati in auto la scorsa settimana a Borgo San Giacomo, nel Bresciano. Il loro papà, di origini romene, li aveva lasciati per andare a giocare alle slot-machine mentre la madre si prostituiva a pochi metri di distanza. La cocaina ce l'hanno nel sangue, quei due bimbi, lo hanno scoperto i medici che li hanno visitati. Ora si sta cercando di capire come sia possibile, se l'abbiano ingerita da sole, accidentalmente, o se addirittura quei genitori gliel'abbiano data, magari per farli stare zitti e tranquilli. Cancellare i propri figli, dopo averli messi al mondo. Quei bimbi per fortuna ora sono in una comunità protetta, e aspettando d'essere adottati.
Si tratta di casi isolati, oppure c'è una allarme che non vediamo sulle condizioni dei piccoli in Italia? Una cosa e l'altra forse, ma sul secondo punto dobbiamo tornare con forza a puntare gli occhi. Tutte le indagini e gli indicatori sociali ci dicono che tanti, troppi bambini sono in sofferenza, nel nostro Paese, che pure conta su un periodo di ripresa economica.
Vivere da bambini, in Italia: ecco i numeri
Intanto i numeri della povertà, sotto il cui peso è più facile che maturino situazioni di disagio estremo come quelle inquadrate dalla cronaca. L'Istat lo scorso luglio ha fatto il punto: sono 1 milione e 619mila le famiglie residenti in condizione di povertà assoluta, nelle quali vivono 4 milioni e 742mila individui. Di cui 1 milione e 292mila sono minori. Per loro, per i piccoli, la situazione è addirittura peggiorata nel 2016 rispetto all'anno precedente: dal 10,9% di quelli coinvolti si è passati al 12,5%. E quando si parla di povertà assoluta si parla di mancanza di tutto per questi bambini: cibo, vestiti, acqua, luce, riscaldamento.
Secondo le stime di Save the children la situazione è ancora peggiore, soprattutto allargando lo sguardo al resto d'Europa: in Italia 1 bambino su 3 è a rischio di povertà ed esclusione sociale (32,1%), ben 4 punti e mezzo sopra la media europea (27,7%). Olanda e Germania, grazie a un sistema di welfare efficace, riescono ad esempio a contenere tale rischio sotto la soglia del 20%.
Senza istruzione
La situazione peggiora, a seconda di dove si nasce (al Sud la situazione è drammatica, complice anche l'ombra della criminalità) e soprattutto a mano a mano che si cresce. La povertà materiale, per i minori, diventa povertà educativa. Negli istituti con un indice socio-economico-culturale più basso, lo certifica sempre Save the Children, più di 1 quindicenne su 4 (il 27,4%) è ripetente, mentre negli istituti con indice alto la quota scende quasi a 1 su 23 (il 4,4%). Uno studente di 15 anni su 2 (il 47%) proveniente da un contesto svantaggiato, inoltre, non raggiunge il livello minimo di competenza in lettura, otto volte tanto rispetto a un coetaneo cresciuto in una famiglia agiata. E tra i bambini e i ragazzi che vivono in condizioni di disagio è ancora elevatissimo il rischio di dispersione scolastica: nelle scuole secondarie di secondo grado il tasso di abbandono in un anno è stato del 4,3%, pari a 112.000 ragazzi, mentre in quelle di primo grado il tasso scende all’1,35%, che corrisponde a 23.000 alunni.
(vedi un estratto dell'Atlante dell'infanzia a rischio di Save the children per l'anno 2017 >>)
E senza investimenti
La beffa? Per affrontare la situazione l’Italia, secondo gli ultimi dati Eurostat sulla spesa sociale in Europa, destina una quota di spesa sociale a infanzia e famiglie di molto inferiore alla media europea (5% rispetto all’8,4%), mentre pensioni di anzianità e vecchiaia (165 gli anziani ogni 100 bambini) assorbono ben oltre la metà della spesa per protezione sociale, con una differenza di circa dieci punti percentuali in più rispetto alla media europea. Un risultato che ci pone tra gli ultimi nel Vecchio Continente. C'è bisogno di ben altro, che un bonus bebè.It's morphin' story time!
Back in May, Lionsgate announced that it would reboot the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers franchise for an upcoming movie. It's unclear if any of the original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers will reprise their roles for the upcoming movie, but The Huffington Post felt like it was morphin' time and reached out to early cast members to talk about the putty-fighting days. Ahead, 11 stories from the franchise that will make all fans want to blast the theme song and watch a YouTube video of the original rangers shouting, "Dragonzord! Mastodon! Pterodactyl! Triceratops! Saber-Toothed Tiger! Tyrannosaurus!" Now, Go! Go! (read about) Power Rangers!
Interviews were conducted separately. People interviewed in alphabetical order:
Karan Ashley = Yellow Ranger. David Fielding = Zordon. Walter Jones = Black Ranger. Austin St. John = Red Ranger. David Yost = Blue Ranger.
1. Austin St. John and Walter Jones lived in a Power Rangers party house together. One kegger even had a helicopter come shut them down.
Casts from other popular shows at the time would also make appearances (and apparently an agreement was made long ago to not disclose too much about the craziness that went down in the house), but here is some information on the legendary parties that continued even past the actors' original time with the show.
WJ: We had lots of different parties and there were lots of different people. And the parties were memorable: We had pool tables, we had a trampoline, we had a huge Burmese python that was 12-feet long, and we'd just have a good time. I'd come home sometimes and there were 150 people in our house that we didn't know. I'd be like, "Hey, what's going on" and I guess we're having a party.
ASJ: Oh man, our parties were always outrageous. At the time we were all single, we were all on the prowl. You know, we had a little bit of fame and we had an amazing house that sat on top of a hill in Glendale, California. It had a 360-degree view of the L.A. area. Pasadena. It was gorgeous.
DY: The funniest stories were about Walter's infamous parties. Those were always a good time. It was a frat house. When they'd do parties it was like the party to be at because it was a lot of fun. They know how to throw a good party.
ASJ: We had stunt guys there, some of them were professional dancers, like dancing on major tours. Like Janet Jackson. So when we had parties they would call their dancer friends, these girls, again professional dancers. So we always had these smoking hot girls at the house. We always had amazing guys at the house, too, if that's what the other guys were into. We had some parties that were so big. Multiple kegs. Inevitably somebody would call the police and a helicopter would show up and put a spotlight on the backyard where we had a volleyball net. A big trampoline. A cop would come knock on the door, "Excuse me, could you guys keep it down." That was just business as usual.
KA: Well, they would have a party what seemed like every month. And the funny thing was I didn't know them because they were off the show by the time I got there. So we'd meet briefly, but they had some great parties. Their house was like just the place to be. I met a lot of friends through that house.
2. The Power Rangers were paid as much as someone who "worked the window at McDonalds."
The original cast often talks about the long hours and little pay that was given to the actors. In a previous interview, Austin St. John said that production company Saban Entertainment's idea of treating the actors well was just providing a good food spread. It seemed that even getting Christmas off was unclear, and St. John once called surviving these working conditions "Power Ranger Stress Disorder." They were all grateful to have the job, but it was far from easy.
WJ: To be working on a television show and have a regular job, doing 40 episodes a season, that's not something to sneeze at. But when the show is making billions of dollars, when they made about a billion dollars in the first year off of merchandising, and when we have toys and parks and video games and comic books and all these things with our likeness, it starts to come into reason that this should be at least union, so it'll be fair.
ASJ: We weren't paid a lot, at all. I could have worked the window at McDonalds and probably made the same money the first season. It was disappointing, it was frustrating, it made a lot of us angry. [Haim Saban] just had absolutely zero conscience about making billions using our faces because it was his idea and he owned it. He felt like, screw us. I don't want to put works in his mouth but he could not have cared less about making all this money, because he had this ownership. The hell with everybody else who was helping him make that money. That's the way it's always been.
WJ: Right before the film they decided that we would receive contracts. They were not great contracts. They were all non-union, and for a number of films and another 40 episodes, they just weren't suitable. I figured after two seasons we deserved to be a union show and the conversation basically went that we should all get together and talk to representation and have someone represent us for these contracts as group. And that didn't work out. So three of us ended up negotiating and three of us stayed. And eventually what happened is that we just negotiated out of the contracts and moved on.
KA: We worked so much we didn't have time to hang out. When we first got on the show we were doing six days a week, 12 to 15 hour days. So, you had a Sunday. You missed quite a bit of your life just trying to keep up with the production schedule and keep up with the things we had to fulfill in our contracts. I remember I'd go to set and it'd be dark, I'd leave set and it was dark. You were like a machine. You just kept pushing through. I've never worked that hard in my life. it was like the good the bad and the ugly, we kind of got it all.
ASJ: We had a lot of fun. We worked around the damn clock. We worked long, long hard hours on a non-union show. And we'll just never be paid what we should have been paid. And Saban is never going to have a problem about paying us. It is what it is.
Image: FastFoodToyReviews YouTube
3. Austin St. John had to live in his Jeep after he left.
Immediately following the show, the actors weren't left with much to live off. St. John, in particular, had a rough time. But for what it's worth, the actors do feel like it was a worthwhile learning experience.
ASJ: There was a period where I did OK, while I was doing appearances. But once the appearances were over, I pretty much hit rock bottom. That's when I met the starving actor thing. I had a huge success, at least industry success, but was never paid for it. Then I had to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. I had learned some hard life lessons. I ended up sleeping out of my jeep for awhile with my dog. We found some spots in the Arizona desert while I was bouncing at the time, just bouncing, teaching martial arts. I was sleeping in a riverbed for awhile until a friend of mine took me in and helped me out. Then I slowly had to learn how to be an adult and grow up and handle my responsibilities. Definitely a hard lesson. It was good for me. I hated it at the time, but it was good for me, in retrospect.
4. The Power Rangers would prank each other all the time while on set.
Being a group of young actors forced to hang around each other all day, they'd often try and cut loose and joke around. Jason David Green, the green Power Ranger, was a particularly big prankster on set, tricking David Yost into eating a fly in a sandwich, drawing on Yost's trailer couch and breaking a brush over his head. Walter Jones and Austin St. John's pranks were often more testosterone-fueled.
DY: Well Jason, he and I were like best friends. He had two kids and I often babysat both of his boys so he and his wife could go off and have date night. So, I considered myself their godfather on some level. We were really close and he would prank me all the time. Some of his pranks, they seem extreme, but they are funny. In terms of pranking him back, I don't think I ever did. But he was often the jokester on set for sure.
ASJ: I was definitely the youngest, so I had some foolish teenager moments where I'd be pulling shenanigans. There might have been times i was making noise off set to try and distract them while they were shooting. Other times I'd do something foolish like throw a carrot over the top of the wall into where I knew they were actively shooting and I was just waiting to see what i could disrupt. Walter and I, we pranked one our production assistants by the name of Nick Kellis a lot. We were always getting at one other, somehow somewhere, cracking jokes or beating each other up in the hallway, playfully of course. It was never sinister. It was just a big family so there was a lot of that stuff going on.
WJ: Nick Kellis was a PA that worked on the show. He was just a poor guy trying to do his job coming to get us to take us to the set, and Austin and I would attack him in the hallway. Not to hurt him, just playing. And he was an amazing wrestler, this guy, so there was just a lot of testosterone on the set. We'd just be like punching and little kicks, just tapping, nothing that was going to hurt anybody. He knew anytime he came to pick us up, it was coming. And it became a fun part of our day. Nick was a good sport for always playing a long with it, in fact we're all really good friends to this day.
Image: David Yost Facebook
5. The process to audition for "Power Rangers" was absolutely crazy.
To cast "Power Rangers," Saban held large, open casting calls where thousands of hopeful actors showed up. Members of the winning cast even just showed up on a lark, with Austin St. John, in particular, attending the audition on a dare from a friend. Eventually the actors were whittled down until a few different teams of Power Rangers auditioned against each other. Notably the Black Ranger could have been a "Michael Jackson" type. Moonwalking around putties could have been a possibility. Zordon could have had a crazier voice, although David Fielding's audition was just him versus one other actor. The cast that won originally had a different Yellow Ranger, with actress Audrey Dubois winning the role that would eventually go to Thuy Trang. When Trang left the show along with St. John and Walter Jones, Saban had another huge casting call where they found Karan Ashley.
KA: When I was first auditioning I didn't know much about it. My friend was telling me you got to go audition, so I show up and there are thousands of people at this open call audition. And of course with that, I had to wait in line for quite a few hours. So luckily for me there was a guy who knew all things Power Rangers in line a couple spaces a head of me. And he just basically was so geeked to be there, I just sat and listened to him all day talk about the show. So it gave me a good idea of what the show was.
DF: I had assumed it was going to be just another cattle call like everything else where you go and stand in a line with 500 guys, read a couple lines and then go home and never hear anything. And when I got to the offices of Saban in Burbank, California, I went up to the floor where they were having the audition and it was just me and this other guy in the waiting room. I thought, "Well, this is strange." We got the lines and kind of went to our separate corners and read them. He went in first and did his thing. About 20 to 25 minutes later, he came out and I went in and they had all the original cast and the director and the producers. They had me stand on a table and read the lines. After I had gotten through the lines about handing the kids their powers and stuff, I remember Austin just turning to everybody and going, "I think we found our Zordon." Well, at the time the character was called Zoltar. Then I went home and like an hour and a half later I got a phone call saying I got the part.
And how was standing on that table?
DF: It wasn't awkward. It kind of made sense to me because I got the impression from reading the character description that he was supposed to be a larger than life figure and a mentor to these kids. When I was in the other room going over the lines and overheard the other gentleman practicing his take on the voice, it was crazier than mine. The one that I used, that ended up being used in the show, was much more of a deeper tone. The idea that I had in my head at the time was that he was a very Zeus-like figure, but in a kindly way, not in a vengeful, god-like way. Somebody that was going to be nurturing for these new superheroes.
6. All of Zordon's footage was shot in one day over just a few hours.
DF: For budgetary reasons they never filmed the character again. They just reused the footage over and over. And from a production standpoint, that is great. From an actor's standpoint... They shaved all my hair off and glued my ears back. And used makeup to make my eyebrows stand out, and then painted the top half of my chest and shoulders green. I sat in front of a green screen while they filmed me because they were just going to use my head and that was it. My recollection is that I was in the chair for three or four hours. Just going over the lines, doing it a number of times and also doing a number of pickups where they would just film my reactions: turning of the head, looking this way, or looking down. And if you watch the character in the show, his movements and his actions seem to be really sort of out of synch with everything. I guess that was sort of their idea -- because the character was trapped in a time warp, in a time bubble, he was trying to communicate with everybody as best as he could.
Top Images: Courtesy of David Fielding. Middle Image: Austin St. John Facebook.
7. The Power Rangers would occasionally go to dance clubs after long days on set. Walter Jones was the best dancer.
Although multiple Power Rangers talked about how exhausted they would be after filming all day and would often have to simply reset at home by watching television and falling asleep, occasionally the cast would go out on the town together.
DY: The first season we'd go out to bars after work on Fridays. Or we'd get dinner on Saturday nights and hang out at whatever the popular dance club was. Walter, hands down, is the best dancer, because he was a professional dancer. Karan could dance, too. I'd probably come in third out of everybody as best dancer.
WJ: If there was dancing to be had, I was probably the best dancer in the group. It's something that I've always done and a passion of mine.
8. Many of the Power Rangers were actually into martial arts and would create their own moves for fight scenes.
All of the actors were chosen for their Power Ranger roles because Saban thought they would be able to fight adequately on screen with little direction. Austin St. John, Jason David Frank and Walter Jones had martial arts backgrounds. To save money, many of the scenes were filmed quickly, which led to little notes as far as fighting and allowed the actors to kind of do their own thing. Walter Jones was given the direction to create a "hip-hop kido" from Saban, but what that meant day to day was mostly up to him.
WJ: It was [Saban's] idea of hip-hop combined with martial arts and dancing. It was something I had to go put some thought to and figure out why I was doing what I was doing and how it would be most effective. Taking a break-dance swipe move -- where you go and you do a flip towards the ground and use your feet to sweep the ground and the air -- is a way to effectively kick two or three people and come to the ground and sweep them. But I'd have to come up with how would this work and how would it be applied. That was one of the funnest parts of the job for me, coming up with new ways to dance and fight at the same time.
The Power Rangers really didn't have much time to figure these fight sequences out.
WJ: It wasn't like a film production where you get two weeks to do a fight and it's choreographed properly. It was like, "OK, so in the script today, you're going to be fighting in the park. Hey, how about you fight on this park bench, can you come up with something?" And so I got 15 minutes, 20 minutes, a half hour, to figure out what I wanted to do. They give me a couple putties. So I put a putty here and I'll do this and he can swing at me and I'll jump down on the seat and do a spin, come back up and punch him. Drop him off, go back up, play like king of the mountain and have another putty come. I'll jump over him, I'll flip over this guy. It was all really improvised and choreographed spontaneously.
9. Why did Zordon want "teenagers with attitude?"
Besides being good fighters, according to the opening sequence, the Power Rangers were supposed to be "teenagers with attitude" as well as "overbearing and over emotional humans." David Fielding explained why he felt Zordon wanted these particular types of people to be chosen for the Power Rangers.
DF: In the opening sequence [the line is something like] "Alpha, teleport to us teenagers with attitude." Then in the actual lines of the show it becomes, "Send me several overbearing and over emotional humans." So he doesn't actually call them teenagers in the lines of the show. But I enjoyed the "teenagers with attitude." It kind of serves as a dual purpose. On one hand, every teenager has an attitude, because they're teenagers; on the other, I think what Zordon was talking about was that he wanted specific personalities to serve as the superheroes. They would be not only capable, but also wouldn't back down. And I think that's an important message for young kids and teenagers: to have somebody who believes in you, and who sees that your attitude can be a strength rather than just something that gets in your way. I think that's what it meant.
10. David Yost was called homophobic slurs on set causing him to eventually quit the show and join a "pray the gay away" program.
David Yost has said that he only missed one day on set over the seasons, but he eventually walked off the show due to years of apparent homophobia from producers and the crew. Eventually, unbeknownst to the other Power Rangers and his close friends, Yost entered a "pray the gay away" program and then checked himself into a hospital.
DY: I was struggling with my sexuality for the majority of my life up to that point. People would say things and there were rumors about my sexuality on set. Or people would make up lies about things I was doing and it would just become upsetting. Because I just wanted to go to work and do my job. I didn't think it was anybody's business what I was doing in my personal life. I can honestly say I wasn't doing anything in my personal life. I wasn't dating anybody or any of that. I do know that a couple of my co-stars were questioned about my sexuality at one point and that was really upsetting to me.
Yost initially tried a religious therapy, but eventually accepted himself.
DY: I had just come to a point where I wasn't in a good place mentally. I just thought it was best that I walk away from the show, because I didn't want to be in an environment anymore that was adding to my stress and adding to me not liking myself. So I left the show and I did try several things to correct being gay, if you will. I tried therapy and that was very unsuccessful and it caused me a lot of emotional stress, more emotional stress than I already had. I ended up having a nervous breakdown and had to check into the hospital for five weeks. After that I started getting my head back together and accepting myself for who I was. Accepting that I was a gay man and that was OK.
Images: David Yost Facebook
11. For the most part, the Power Rangers were there for each other and had each other's backs.
All the Power Rangers I spoke to had fond memories of their cast mates. This was an experience they were happy to get through with each other. Austin St. John and Walter Jones lived in a house together, but they've also said that Jones was sort of a big brother to St. John on the set, and the two would look out for each other if either were acting too foolish. What kinds of foolish things would they get up to?
ASJ: You know, silly stuff, we would just go out and have a couple beers and just be ridiculous. Insanity. Crack jokes, a lot of times at our own expense. Just everybody laughing and having a good time. Sometimes, one of us would get a little too carried away and the other one would be like, "Hey, we should probably reel this in for just a hot second..."
WJ: When he came into the house [St. John] was just turning 18, so he was really young and not experienced and hadn't really acted before. It was kind of a fluke that he got it because i think he came into the audition on a dare. So there was a lot for him to learn and i was a little older than him so i watched his back but he also watched my back. So if either one of us |
48 0.0 CHAMPIONSHIP DRIVE ENN WHOS IN 7:30 PM 8:00 PM 47 0.0 QUICK PITCH MLBN QP 12P 12:00 PM 1:00 PM 47 0.0 LIGUE 1 BEIN PARIS SAINT-GERMAIN VS. OLYMPIQUE DE MAR 4:30 PM 6:30 PM 46 0.0 SPORTSCENTER FEATURED ENN 8:00 PM 8:30 PM 46 0.0 BUNDESLIGA FOXD SCHALKE VS KOLN 9:20 AM 11:24 AM 44 0.0 CONTACTO DEPORTIVO UDN 10:00 PM 11:00 PM 44 0.0 UEFA CL SEMANAL FOXD 2:30 PM 3:00 PM 43 0.0 COLLEGE FOOTBALL REPEAT ESPN2 IOWA/WISCONSIN 1:00 AM 3:00 AM 42 0.0 GOLF CENTRAL GOLF 6:05 PM 7:05 PM 42 0.0 COLLEGE FOOTBALL REPEAT ESPNU TEXAS A&M/MISSISSIPPI ST 5:00 PM 7:00 PM 41 0.0 ESPN ORIGINAL DOCUMENTARY ESPNU SEC STORIED: WUERFFELS WAY 7:30 AM 8:00 AM 41 0.0 BARCLAYS PREMIER LEAGUE UNVSO EVERTON V. LIVERPOOL 10/4 8:25 AM 10:33 AM 41 0.0 FOX SPORTS LIVE FS1 1832 7:00 AM 8:00 AM 40 0.0 SPORTSCENTER WEEKEND ENN 12:00 PM 1:00 PM 39 0.0 LIGA MX EN 60 UDN 9:00 PM 10:00 PM 39 0.0 UFC ULTIMATE INSIDER FS1 TJ DILLASHAW 4:30 PM 5:00 PM 38 0.0 COLLEGE FOOTBALL REPEAT ESPNU NOTRE DAME/CLEMSON 12:00 AM 3:00 AM 37 0.0 NBA GAMETIME NBAT GAMETIME 10/4/15 12:30 AM 1:00 AM 37 0.0 CHAMPIONSHIP DRIVE ENN WHOS IN 1:30 AM 2:00 AM 34 0.0 CHAMPIONSHIP DRIVE ENN WHOS IN 11:00 PM 11:30 PM 33 0.0 LIGA MX EN 30 UDN 11:30 AM 12:00 PM 33 0.0 MAJOR LEAGUE FISHING FS2 CHALLENGE CUP:ELIMINATION RND 1 9:00 AM 11:00 AM 32 0.0 LIGA EREDIVISIE HOLANDA L UDN AJAX AMSTERDAM / PSV EINDHOVEN 8:25 AM 10:30 AM 32 0.0 LIGA MX EN 30 UDN 10:30 AM 11:00 AM 32 0.0 EXPRESS PREGAME BEIN EXPRESS PREGAME – L 2:00 PM 2:25 PM 31 0.0 ULTIMATE FIGHTER FS2 504:A FAITHLESS FOE 12:00 AM 1:00 AM 30 0.0 PREMIER LEAGUE ENCORE NBCSN NEWCASTLE/MANCHESTER CITY 1:30 AM 3:00 AM 30 0.0 ASIAN AMATEUR CHAMP. ESPN2 FINAL ROUND 6:00 AM 6:11 AM 29 0.0 BUNDESLIGA PREGAME L FS1 18 9:00 AM 9:22 AM 29 0.0 FOX SPORTS LIVE L FS1 1833 11:34 PM 12:30 AM 29 0.0 UFC FIGHT FLASHBACK FS2 UFC 187 8:00 AM 8:30 AM 29 0.0 HIGH HEAT MLBN HIGH HEAT 1:00 PM 2:00 PM 29 0.0 UFC UNLEASHED FS2 FORREST GRIFFIN/TITO ORTIZ 8:00 PM 9:00 PM 28 0.0 SN MONTHLY JEERS ENN 1:30 PM 2:00 PM 27 0.0 SPORTSCENTER TOP 10 ENN 12:00 AM 12:30 AM 27 0.0 CENTRAL FOX WKND FOXD 1:00 AM 2:00 AM 27 0.0 CONTACTO DEPORTIVO UDN 2:00 AM 3:00 AM 27 0.0 SN MONTHLY JEERS ENN 12:30 AM 1:00 AM 26 0.0 FOX SPORTS LIVE FS1 1832 6:00 AM 7:00 AM 26 0.0 FOX SPORTS LIVE FS1 1834 2:00 AM 3:00 AM 25 0.0 UFC HOF INDUCTION CEREMON FS2 2015 7:00 PM 8:00 PM 25 0.0 LIGA MX EN 30 UDN 11:00 AM 11:30 AM 25 0.0 FOX DEPORTES EN VIVO WKND FOXD 9:00 AM 9:20 AM 24 0.0 ULTIMATE FIGHTER FS2 503:RECOGNIZE THE ENEMY 11:00 PM 12:00 AM 24 0.0 UEL HIGHLIGHTS FS2 34 2:00 PM 3:00 PM 23 0.0 FOX DEPORTES EN VIVO WKND FOXD 11:49 PM 12:00 AM 22 0.0 UCL MAGAZINE FS2 72 1:30 PM 2:00 PM 22 0.0 NBA PRESEASON NBAT DENVER/LA CLIPPERS 8:30 AM 11:00 AM 22 0.0 PL MATCH OF THE DAY NBCSN 6:30 AM 7:30 AM 21 0.0 SN MONTHLY JEERS ENN 11:30 PM 12:00 AM 20 0.0 INTERNATIONAL SOCCER FOXD BUND:LEVERKUSEN VS AUGSBURG 5:00 PM 7:00 PM 20 0.0 MORNING DRIVE GOLF 6:30 AM 7:30 AM 20 0.0 LIGA MX EN 60 UDN 1:00 AM 2:00 AM 20 0.0 CHAMPIONSHIP DRIVE ENN WHOS IN 1:00 AM 1:30 AM 19 0.0 FOX SPORTS LIVE L FS1 1834 1:00 AM 2:00 AM 19 0.0 UFC 1 ON 1 FS2 FORREST GRIFFIN 8:30 AM 9:00 AM 18 0.0 UFC PPV PRELIMS FS2 192:CORMIER/GUSTAFSSON 5:00 PM 7:00 PM 18 0.0 GOLF CENTRAL GOLF 6:00 AM 6:30 AM 18 0.0 REAL TRAINING CAMP NBAT 2015 MINNESOTA TIMBERWOLVES 3:30 PM 5:00 PM 18 0.0 SOMOS MLS UDN 11:00 PM 12:00 AM 18 0.0 PREMIER LEAGUE WORLD NBCSN 6:00 AM 6:30 AM 17 0.0 REPUBLICA DEPORTIVA 2 SUN UDN 12:00 AM 1:00 AM 17 0.0 COLL FTBL SCOREBOARD ENN 2:00 AM 3:00 AM 16 0.0 LO MEJOR UEFA CHAMPIONS FOXD 4:30 PM 5:00 PM 16 0.0 REAL TRAINING CAMP NBAT 2015 CLEVELAND CAVALIERS 11:00 AM 12:30 PM 16 0.0 SERIE A BEIN JUVENTUS VS. BOLOGNA 11:55 AM 2:00 PM 13 0.0 LO MEJOR UEFA CHAMPIONS FOXD 4:00 PM 4:30 PM 13 0.0 MAJOR LEAGUE SOCCER FOXD CO RAPIDS VS REAL SALT LAKE 7:00 PM 9:27 PM 13 0.0 NASCAR VICTORY LANE P FS1 DOVER 12:30 AM 1:00 AM 13 0.0 NBA SPECIAL NBAT JAMES WORTHY 5:00 PM 5:23 PM 13 0.0 PREVIA AL CLASICO HOLANDA UDN 8:00 AM 8:25 AM 13 0.0 90 IN 30 BEIN ATLETICO MADRID VS. REAL MADRID 9:30 PM 10:00 PM 12 0.0 LA LIGA BBVA MARQUEE BEIN ATLETICO MADRID VS. REAL MADRID 1:00 AM 3:00 AM 12 0.0 CENTRAL FOX WKND ENC FOXD 8:00 AM 9:00 AM 11 0.0 CENTRAL FOX WKND MID FOXD 3:00 PM 4:00 PM 11 0.0 GOLF CENTRAL GOLF 10:05 PM 11:05 PM 11 0.0 LIGA MX EN 30 UDN 7:30 AM 8:00 AM 11 0.0 SERIE A BEIN AC MILAN VS. NAPOLI 7:30 PM 9:30 PM 10 0.0 REAL TRAINING CAMP NBAT 2015 MILWAUKEE BUCKS 2:00 PM 3:30 PM 10 0.0 UFC HOF INDUCTION CEREMON FS2 2015 2:00 AM 3:00 AM 8 0.0 PRESS CONFERENCE NBAT WNBA PRESS CONFERENCE 5:23 PM 6:03 PM 8 0.0 EXPRESS WEEKEND BEIN EXPRES XTRA WEEKEND-R 10:00 PM 11:00 PM 7 0.0 UFC PPV POST FIGHT FS2 192:CORMIER/GUSTAFSSON 7:00 AM 8:00 AM 7 0.0 REAL TRAINING CAMP NBAT 2015 MINNESOTA TIMBERWOLVES 7:00 AM 8:30 AM 7 0.0 REAL TRAINING CAMP NBAT 2015 MEMPHIS GRIZZLIES 12:30 PM 2:00 PM 7 0.0 CONTACTO DEPORTIVO UDN 6:00 AM 7:00 AM 7 0.0 UFC ULTIMATE INSIDER FS2 TJ DILLASHAW 1:00 AM 1:30 AM 6 0.0 EXPRESS WEEKEND BEIN EXPRESS XTRA WEEKEND-L 6:30 PM 7:30 PM 5 0.0 SERIE A BEIN SAMPDORIA VS. INTER 8:55 AM 11:00 AM 5 0.0 FOX GOL MEXICO FOXD 2:00 AM 3:00 AM 5 0.0 STREET LEAGUE SKATEBOARD FS2 NEW JERSEY 3:00 PM 5:00 PM 5 0.0 UFC 1 ON 1 FS2 FORREST GRIFFIN 1:30 AM 2:00 AM 5 0.0 90 IN 30 BEIN SEVILLA VS. BARCELONA 11:00 AM 11:30 AM 3 0.0 NATIONAL RUGBY LG L FS2 GRAND FNL:BRONCOS/COWBOYS 6:00 AM 7:00 AM 3 0.0 REAL TRAINING CAMP NBAT 2015 CLEVELAND CAVALIERS 6:00 AM 7:00 AM 3 0.0 MOTORSPORTS BEIN FIM SBK-COURS FRANCE – RACE 1 & 2 11:00 PM 1:00 AM 2 0.0 SKYBET CHAMPIONSHIP BEIN CHARLTON ATHLETIC VS. FULHAM 8:30 AM 8:55 AM 2 0.0 EXPRESS PREGAME BEIN EXPRESS PREGAME – L 11:30 AM 11:55 AM 1 0.0 CENTRAL FOX WKND AM FOXD 7:00 AM 8:00 AM 1 0.0 GILLETTE WORLD SPORT UDN 7:00 AM 7:30 AM 1 0.0 PAID PROGRAMMING FOXD 6:00 AM 7:00 AM 0 0.0
–
Note: viewership of around 100,000 or lower is technically what Nielsen refers to as a “scratch” i.e., not enough Nielsen panelists watched for Nielsen to validate it. There are around 20,000 homes in the Nielsen panel and a bit over 50,000 panelists, where 1 Nielsen panelist watching a whole telecast represents around 5,800 people. So something averaging a million viewers averaged around 170 people out of the 50K+ panel — small, but still statistically significant. But when there’s a show with 30,000 viewers, that’s only around 5 or 6 Nielsen panelists…Amazon announces a new bonus for members of its Prime subscription service that might entice more than a few gamers into shelling out for the premium offering.
The online shipping and retail giant announced the service earlier today, indicating that it would offer a 20 percent discount on all video game pre-orders and new releases for its Prime subscribers. Amazon already represents a huge portion of online video game purchases and carries a strong influence in determining which video games are best sellers in the holiday season, and the new Prime bonus appears to be an effort to solidify the company’s role and reputation within the video game industry.
According to Amazon, the “new release” window is defined as any day within the first two weeks after a game’s launch, and the deal will only be valid for physical copies. While that doesn’t apply to package deals like console bundles, it does include special editions, which might help gamers get the discount they’re looking for on the more expensive video game special edition releases available. Customers won’t see the discount until checkout, and the 20 percent off is only for the list price and does not include any previously existing sale price.
Essentially, however, the offering is a noticeable discount on new games that wasn’t there before. Amazon is also applying the deal to all existing Prime member pre-orders, a move likely driven equally as a gesture of good faith and a preliminary measure taken to avoid a wave of cancellations and re-orders so that members could acquire the valuable discount.
It’s been a while since the online retailer made video game headlines, as things have been relatively quiet for the company since Amazon acquired Twitch for $970 million a year and a half ago. Still, Amazon has maintained a healthy interest in video games for quite some time now, and it’s no surprise to see the company appeal to gamers’ wallets and loyalties once more after it was revealed Amazon is creating its own PC game. While details regarding that game are still scarce, creating a healthy relationship with the video game community can only make the game’s eventual release smoother.
That relationship should continue to improve on its already amiable nature, too, as the new Prime discount appears to be a permanent new addition to the subscription-based service and not just a limited time offer to spark interest from gamers after the holiday rush. The timing couldn’t be better for video game fans, either, as there is already a long list of most anticipated games in 2016 that will likely continue to expand as more announcements are made in the coming months. For those who were already going to pre-order 5 new games this year, the 20 percent off deal represents a sixth new game as virtually free – and if there’s one thing gamers love, its new, free content to explore.
Is the new addition to the Prime subscription service enough to convince you to give Amazon your money? Will this service help Amazon compete with the beloved Steam shopping experience? Let us know in the comments below.
Source: Amazon (via Polygon)Chip Kelly and the Oregon Duck offense have seen countless variations, stunts, and unconventional packages thrown their way over the years. Whether defenses are bringing men out of coverage to account for the run, aligning in creative fashions to confuse the conventional zone blocking schemes, or simply feigning an injury to give the defense a chance to rest, there isn’t much left for Chip Kelly to scheme against.
As you likely know, Kansas State boasts the nation’s most efficient team, and most of that title stems from KSU’s defense; it leads the nation in turnover margin at +22, and is in the top 25 for scoring defenses at 21 points per game, and rushing defense, at 119 yards per game. Kansas State’s turnover margin fell below zero twice this season, once against lowly North Texas, and again against Baylor, the Wildcats’ only loss.
While the high turnover margin and elite rushing defense indicates a successfully aggressive defense, Kansas State will likely avoid stepping out of its comfort zone when it faces Oregon on January 3rd. Evidence suggests that Kansas State will be playing a relatively basic defensive scheme, and allow its disciplined defenders to make tackles in space and prevent explosion plays. Against eleven of their twelve opponents, the scheme worked, and played directly into the hands of the even more efficient Kansas State offense, that churned away at defenses and the game clock. When the Wildcats don’t make mistakes, the scheme works, and can allow the Wildcats to play and beat nearly any team in the country.
But as we’ve seen before this season, Oregon’s offense can conjure many mistakes from their opponents, and while Kansas State will most likely not be making nearly as many as the sometimes porous PAC-12 defenses have this season, containing Oregon’s offense for an entire game is a very hard thing to do, even for the nation’s elite defenses.
Oregon’s offense is a simple numbers game; if there are more defenders in the box than offensive players, Oregon will throw. If there are more offensive players than defensive players, then Oregon will run, and when Kansas State played Baylor this season, the Bears used a similar principal against the Wildcats.
When the spread running game was invented, it was most likely scripted with seven offensive players, and six defenders in the box. Nearly every concept Oregon runs will succeed when given a man advantage at the point of attack, and as shown by the power play diagrammed in the image above, Kansas State will not have much success without devoting more defenders to the running game.
After using quick passes, bubble screens, and short interior runs, Baylor quickly reached the Kansas State red zone early in the game. The Bears used extremely wide formations throughout the game, meaning that the receivers often lined up way outside of the hash marks, isolating the offensive line and defensive front for interior runs. In the picture above, Baylor changes their formation tendencies, and brings in a tight end, or H-back to add a blocker to the offensive front. Still concerned with the bubble screens, Kansas State keeps their original alignment, and gives Baylor a major advantage in the run game, as Baylor now has eight men in the black box, while Kansas State only has six defenders in the white box.
As shown above, Baylor will be running an inverted veer play, which is similar to Oregon’s inside zone play, except the offense will read the playside linebacker (yellow circle), as opposed to a back side defender. Because of the different angles given on the read, the quarterback should take the interior path (green arrow), while the running back will take the exterior path along the orange arrow (the opposite is true on the inside zone play).
At the mesh point in the image above, Kansas State’s defensive lineman immediately disrupts the play, shucks his blocker, and heads towards the ball (red arrow). With a now unblocked defender, Baylor’s quarterback now adjust his read to the crashing lineman that cuts off the interior lane. The proper read would be to give the ball to the running back on the exterior lane.
However, the Baylor quarterback makes the incorrect read, and pulls the ball in the image above. With the two man advantage in the box, however, Baylor is able to pick up both unblocked defenders with no problems (orange circle, and yellow lines), and this allows the quarterback to reach the outside despite making the incorrect read.
Once Baylor’s running game commanded more attention, as shown by the seven man front in the image above, Baylor’s play-action concepts became extremely effective. KSU is running Cover 3, as shown by the three deep orange circles (the outer most defenders are off screen), but will bring a blitz underneath the zone coverage (red arrow). The strong safety is responsible for the run first, then will need to cover a more intermediate zone that defends the space in-between the deep coverages.
As Baylor carries out the play action, the strong safety freezes, and starts to head towards the running back (red arrow above). Once the safety hesitates, the purple zone immediately becomes uncovered, even if the defender is just a few steps behind the play’s progression.
As soon as the receiver breaks for the post (orange arrow above), the ball (green arrow) is placed perfectly in between the deep zones for an easy touchdown.
This particular matchup between Oregon and Kansas State is very similar to the Oregon-Wisconsin matchup from last January. The Badgers boasted efficiency and a stout defense, but lacked the speed and athleticism to run base coverages; thus, they could not avoid neglecting a component of the Oregon offense. Kansas State may have a pair of elite cornerbacks, but the battle for supremacy against Oregon doesn’t usually happen on the outside of the field – it happens inside of the box, where linemen and linebackers are forced to use their athleticism to head off the speedy Oregon skill players. Those KSU shortcomings were especially evident against Baylor, and may be equally evident on January 3rd against Oregon.
If Kansas State allows Oregon to stretch the field and force the Wildcats to take safeties out of the box to defend exterior passes, then Oregon will have no problem running the ball throughout the game.Ideas! That was their world now! Big questions and big answers, about life, and how you had to live it, and what you were for.
Let’s get the scarred illusionist in the room out of the way, shall we? By the time The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents was first published, in 2001, Discworld was beginning to be eclipsed by the Harry Potter series. JK Rowling’s fourth book was a genuine pop-culture phenomenon, effectively kickstarting the modern trend of adults dabbling in YA fiction (and why shouldn’t they?).
Rowling’s incredible success would cause cynics to raise an eyebrow at Pratchett’s first young adult book for the Discworld being published at a time when Potter fandom was rampant. But he praised the series as being “beautifully cooked”. And the Discworld has always had crossover appeal. Most fans I know were like me. The books were first picked up around the age of 12 or 13, and they didn’t leave our hands for a good few years afterwards. Pratchett did what any great author does, Rowling included – he never patronised the reader. If you wanted to read the Discworld, you were welcome.
Discussions about this book being his first young adult Discworld novel are moot. His popularity has shown he has had legions of teen fans and he had written several YA titles before embarking on this series. What is important is this was the first Discworld book explicitly marketed for the young adult market. The reason this is so interesting to me is because the content of Amazing Maurice is so bloody dark. Let’s do a quick list of what happens in the novel. There is cannibalism, children getting assaulted, poisoning, mind control, battles against the darkness that resides in all of us. This is coupled with debates about what makes us us and how to negotiate diplomatic solutions between very very different people (and rats. And cats).
This is children’s fiction as it should be. I’ve written before of my love of Roald Dahl, no stranger to exposing children to twisted tales. You don’t need me to tell you darkness has long been a mainstay in children’s fiction from the Brothers Grimm onwards. Amazing Maurice is considerably darker than other Discworld novels but is written with a care and intelligence that places it alongside some of his best.
It also has a drastic change in what we have seen in the Discworld over the past 27 books. We have chapters. My. God.
Amazing Maurice is the now normal Pratchett spin on classic tales, this one the Pied Piper of Hamlyn. After eating *something* left outside the Unseen University (you would, wouldn’t you?), a plague of rats have become something, um, more, along with Maurice, the streetwise alleycat (replacing Maurice with O’Malley would have made the title clunkier). Maurice brings together the rats, along with the seemingly simple Keith as their piper, and decides to con as many people as they can. They end up in Bad Blintz, where all of the rats are missing and the rat-catchers look decidedly dodgy. Finding these rodents reveals a primal darkness that the Educated Rodents thought they had left behind them.
What we get is Pratchett 101: a primer to the wider Discworld series but written with an impressive enthusiasm. There is no sense of a cash-in here. Given Pratchett’s youthful love of what his library had to offer, he seems like the last author who would churn out a children series for the money. Also: he’s absolutely loaded at this point. In a speech to the 2004 Worldcon, he said the following:
The thing is that when you write for kids you have to be more precise. You have to answer the questions. You can’t leave people hanging around. You can’t rely on them filling in too many gaps for themselves. But kids are also remarkably astute about narrative these days. They’ve got plot savvy…So it really stretches me to write the children’s books. You have to stay ahead of them.
Pratchett has a lot of fun with this in the book, lightly mocking the expectations of Malicia, the bookworm Mayor’s daughter of Bad Blintz. Malicia offers a running commentary on the events of the book, arguing that things should be happening in a certain way, because that’s how fairy-tales work:
It seems to Maurice, while he was watching Malicia make up her mind, that her mind worked in a different way to other people’s minds. She understood all the hard things without even thinking. Magical rats? Yeah, yeah. Talking cats? Been there, done that, bought the singlet. It was the simple things that were hard.
She later gets a bit postmodern, complaining about Mr Bunnsy has an Adventure, the book a lot of the rats look to as gospel. If people are going to make up stupid stories about animals pretending to be human, at least there could be a bit of interesting violence… Which Amazing Maurice has in spades.
The problem is not that books are bad, it’s that believing solely in fiction means you are removing yourself from the real world. Malicia is like Dangerous Beans, the rat who believes in Mr Bunnsy the most. While he is “a very kind and thoughtful” rat, as Keith puts it, the trouble is, see, that he thinks everyone else is like him. People like that are bad news, kid.
In another book, the thoughtful Dangerous Beans would eventually become the leader of the rat pack. But the real world in Uberwald is nasty and one where the much more pragmatic for which Darktan is appropriate. Life was real, life was practical, and life could get taken away really quickly if you weren’t paying attention…
And he’s right. This book celebrates clear thinking and knowing your weaknesses. It’s little wonder Darktan is a expert trap disarmer. The traps throughout the book represent more than just a piece of cheese on a string. Traps result in you reverting to your base nature. Humans resort to violence or cowardice, cats to hunting rats. The educated rats freak out completely when they see the multitude of cages the rat-catchers are using to kidnap and breed rodents for fighting. That’s what happens when you let yourself go, Maurice thought. They thought they’d got educated, but in a tight corner a rat is just a rat.
The figure of Spider, the rat king who is comprised of eight rats tied together, is terrifying. With his ability to control minds, Spider is the darkness inside all of us and a theme Pratchett returns to in the forthcoming Night Watch, which was originally titled The Nature of the Beast. And Spider was created by humans. His evil is our fault, the weakness of humans:
Humans have tortured and poisoned and killed and all of that is now given form in me and there will be REVENGE…I am filth and darkness! I am the noise under the floor, the rustling in the walls! I am the thing that undermines and despoils! I am the sum of all that you deny! I am your true self!
Maurice the alley-cat is streetwise and cynical but even he devolves back into his former ferocious feline state once Spider bites into his mind. He’s a neatly ambiguous character because while he overcomes his base self, helping to defeat Spider and bring peace between the rats and Bad Blintz, he chooses to leave the rats at the end of the novel because he can’t stay in one place. It’s not who he is. You’re left asking the question about how much can we change who we are.
It is down to us to make the best out of what we have, which is why Darktan is the best hope for the rats. But he realises he alone is not enough for the rats. That’s why stories are important – what Dangerous Beans helps them do is understand. He’s a trap-hunter! He goes ahead of us and finds the dangerous ideas and thinks about them and traps them in words and makes them safe and shows us the way through.
These politics of compromise are hilariously illustrated at the end of the novel, where Darktan thrashes out a settlement with the Mayor of Bad Blintz. The latter’s illustration of how leadership works is so darkly cynical (and true): I have to make it all work…And every year it turns out that I haven’t upset enough people for them to choose anyone else as mayor. So I have to do it again. It’s a lot more complicated than I ever thought it would be.
Even the happy ending is barbed. The residents of Bad Blintz welcome their new rodent neighbours, reinventing the village as one of Uberwald’s greatest tourist attractions, but it makes no difference whatsoever. The village is a wonderful demonstration of tolerance, showing visitors how we can all live together, but:
And then most of them go back to their own towns and set their traps and put down their poisons, because some minds you couldn’t change with a hatchet. But a few see the world as a different place.
It’s not perfect, but it works. The thing about stories is you have to pick the ones that last.
And that’s the book in four sentences.
It’s preposterous that Terry Pratchett had to wait some 16 years for his first major award but Amazing Maurice, which won the Carnegie Medal, definitely warranted a prize (you can read his excellent acceptance speech in full here). It is dark, intelligent, hilariously subversive and would shock most parents if they picked it from their kid’s hands to find out what they were reading. I don’t think there’s higher praise for a children’s book and it bodes well for Tiffany Aching, who is finally just a few books away.
But first Sam Vimes needs our attention. He is lost in time, travelling back to revolutionary Ankh-Morpork in a Discworldian spin on Quantum Leap. Oh boy. See you next week.
AdvertisementsAnyone who grew up on MTV in the 90s can quote lines from the short-lived cult sketch comedy show, The State. Even casual fans are familiar with the classics like Michael Showalter’s rebel-without-a-cause character, Doug, and his famous line, “I’m outta heeeere.” Or Barry and Levon and their $240 worth of puddin’. And of course, Louie, the guy who comes in and says his catchphrase over and over again: “I wanna dip my balls in it!” But most of these popular recurring characters were actually written in at the suggestion of MTV. In fact, when the cast was pressured by the network to incorporate more catchphrases into the show, they wrote the “I wanna dip my balls in it” line as their giant middle-fingered response. And while ironically, those have become the lines and characters that people remember most, the show was also chock full of one-off skits with incredibly bizarre premises that are often lost in the foggy memories of 90s television nostalgia. Here are 20 sketches that aren’t usually the first things people think of when discussing The State but are still hilarious and weird in their own rights. These non-classics may not be as quotable as the Porcupine Racetrack or have the character recognition of Captain Monterey Jack, but they’re all worth revisiting.
20.“Rug Brothers” (Season 3, Episode 6)
“Rug Brothers” was a skit proving that less is more. It was about two characters who loved a rug. Like, really loved a rug. To the point where they were having sex with it.
19. “Tuxedo” (Season 4, Episode 3)
“Tuxedo” was a mock hidden camera-style prank show where the gag was that the prank was totally innocuous and involved seeing people’s reactions to someone wearing a tuxedo in public. If nothing else, it was a great excuse for Michael Ian Black to ham it up.
18. “Race” (Season 4, Episode 1)
With only one female member, the male cast of The State would often crossdress in sketches and it was always hilarious. But even more hilarious was when they portrayed children. “Race” is an incredibly violent skit where a friendly father-son race took a dark turn when the two turned the competition violent. It ends with the father (Michael Showalter) kicking his son (Ben Garant) in the crotch.
17. “Slinkys” (Season 4, Episode 1)
If you like elaborate demonstrations of Slinkys set to music, boy is this the sketch for you.
16. “Senator Cavanaugh” (Season 4, Episode 2)
It could be argued that the premise for this sketch about a ridiculously over-the-top campaign ad starring Michael Ian Black was recycled later on Black’s even shorter lived Comedy Central show, Stella, when his character ran for president of the residency board in his apartment building.
15. “The Howard Report” (Season 4, Episode 1)
The Howard Report was an absurd talk show where topics of national interest were discussed with men named Howard. Also, doing the crabwalk was Henry O. Washington Anson Radcliffe Davis (put them together, they spell Howard).
14. “Crackers” (Season 1, Episode 3)
The “Crackers” sketch almost feels like The State were sitting in the writers’ room and said, “Oh, let’s just have a bit where the characters have mouths full of crackers so we can call it a day.” And that’s all it was. But it still made for a great visual gag.
13. “Bologna Foot” (Season 2, Episode 4)
Tim “Bologna Foot” Bolster was a character that could’ve easily been a recurring one but luckily, The State used him once and then retired him. That’s probably just as well. How much can you really say about a kid with bologna sandwiches for feet?
12. “High Brow / Low Brow” (Season 2, Episode 2)
In an effort to appeal to both high brow and low brow crowds, The State made this skit which simultaneously features fart jokes alongside an anecdote about Winston Churchill.
11. “First Election” (Season 2, Episode 4)
“First Election” was one of The State’s best opening skits. It documented a town who elected its first mayor in over 100 years. Their choice: a red balloon.
10. “Where’s the Mousey?” (Season 3, Episode 3)
This sketch asked one very important question, namely “wheres the mousey?” After several minutes of repeatedly asking where the mousey was, a giant mouse dropped down from the ceiling and that was the entire sketch.
9. “Copy Shop” (Season 2, Episode 2)
“Copy Shop” was a great example of a weak premise with a strong delivery. The gag is that the copy shop will mimic anything you want for a fee. But seeing Ben Garant bodypainted as a three-color copy totally saves the skit.
8. “Sal and Frankie” (Season 4, Episode 3)
Mean Ass Sal and Frankie the Pig were characters who sat by the highway and waved at cars. That’s all they did. And they were never used on the show again. Mainly because they died at the end of the skit. They just shouldn’t have sat that close to the highway.
7. “Tough Choices” (Season 4, Episode 7)
As its name implies, this skit featured a game show that asked contestants to make some really tough choices. Choices like, “Which would you rather do: Lick a cow’s ass or make out with your mom?” or “Lick a cow’s ass or massage your dad’s butt?”
6. “Laupin Variety Programme” (Season 4, Episode 3)
People often forget that the short-lived Comedy Central Euro programming spoof show, Viva Variety, was based on this sketch, which originally featured a character named Ape Man and the popular song, “Don’t Break |
women, and children from all major urban centers and from the countryside.” Turkish attacks on nearby European lands lasted well into the modern era.
– – – – – – – – –
Dr. Andrew G. Bostom, author of the excellent book The Legacy of Jihad, has written about what he calls “ America’s First War on Terror.” Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, then serving as American ambassadors to France and Britain, met in 1786 in London with the Tripolitan Ambassador to Britain, Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja. These future American presidents were attempting to negotiate a peace treaty which would spare the United States the ravages of Jihad piracy — murder and enslavement emanating from the so-called Barbary States of North Africa, corresponding to modern Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. Bostom notes that “By June/July 1815 the ably commanded U.S. naval forces had dealt their Barbary jihadist adversaries a quick series of crushing defeats. This success ignited the imagination of the Old World powers to rise up against the Barbary pirates.”
Robert Davis, professor of history at Ohio State University, has developed new methodical enumeration which indicates that perhaps one and one-quarter million white European Christians were enslaved by Barbary Muslims just from 1530 through 1780 — a far greater number than had been estimated before:
Enslavement was a very real possibility for anyone who traveled in the Mediterranean, or who lived along the shores in places like Italy, France, Spain and Portugal, and even as far north as England and Iceland. Much of what has been written gives the impression that there were not many slaves and minimizes the impact that slavery had on Europe,” Davis said. “Most accounts only look at slavery in one place, or only for a short period of time. But when you take a broader, longer view, the massive scope of this slavery and its powerful impact become clear.
Jihad piracy and slave raids were a fact of life in the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions for the better part of a thousand years, if not more, occasionally with Christian retaliations. Italy was politically fragmented and therefore had weak territorial defenses. As late as the seventeenth century along the Adriatic coast, a zone said to be “continually infested by Turks,” even a well-defended town such as Rimini could offer little by way of protection for the local fishermen and coastal farmers. Robert C. Davis explains in Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast and Italy, 1500-1800:
Italy was among the most thoroughly ravaged areas in the Mediterranean basin. Lying as it did on the frontline of the two battling empires, Italy was known as ‘the Eye of Christendom’…Especially in areas close to some of the main corsair bases (western Sicily is just 200 kilometers from Tunis) slave taking rapidly burgeoned into a full-scale industry, with a disastrous impact that was apparent at the time and for centuries to come. Those who worked on coastal farms, even 10 or 20 miles from the sea, were unsafe from the raiders — harvesters, vine tenders, and olive growers were all regularly surprised while at their labors and carried off. Workers in the salt pans were often at risk, as were woodcutters and any others of the unprotected poor who traveled or worked along the coasts: indigents like Rosa Antonia Monte, who called herself ‘the poorest of the poor in the city of Barletta [in Puglia],’ and who was surprised together with 42 others, including her two daughters, while out gleaning after the harvest, 4 miles outside of town. Monasteries close to the shore also made easy targets for the corsairs.
the seventeenth century represented a dark period out of which Spanish and Italian societies emerged as mere shadows of what they had been in their earlier, golden ages. For individuals themselves, we can see that the psychological traces of this trauma lasted beyond the time that the larger societies had rebuilt themselves as modern states, long after ‘even the idea ha[d] been lost of these dogs that had brought so much terror.’ It continued just below the surface of the coastal culture of the European Mediterranean even into the first years of the twentieth century, when, as one Sicilian woman put it, ‘The oldest [still] tell of a time in which the Turks arrived in Sicily every day. They came down in the thousands from their galleys and you can imagine what happened! They seized unmarried girls and children, grabbed things and money and in an instant they were [back] aboard their galleys, set sail and disappeared….The next day it was the same thing, and there was always the bitter song, as you could not hear other than the lamentations and invocations of the mothers and the tears that ran like rivers through all the houses.’
Fishermen were especially at peril. During a period in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Muslim pirates set up semi-permanent bases for themselves at the mouth of the Bay of Naples, attacking small ships. Surrounded by hostile seas on all sides,
Corsairs from cities in North Africa — Tunis, Algiers etc. — would raid ships in the Mediterranean and Atlantic, as well as seaside villages to capture men, women and children. The impact was devastating — France, England and Spain each lost thousands of ships, and long stretches of the Spanish and Italian coasts were almost abandoned by their inhabitants.
At its peak, the destruction and depopulation of some areas probably exceeded what European slavers would later inflict on the African interior. The lives of European slaves were often no better than the victims of the transatlantic slave trade, which later tapped into the preestablished Islamic slave trade in Africa. “As far as daily living conditions, the Mediterranean slaves certainly didn’t have it better,” Davis says. While African slaves did grueling labor on sugar and cotton plantations in the Americas, European slaves were often worked just as hard and as lethally — in quarries, in heavy construction, and above all rowing the corsair galleys.
Young Englishmen risked being surprised by a fleet of Muslim pirates showing up at their village, or being kidnapped while fishing at sea. Thomas Pellow was enslaved in Morocco for twenty-three years after being captured by Barbary pirates as a cabin boy on a small English vessel in 1716. He was tortured until he accepted Islam. For weeks he was beaten and starved, and finally gave in after his torturer resorted to “burning my flesh off my bones by fire, which the tyrant did, by frequent repetitions, after a most cruel manner.”
Throughout most of the seventeenth century, the English alone lost at least 400 sailors a year to the slavers. One American slave reported that 130 American seamen had been enslaved by the Algerians in the Mediterranean and Atlantic just between 1785 and 1793 (which prompted the eventual military response from the Americans mentioned above). In his book White Gold, Giles Milton describes how regular Jihad razzias in Europe extended as far north as distant Iceland in the middle of the North Atlantic, where some local villagers in well-documented attacks in the seventeenth century were kidnapped and dragged off to North Africa as slaves.
As Murray Gordon writes in his book Slavery in the Arab World, the sexual aspects of slavery were disproportionate important in the Islamic world. “Eunuchs commanded the highest prices among slaves, followed by young and pretty white women.” Usually, the high cost of white female slaves made them a luxury which only rich Muslims could afford:
“White women were almost always in greater demand than Africans, and Arabs were prepared to pay much higher prices for Circassian and Georgian women from the Caucasus and from Circassian colonies in Asia Minor. After the Russians seized Georgia and Circassia in the early part of the nineteenth century and, as a result of the Treaty of Adrianople in 1829 under which they obtained the fortresses dominating the road into Turkey from Circassia, the traffic in Circassian women came to a virtual halt. This caused the price of Circassian women to shoot up in the slave markets of Constantinople and Cairo. The situation was almost completely reversed in the early 1840s when the Russians, in exchange for a Turkish pledge to cease their attacks on their forts on the eastern side of the Black Sea, quietly agreed not to interfere in the slave traffic. This unrestricted trade brought on a glut in the Constantinople and Cairo markets, where prices for Circassian women brought them in reach of many ordinary Turks and Egyptians.”
After whites, Abyssinian (Ethiopian) girls were considered the “second best” alternative. Depending on lightness of skin, attractiveness and skills, they cost anywhere from a tenth to a third of the price of a Circassian or Georgian woman. As long as Circassian, Slavic, Greek and other white women were available at affordable prices, Arabs always preferred them to blacks. It is interesting to notice that this pattern was established long before the European colonial period. These days when everything bad in the world is attributed to Europeans, it is common to say that “racism” is a legacy of the European colonial period. In fact, there is a virtually universal preference for light skin, especially for women, in the Middle East, in Asia and in Africa itself, which was present long before European colonial rule in these countries.
According to Murray Gordon, “For a better part of the Middle Ages, Europe served as a valuable source of slaves who were prized in the Muslim world as soldiers, concubines, and eunuchs. It would not long compete with Africa in this trade if only because Christian Europe, with few exceptions, rejected the notion that its people could be enslaved, particularly for the despised Muslim world. In the greatest part of black Africa, by contrast, there were few governments or chiefs that could interpose their authority against the merchants who arrived by caravan and ship in quest of slaves. Lamentably, many African chiefs often became middlemen in the trade by rounding up inhabitants of nearby villages and exchanging them for an assortment of manufactured wares.”
There are examples where some Europeans sold other Europeans as slaves. This could be done by Vikings or Slavs, but especially by certain Italians, above all the Venetians. Some shipowners from Venice loaded up with Russian and Georgian slaves in the Black Sea and sold them to the Turks or to Venetian sugar plantations in Crete and Cyprus. These kinds of activities, which were harshly condemned by both the Roman Catholic and the Byzantine Churches, should be mentioned for the sake of historical accuracy, but this was clearly of secondary importance compared to the extensive Islamic raids in Europe for many centuries.
Slavery never faced as powerful opposition in Muslim societies as it sometimes did in Christian ones. Toward end of the nineteenth century, questions about slavery were finally raised, but only due to Western influence and military pressure. Murray Gordon writes:
That slavery persisted as long as it did in the Muslim world — it was only abolished in Saudi Arabia in 1962 and as late as 1981 in Mauritania — owed much to the fact that it was deeply anchored in Islamic law. By legitimizing slavery and, by extension, the sordid traffic in slaves (for which there was no legal sanction), Islam elevated these practices to an unassailable moral plan. As a result, in no part of the Muslim world was an ideological challenge ever mounted against slavery. The political structure and social system in Muslim society would have taken a dim view of such a challenge. The sultan of the Ottoman Empire and the potentates who ruled in other Muslim lands owed their thrones as much as to their being religious as well as secular leaders and were therefore duty bound to uphold the faith. Part of this obligation was to assure the normal functioning of the slave system which was an integral part of Islamic society that is embellished in the Koran.
Unlike the West, there never was a Muslim abolitionist movement since slavery is permitted according to sharia, Islamic religious law, and remains so to this day. When the open practice of slavery was finally abolished in most of the Islamic world, this was only due to external Western pressure, ranging from the American war against the Barbary pirates to the naval power of the British Empire. Slavery was taken for granted throughout Islamic history and lasted longer than did the Western slave trade. Robert Spencer elaborates in his book A Religion of Peace?: Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t:
Nor was there a Muslim abolitionist movement, no Clarkson, Wilberforce, or Garrison. When the slave trade ended, it was ended not through Muslim efforts but through British military force. Even so, there is evidence that slavery continues beneath the surface in some Muslim countries — notably Saudi Arabia, which only abolished slavery in 1962; Yemen and Oman, both of which ended legal slavery in 1970; and Niger, which didn’t abolish slavery until 2004. In Niger, the ban is widely ignored, and as many as one million people remain in bondage. Slaves are bred, often raped, and generally treated like animals. There are even slavery cases involving Muslims in the United States. A Saudi named Homaidan al-Turki was sentenced in September 2006 to twenty-seven years to life in prison for keeping a woman as a slave in his Colorado home. For his part, al-Turki claimed that he was a victim of anti-Muslim bias.
Slavery involving peoples of all races, Germans, Saxons, Celts and some black Africans, was widely practiced in the Greco-Roman world. The most famous slave rebellion during the Roman era was led by Spartacus, a gladiator-slave from the Thracian people who dominated Bulgaria and the Balkan region close to the Black Sea in early historic times. His rebellion was crushed in 71 BC, and thousands of slaves were crucified alongside the road to Rome as a warning to others. The retreat of slavery in Europe followed the spread of Christianity.
All the way back to the Old Kingdom in ancient Egypt, slavery was an important component of Africa’s trade to other continents. However, according to Robert O. Collins and James M. Burns in A History of Sub-Saharan Africa, “The advent of the Islamic age coincided with a sharp increase in the African slave trade.” The expansion of the trans-Saharan slave trade associated with the Sahelian empire of Ghana was a response to the demand in the markets of Muslim North Africa:
“The moral justification for the enslavement of Africans south of the Sahara by Muslims was accepted by the fact they were ‘unbelievers’ (kafirin) practicing their traditional religions with many gods, not the one God of Islam. The need for slaves, whether acquired by violence or by commercial exchange, revived the ancient but somnolent trans-Saharan trade, which became a major supplier of slaves for North Africa and Islamic Spain. The earliest Muslim account of slaves crossing the Sahara from the Fezzan in southern Libya to Tripoli on the Mediterranean coast was written in the seventh century, but from the ninth century to the nineteenth there are a multitude of accounts of the pillage by military states of the Sahel, known to North African Muslims as bilad al-sudan, (‘land of the blacks’), of pagan Africans who were sold to Muslim merchants and marched across the desert as a most profitable commodity in their elaborate commercial networks. By the tenth century there was a steady stream of slaves taken from the kingdoms of the Western Sudan and the Chad Basin crossing the Sahara. Many died on the way, but the survivors fetched a great profit in the vibrant markets of Sijilmasa, Tripoli, and Cairo.”
The spread of Islam with Arab contacts did bring literacy to sub-Saharan West Africa, but otherwise Muslims stimulated the slave trade from East Africa to the Indian Ocean, the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, and some African slaves were shipped as far as Central Asia and India. When Europeans began to arrive in force in sub-Saharan Africa.
Africa north of the Sahara and the Red Sea coast was known to the ancient Mediterranean world, but sub-Saharan Africa was not. The Portuguese made planned expeditions along West Africa in the fifteenth century, which required decades of improvements in navigation and shipbuilding before they could round the Cape of Good Hope and reach the Indian Ocean.
While the extensive Portuguese participation in the transatlantic slave trade is widely known, not everybody knows that Cristóvão da Gama (1516-1542), son of the great Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama (ca. 1460-1524), fought in Ethiopia in support of local Christians in the early 1540s, and died there. The Ethiopians were the only literate African nation not under Islamic rule; they had been Christianized via the Egyptian Copts already in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, but had been virtually cut off from direct contact with the Mediterranean Christian world after the Islamic conquests. Portuguese mercenaries arrived to prevent the Ethiopian kingdom from being overwhelmed by Muslims from the plains of Somalia. Robert O. Collins and James M. Burns explain in A History of Sub-Saharan Africa:
Its monarchy had captured the last Muslim stronghold in Portugal in 1249 and in 1385 had initiated a stable political system under the new dynasty, the house of Avis, isolated on the western coast of Europe with a powerful and suspicious Spain as its neighbor to the east. The gold of Africa would provide the resources to defend the kingdom and finance Portuguese expeditions around Africa to the Indian Ocean and Asia in order to reap the wealth from the spice trade. Moreover, beyond the Sahara Desert lived the non-Muslim peoples of West Africa who perhaps could be converted to Christianity and enlisted in the crusade against the Muslims….And then there was the compelling legend of Prester John, which ignited the desire of medieval European monarchs to succor this beleaguered Christian king surrounded by Muslim enemies somewhere in the East. By the fifteenth century the legend of Prester John had come to be associated with Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in northeast Africa; his Christian subjects were said to be defending the faith against the jihad (holy war) of Islam. No Portuguese king, noble, or peasant could neglect their Christian responsibility to come to the aid of Prester John and his people.
Moreover, what was to become in ensuing centuries a worldwide European expansion and exploration of the seas started in Portugal in the fifteenth century with the initiatives of Prince Henry the Navigator (1394-1460). Incidentally, the exploration of the African coasts began with the Portuguese in 1415 capturing the North African port of Ceuta, which had been used as a base for Muslim Barbary pirates in their attacks on the coasts of Portugal, capturing the locals as slaves and depopulation several regions because of repeated attacks.
One of the most important reasons for this early European overseas expansion was the desire to get away from the iron grip Muslims had enjoyed over the European continent for so long. Norman Davies in his massive book Europe: A History elaborates:
Islam’s impact on the Christian world cannot be exaggerated. Islam’s conquests turned Europe into Christianity’s main base. At the same time the great swathe of Muslim territory cut the Christians off from virtually all direct contact with other religions and civilizations. The barrier of militant Islam turned the [European] Peninsula in on itself, severing or transforming many of the earlier lines of commercial, intellectual and political intercourse. In the field of religious conflict, it left Christendom with two tasks — to fight Islam and to convert the remaining pagans. It forced the Byzantine Empire to give lasting priority to the defence of its Eastern borders, and hence to neglect its imperial mission in the West. It created the conditions where the other, more distant Christian states had to fend for themselves, and increasingly to adopt measures for local autonomy and economic self-sufficiency. In other words, it gave a major stimulus to feudalism. Above all, by commandeering the Mediterranean Sea, it destroyed the supremacy which the Mediterranean lands had hitherto exercised over the rest of the Peninsula.
No European peoples suffered more from Islamic colonialism than those in the Balkans. Sir Jadunath Sarkar, the pre-eminent historian of Mughal India, wrote this about dhimmitude, the humiliating apartheid system imposed upon non-Muslims under Islamic rule: “The conversion of the entire population to Islam and the extinction of every form of dissent is the ideal of the Muslim State. If any infidel is suffered to exist in the community, it is as a necessary evil, and for a transitional period only.…A non-Muslim therefore cannot be a citizen of the State; he is a member of a depressed class; his status is a modified form of slavery. He lives under a contract (dhimma) with the State.…In short, his continued existence in the State after the conquest of his country by the Muslims is conditional upon his person and property made subservient to the cause of Islam.”
This “modified form of slavery” is now frequently referred to as the pinnacle of “tolerance.” If the semi-slaves rebel against this system and desire equal rights and self-determination, Jihad resumes. This happened with the Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire, who were repressed with massacres, culminating in the genocide by Turkish and Kurdish Muslims against Armenians in the 20th century.
The Balkans, with its close connections to Byzantium, was a reasonably sophisticated region in medieval times, until the Ottomans Turks devastated much of the area. One of the most appalling aspects of this was the practice of devshirme, the collecting of boys among the Christians who were forcibly converted to Islam and taught to hate their own kin. Andrew G. Bostom quotes the work of scholar Vasiliki Papoulia, who highlights the continuous desperate struggle of the Christian populations against this forcefully imposed Ottoman levy:
It is obvious that the population strongly resented…this measure [and the levy] could be carried out only by force. Those who refused to surrender their sons— the healthiest, the handsomest and the most intelligent — were on the spot put to death by hanging. Nevertheless we have examples of armed resistance. In 1565 a revolt took place in Epirus and Albania. The inhabitants killed the recruiting officers and the revolt was put down only after the sultan sent five hundred janissaries in support of the local sanjak-bey. We are better informed, thanks to the historic archives of Yerroia, about the uprising in Naousa in 1705 where the inhabitants killed the Silahdar Ahmed Celebi and his assistants and fled to the mountains as rebels. Some of them were later arrested and put to death.
The Christian subjects tried for centuries to combat this evil practice:
Since there was no possibility of escaping [the levy] the population resorted to several subterfuges. Some left their villages and fled to certain cities which enjoyed exemption from the child levy or migrated to Venetian—held territories. The result was a depopulation of the countryside. Others had their children marry at an early age…Nicephorus Angelus…states that at times the children ran away on their own initiative, but when they heard that the authorities had arrested their parents and were torturing them to death, returned and gave themselves up. La Giulletiere cites the case of a young Athenian who returned from hiding in order to save his father’s life and then chose to die himself rather than abjure his faith. According to the evidence in Turkish sources, some parents even succeeded in abducting their children after they had been recruited. The most successful way of escaping recruitment was through bribery. That the latter was very widespread is evident from the large amounts of money confiscated by the sultan from corrupt…officials.
Lee Harris in his book The Suicide of Reason describes how this practice of devshirme, the process of culling the best, brightest and fittest “alpha boys,” targeted the non-Muslim subject populations:
The bodyguard of Janissaries ‘had the task of protecting the sovereign from internal and external enemies,’ writes scholar Vasiliki Papoulia. ‘In order to fulfill this task it was subjected to very rigorous and special training, the janissary education famous in Ottoman society. This training made possible the spiritual transformation of Christian children into ardent fighters for the glory of the sultan and their newly acquired Islamic faith.’ Because the Christian boys had to be transformed into single-minded fanatics, it was not enough that they simply inherit their position. They had to be brainwashed into it, as we would say today, and this could be done most effectively with boys who had been completely cut off from all family ties. By taking the boys from their homes, and transporting them to virtually another world, devçirme assured that there would be no conflict of loyalties between family and duty to the empire. All loyalty would be focused on the group itself and on the sultan.
This practice drained the strength of the Christian populations. Harris again:
The culling of these alpha boys had two effects, both of them good for the Ottoman Empire, both bad for the subject population. By filling the critical posts in the Ottoman Empire with boys who had been selected on the basis of their intrinsic merit, and not on their family connection, the Empire was automatically creating a meritocracy — if a boy was tough, courageous, intelligent, and fanatically loyal, he was able to work his way up the Ottoman hierarchy; indeed, as we have seen, he become a member of the ruling elite, despite having the formal title of being the sultan’s slave. The Ottoman Empire was both strengthening itself through acquiring these alpha boys, and weakening its subject population by taking their best and brightest. Thanks to the institution of devçirme, the more ‘fit’ Christian boys who would be most likely to be the agents of rebellion against the Empire become the fanatical Muslim warriors who were used to suppress whatever troubles the less ‘fit’ Christian boys left behind were able to cause.
The most enduring legacy of the centuries of Ottoman Turkish rule in the Balkans is the presence of large indigenous Muslim communities. Srdja Trifkovic explains in Kosovo: The Score 1999-2009, a book dedicated to the anniversary of the NATO bombing of Serbia, which resulted in the ethnic cleansing of Christian Serbs by predominantly Muslim Albanians:
The Balkan Peninsula is one of the most ethnically and religiously diverse regions in the world, especially considering its relatively small area (just over 200,000 square miles) and population (around 55 million). Of that number, Eastern Orthodox Christians — mainly Greeks, Bulgars, Serbs and Slavic Macedonians — have the slim majority of around 53 percent; Sunni Muslims (11 million Turks in European Turkey and a similar number of Albanians, Slavic Muslims and ethnic Turks elsewhere) make up 40 percent; and Roman Catholics (mainly Croats) are at around 5 percent. Those communities do not live in multicultural harmony. Their mutual lack of trust that occasionally turns into violence is a lasting fruit of the Turkish rule. Four salient features of the Ottoman state were institutionalized, religiously justified discrimination of non-Muslims; personal insecurity; tenuous coexistence of ethnicities and creeds without intermixing; and the absence of a unifying state ideology or supra-denominational source of loyalty. It was a Hobbesian world, and it bred a befitting mindset; the zero-sum game approach to politics, in which one side’s gain is perceived as another’s loss. That mindset has not changed, almost a century since the disintegration of the Empire.
Trifkovic warns that “The Christian communities all over the Balkans are in a steep, long-term demographic decline. Fertility rate is below replacement level in every majority-Christian country in the region. The Muslims, by contrast, have the highest birth rates in Europe, with the Albanians topping the chart. On current form it is likely that Muslims will reach a simple majority in the Balkans within a generation.”
The wars in the Balkans are a direct result of the legacy of Turkish Muslim colonialism. So why does nobody demand that the Turks should pay reparations to their former subjects, starting with the Armenians, who suffered a Jihad genocide less than a century ago, and continuing with the Serbs, the Bulgarians, the Greeks, the Croatians and others who have suffered hundreds of years of abuse and exploitation at their hands?
There is a persistent myth that the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions happened only because Europeans “plundered” other continents. This is easily disproved since there is little correlation between which countries had extensive colonial empires and which developed sophisticated scientific-industrial economies. Portugal had several colonies and was an active participant in the transatlantic slave trade, yet it is one of the poorest countries in Western Europe, in sharp contrast to Sweden, Switzerland or Finland which have no colonial histories.
The Spanish brought much silver and gold back from their colonies in Latin America, which had sometimes been extracted under very harsh conditions. Yet the Spanish never developed a leading role in European science and technology. The Italians were much more prominent in European science then the Spanish despite the fact that they had no colonial history, if for no other reason than because “Italy” as a state did not exist before the second half of the nineteenth century. The same can be said even more about Germany. The Germans outperformed the French and sometimes even the British at the dawn of the twentieth century in science and technology, despite the fact that the two latter had global colonial empires whereas the Germans held only a few, rather marginal colonies.
If we look at the post-Roman period as a whole, a picture emerges where Europe was under siege by hostile aliens for most of the time, yet succeeded against all odds. Already before AD 1300, Europeans had created a rapidly expanding network of universities, an institution which had no real equivalent anywhere else, and had invented mechanical clocks and eyeglasses. It is easy to underestimate the importance of this, but the ability to make accurate measurements of natural phenomena was of vital importance during the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. The manufacture of eyeglasses led indirectly to the development of microscopes and telescopes, and thus to modern medicine and astronomy. The network of universities facilitated the spread of information and debate and served as an incubator for many later scientific advances. All of these innovations were made centuries before European colonialism had begun, indeed at a time when Europe itself was a victim of colonialism and had been so for a very long time. Parts of Spain were still under Islamic occupation, an aggressive Jihad was being waged by the Turks in the remaining Byzantine lands, and the coasts from France via Italy to Russia had suffered centuries of Islamic raids.Kirby is tiny, use his low profile to your advantage!
Kirby lives life on the edge!
Kirby doesn’t really care about your percent or enemy lead.
Kirby is a fan of the platforms.
I’m going to go over what I feel for every single of our pink hero’s moves as a whole and analyze what I feel is good about them.
Alright so this is my write up on Kirby. This is specifically for 3.5 and anything I mention goes mainly for this version, though a lot of it does apply for 3.02 as well. A lot of Kirby players on netplay have been asking for advice on this character and I happen to know a lot since I’ve been steadily learning and placing at tournaments with this character for the past year. I won’t really go into match ups too much in this thread since it’s not really what this is about. I personally feel I’ve had enough time to dwell on all of this and I also think Kirby may end up becoming insanely good in the new meta of 3.5 so hopefully this will come in handy to a lot of Kirby players. So I’m going to try to spill as much information as I can about this character, a lot of this coming from personal experience so some of this may not apply for some of you guys. Here's the Salty Highlights special of my Kirby (I also have one of my Ness, part 44 ) I really encourage you guys to check that series out since me and Doof work on it for the PM community to enjoy!Kirby is a very interesting capitalization character in Project M! He strives for punishes and gimps, implementing reads with this character is very powerful. He is also very simple to get the basics of so picking him up isn’t too bad, I always felt that playing this character required fundamentals more than tech skill. Tech skill can help this character of course with having great waveland game and such but it’s mainly about spacing and forcing your opponent into bad situations. Kirby plays extremely well against those who are hotheaded and are not respecting him.This is what makes Kirby’s neutral game a bit more unique in certain MUs. Any character that is tall and allows for him to duck under grabs Kirby has a huge advantage against. You’re able to stay inside their range while pressuring them and avoiding grabs with things like dtilt. Having fast reactions is really beneficial here because if the opponent whiffs anything over your head while you’re this close, you can get in a very quick punish such as a smash attack. Wavelanding is also incredible for this purpose, you can avoid many high attacks and even cross up your opponent if you’re already near. Using your duck in conjunction with your shield for attacks that can’t be ducked allows for Kirby to fight up close and personal and really can force certain characters to be very uncomfortable with such a small hard to hit target right on them that has the ability to pressure them well. Also you holding down often means you will crouch cancel things too, so that’s cool.When outside of their range, when facing off against things such as projectiles Kirby can duck under many of these as well or even waveland if you’re good at timing this. This is much better than shielding since you won’t have to be endure shield stun of any kind. Crouch trotting is very recommended with Kirby in neutral since it allows for you to play around with a low profile even more. Using this to your advantage opens up a lot of options for Kirby and allows you get in against many characters. Don’t be afraid to duck certain aerials either, making an opponent whiff an aerial as they’re falling will allow for you to get a really good punish usually as they come in for landing but this is a more risky maneuver that works better in certain situations. Due to him being so great at having a low profile, I’d argue that Kirby is best on the ground instead of the air in neutral. In the air he’s great on the offensive but defensively and otherwise he’s average up there.This character is very awesome at edge play, and has many options for defending and playing offensive on the edge. Being at the edge as Kirby is a place you want to be a lot of the time, it gives YOU the advantage usually. Even if you are trying to play more aggro instead of defensive, being here is still a place that is favorable in most MUs and you generally want to bring fights here.This character is a MASTER of gimps. With Inhale, Final Cut Spike, his ability to dash attack off the stage and all of his good aerials combined with his 5 jumps, Kirby putting another character offstage is what you almost ALWAYS want to do. Bad recoveries have no chance offstage against our amazing toolkit and even good recoveries will have to play carefully in order not to lose their stock once off the stage. Our beloved Kirby is an absolute monster when it comes to terrorizing others off the stage and I highly emphasize getting comfortable with fighting offstage with this character. If you're a stock ahead, your options are terrifying to keep that lead. A Kirby who is not implementing this will be missing out on a huge benefit to his game.Getting the opponent to the edge is for this reason, so they will be offstage for your gimps. A good inhale or final cut will end out a stock at ANY percent against most of the cast so being keen to watching for these two options is ideal since they’re his strongest gimp tools. Wall of paining with various aerials and reverse uairs will semi spike certain recoveries dead if you can land it. Dair is also very dangerous against certain recoveries and dsmash’s lingering hitbox is a semispike as well.Between inhale and dash attack, the pink ball is really good with stages that have platforms. Inhale is awesome at catching opponents on platforms as most command grabs are, and dash attack is good if you’re on a platform already. Wavelanding is also really good with Kirby so it allows for him to maneuver around platforms very fluently and keep mobile. Also on certain stages like Battlefield, the platform height is awesome for Kirby’s jump height. Naturally Kirby can barely make it onto a platform with his full jump. But if you immediately jump with a uair/nair/dair, Kirby doesn’t get on top of the platform, instead he appears slightly above it and falls back through it automatically. Fast falling with this allows for really great platform harassment on opponents who are stuck on one.: This move is Kirby’s staple, and in Project M boy is it better than ever. Command grabs in general are very good, getting an opponent on a platform means you can just scoop them with this and exhale them for a good 10%. Copying certain abilities is very much worth it for certain MUs. A lot of people tend to mash incorrectly or try to retaliate immediately upon exiting exhale meaning you can get another follow up. Mixing up your opponent with wavebounce or b reverses really make this move tricky. It’s a fantastic move, using it at the edge will make people scared of you there because if you’re a stock ahead you have the option to kirbycide and still stay in the lead, or gimp them in some horrific way!: Gimping with inhale is done in three ways. One is to Inhale release them (Opponent mashes out or you wait 4 seconds after inhaling). Second way is to exhale them underneath or away from the stage (Good on stages like warioware where you can hit the side blast zones easier or smashville where they’re put underneath the stage). And the third way is to just kirbycide (Falling into the blast zone with the opponent in your mouth).Against fast fallers, the inhale release will drop them at a cruel angle, allowing for good edgeguard chances. This is VITAL against spacies as it allows you to most likely take their stock at any percent with a proper inhale at the edge. Mashing out is good for you, it allows you to fall off the stage and release the opponent below you, allowing for good edgeguard chances. If they chose not to mash out, you count 4 seconds. Trust me, this allows for you to time it yourself and fall off, playing chicken with the blast zone and killing them before you die, allowing for a recovery. It’s hard but it is very VERY valuable to have as an option against those you know don’t mash out of your kirbycide.It’s your judgement to decide when it’s a good time to allow yourself to die too, if possible its always best to survive so you still have that extra stock but if you’re losing a stock (same stock, you’re at like 100 and they’re at nearly 0) its worth it, or if you’re a stock ahead it’s fine as long as that stock isn’t too new for yourself. Otherwise go for other gimps if you want to play as efficient as possible |
video of the explosion captured by a man who was in his car with his family some distance from the plant:
1:47pm:
Local television station KWTX news is reporting that at least 60 people have been killed in the explosion.
The report could not be immediately verified by sources, but KWTX cited West EMS director George Smith as confirming the death toll.
1:43pm:
Texas governor Rick Perry has issued a statement saying state emergency services have been mobilised to help their local counterparts.
"Our thoughts and prayers are with the people of West, and the first responders on the scene," he said.
1:27pm:
The Waco Tribune newspaper reported that Bill Bohannan, who was visiting his parents at their house in West, witnessed the explosion, which happened during a fire at the plant:
"I said, 'This thing is going to blow'... and I told my mom and dad to get in the car. "I was standing next to my car with my fiancee, waiting for my parents to come out and [the plant] exploded. It knocked us into the car... Every house within about four blocks is blown apart."
Photos posted on social media sites showed what appeared to be a large cloud of smoke rising over the site of the blast, and a makeshift medical treatment centre set up on a local football field.
11:50am:
There are reports of a massive explosion at a fertiliser plant in the town of West in Texas.
The blast, apparently preceded by a fire at the plant, was reported about 8pm (local time) in the town of some 2,700 people about 130km south of Dallas and 32km north of Waco.
Topics: disasters-and-accidents, united-states
First postedThe Council on American-Islamic Relations, aka CAIR, has helped launch a series of protests across the country and plans lawsuits related to President Trump’s recent executive orders on immigration.
The orders are designed to keep Americans safer from terrorism by temporarily barring visitors from Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Sudan from entering the U.S. without “extreme vetting” and banning refugees from these countries for at least 30 days.
CAIR has been declared a terrorist organization by the United Arab Emirates and was named by federal prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas-funding operation.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations is also increasingly a part of America’s institutional left infrastructure and was one of the partners behind the recent Women’s March in Washington that drew hundreds of thousands, along with feminist groups like Planned Parenthood.
On Saturday, protests broke out at airports around the country, including New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. Saturday morning, two Iraqis were detained at JFK.
Over 1,000 now at Terminal 4 at #NoMuslimBanJFK to say refugees and Muslims are welcome here! pic.twitter.com/NSBHt2KDut — Daniel Altschuler (@altochulo) January 28, 2017
CAIR chapters were actively promoting the protests on social media and acting as spokesmen for the issue.
#CAIR-Dallas: Immigration order halts travelers at DFW airport Alia Salem, executive director for DFW Chapter of… https://t.co/y82rUxjnxl — CAIR National (@CAIRNational) January 28, 2017
ABC News reports on the Chicago chapter of CAIR’s involvement:
At least one person was detained at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago today, and it is expected that she will return to Saudi Arabia, according to the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). Sahar Alghnimi, a Syrian woman who came to the U.S. on tourist visa to see her mother who had just undergone cancer surgery, was detained when she arrived from Saudi Arabia at 8:48 AM on Eithad Airlines, CAIR Chicago executive director Ahmed Rehab told ABC News.
Meanwhile in Boston, CAIR is is planning another rally for Sunday at 1 p.m. on Boston’s Copley Square.
CAIR-Massachusetts Executive Director John Robbins said Trump is playing on “religious bigotry and intolerance” and will end up turning away men, women, and children fleeing violence and persecution.
Time magazine says that CAIR was behind a protest that happened earlier in the week at New York City’s Washington Square Park:
The demonstration, led by the New York Chapter of the Center for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was hastily organized in response to Trump’s executive orders restricting immigration from Muslim countries and efforts to curb undocumented immigration within the U.S. On Wednesday, Trump green-lighted the construction of a wall along the southern border, ordered the Department of Homeland Security to build more detention centers, and ended federal grant funding to so-called “sanctuary cities” that refuse to cooperate with federal anti-immigration efforts.
CAIR has announced on their website that they will hold a news conference at its Capitol Hill headquarters in Washington, D.C. to announce the filing of a federal lawsuit on behalf of more than 20 individuals challenging the “Muslim ban” executive order. CAIR’s news conference will be live-streamed on its Facebook page.
Follow Breitbart News investigative reporter and Citizen Journalism School founder Lee Stranahan on Twitter at @Stranahan.A man who was stabbed inside an apartment building Monday evening in Southeast Washington waited nearly 30 minutes for an ambulance to take him to a hospital, according to D.C. fire department officials.
The department was overwhelmed by emergency calls at the time, with all 42 ambulances and paramedic units on other calls, according to Timothy J. Wilson, a department spokesman. The victim survived.
Wilson said the first ambulance to become available was leaving MedStar Georgetown University Hospital, about eight miles from the site of the stabbing in the 5100 block of F Street SE in Marshall Heights.
The ambulance arrived at 7:16 p.m., 28 minutes after the first 911 call at 6:48 p.m. Wilson said the victim had been receiving prompt treatment; a fire engine with a firefighter trained as an advanced paramedic arrived at 6:55 p.m.
Still, Wilson said, a 28-minute wait for an ambulance is exceptionally long. The ideal response time is less than eight minutes. WJLA-TV first reported the delay, quoting residents who said it took the ambulance more than 40 minutes to arrive.
The Department of Fire and Emergency Medical Services has long been concerned about a surge in calls that authorities say coincides with an influx of people moving into the District. There were 20,000 more 911 calls in 2014 than there were in 2013, more than 80 percent of them medical in nature, which Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) said last week is “putting strains on our emergency response infrastructure.”
[Read: Next D.C. mayor will inherit thorny issues within fire department]
A new fire chief, Gregory Dean, was named last week and is due to start in May. The 64-year-old is a retired veteran of the Seattle Fire Department. He is regarded as an innovator in providing advanced medical care and merging the traditional roles of firefighters and paramedics to address the dwindling number of fire calls and the increase in medical emergencies. The District also is experiencing a shortage of paramedics, who provide advanced medical care.
Monday’s ambulance delay is the latest in a series of similar incidents that has plagued the District’s fire department for two years. The agency had come to be defined by the January 2014 mishandling of the Medric Cecil Mills Jr. case. The 77-year-old man collapsed across the street from a fire station and was refused help from the firefighters inside.
On New Year’s Day 2013, a 71-year-old man died of a heart attack after waiting more than 30 minutes for an ambulance on a day when one-third of the firefighters on duty had called in sick. In March 2013, a D.C. police officer who was struck by a car and suffered a broken leg waited 15 minutes for an ambulance; authorities later found that three ambulances were improperly out of service. There have been several instances when firefighters transported victims in trucks because ambulances were delayed.The recent boom in religiously unaffiliated Americans may ultimately help explain the results of the upcoming 2012 presidential election, according to a new poll that shows such voters lean heavily toward President Obama but are less likely than the religiously affiliated to turn out.
Nearly one-quarter of likely Obama supporters say they have have no particular religion — a group less likely to vote than those affiliated with an organized religion, according to a poll released Monday by the Public Religion Research Institute. Sixty-one percent of unaffiliated Americans said they are certain to cast a ballot, compared with 73 percent of Americans who are religiously affiliated.
The poll, one of a slew being released in the days before the election, focuses on the overlap — and sometimes contradiction — of a person’s faith identity and their views on newsy topics from religious freedom to abortion.
White Catholics, for example, are far more likely than Latino Catholics to favorably view Mitt Romney (54 percent vs. 27 percent). Yet White Catholics also are more likely to believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, a view more in line with Obama’s.
The poll shows that nearly six in 10 Americans believe religious liberty is threatened in America, but about the same number believe religiously affiliated institutions should be required to provide employees with no-cost birth control. Ending the new White House mandate for such coverage has been the centerpiece of a campaign by the Catholic Church and conservative religious groups.
View Graphic Politics and religion of voters
The poll, which was co-authored by several senior fellows at the Brookings Institution, highlights the stark difference among faith groups.
Nearly eight in 10 likely Romney voters identify themselves as white Christians — mainline Protestants, Catholic or evangelical — while the number of likely Obama voters who identify themselves as white Christians drops to about four in 10. Other large parts of Obama’s base are the unaffiliated (23 percent), black Protestants
(18 percent) and Latino Catholics (6 percent).
Like the unaffiliated, Latino and African American voters traditionally have lower turnout rates, said Robert Jones, a poll co-author who founded the institute.
“Romney has a turnout advantage in that his supporters are more white,” Jones said.
The poll showed Romney with a 21-point lead among white working-class voters overall, but the group was more divided when looked at by faith.
Sixty-six percent of white working-class Protestant voters supported Romney, compared with 30 percent for Obama. Among white working-class Catholics, neither candidate had a statistically significant edge.
The poll also laid out other voting gaps. According to PRRI, 53 percent of female voters were likely to support Obama, compared with 44 percent for Romney. Seventy-six percent of women who have never been married support Obama, while 55 percent of married women support Romney.
Issues related to reproductive freedoms, including the contraception mandate, have figured prominently in the campaign. Fifty-six percent of Americans say religiously affiliated hospitals and colleges should be required to provide no-cost contraception coverage to employees, and 45 percent said even houses of worship should be required to do so as well.
The White House mandate exempts houses of worship, but bishops and many other religious liberty advocates have said the exemption should be wider.
The poll shows Americans are divided by faith identity even on the question of what America’s core problems are.
PRRI asked if the country’s woes are primarily because of an unfair economic system, and then asked if they are also caused by a moral decline and the loss of traditional values. White evangelical Protestants were much more likely to identify moral decline, not economic inequality (37 percent to 5 percent). White Catholics, white mainline Protestants and Hispanic Catholics also were more likely to blame shifting values. But black Protestants and the religiously unaffiliated were equally likely to blame both factors.The Philadelphia Eagles’ star quarterback Carson Wentz used a season-ending injury on Sunday to reassure well-wishers that his tribulations are part of God’s bigger plan.
NFL football fans in the City of Brotherly Love were stunned this weekend when the team’s leader went down with a torn ACL in his left knee. The Eagles defeated the Los Angeles Rams and clinched the NFC East title, but their Super Bowl hopes now rest upon backup Nick Foles.
“NFC East Champs! So proud of the resiliency of this team,” Wentz said of his (11-2) team late Sunday. “Such a special group of men. And I greatly appreciate all the prayers! I know my God is a powerful one with a perfect plan. Time to just lean in to him and trust whatever the circumstances! #Proverbs3:5-6.”
NFC East Champs! So proud of the resiliency of this team. Such a special group of men.
And I greatly appreciate all the prayers! I know my God is a powerful one with a perfect plan. Time to just lean in to him and trust whatever the circumstances! #Proverbs3:5-6 — Carson Wentz (@cj_wentz) December 11, 2017
The biblical passage referenced states: “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.”
Head coach Doug Pederson echoed the star’s hopeful message on Monday.
“If there’s ever an opportunity for me to rally the troops as the football coach, now might be the time,” he said, ESPN reported. “You can’t lose faith. This has been a resilient football team all season long.”
Wentz, in just his second year in the league, exited the game with 33 touchdowns for the season. The feat broke Sonny Jurgensen’s franchise record for the most touchdowns in a single season.
Jurgensen’s mark stood since 1961, ESPN reported.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley speaks with reporters in his office inside the Maryland State House in Annapolis on April 7, the final day of the 2014 legislative session. (Patrick Semansky/AP)
Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) signed legislation Monday that will increase the state’s minimum wage for most workers to $10.10 by 2018, the last major legislative priority of his tenure.
O’Malley said the wage increase is needed to help parents who work one, two or sometimes three low-paying jobs but still struggle to provide for their families.
“It is not fair, it is not right, it is not just that people should play by the rules, work 16-hour days and still be raising their children in poverty,” O’Malley said at a ceremony Monday morning, during which he signed more than 200 bills into law.
U.S. Labor Secretary Thomas Perez attended the ceremony and praised Maryland for “leading on this issue.” President Obama has asked state and local leaders to increase the minimum wage to at least $10.10, something that Congress has yet to do.
“When you put money in people’s pockets, people spend it,” Perez said. “When people spend it, businesses have to hire more people. When businesses hire more people, everybody benefits. That’s why the minimum wage works.”
The law will gradually increase the state’s minimum wage of $7.25 an hour to $10.10 by July 2018 — two years later than O’Malley originally proposed. Lawmakers rejected a provision that would have allowed the minimum wage to continue to rise above $10.10 based on inflation. Lawmakers also froze the base wage for workers who receive tips, including restaurant servers, at $3.63 per hour. Many Republicans voted against the legislation, saying that many business owners will struggle to absorb that added cost.
O’Malley also signed two bills that are expected to help colleges reduce high-risk drinking and help students who consume too much. One is a “Good Samaritan” law that will provide limited immunity to people who seek medical assistance for someone who has become sick after drinking or consuming illicit drugs. The other will ban the sale of grain alcohol, which is 190-proof or higher, starting July 1. A coalition of college presidents and public health advocates have been pushing for this ban for three years, saying that it causes students to quickly become dangerously intoxicated.
“You can drink a lot less of it, not know you are consuming it, and suddenly find yourself in a situation, even unconscious, without even knowing how you got there,” said Jonathan Gibralter, the president of Frostburg State University, who has made the reduction of high-risk drinking on his campus one of his highest priorities.
Among the other pieces of legislation that O’Malley signed:
●A bill that increases the number of syringes and needles distributed by an AIDS prevention program in Baltimore.
●A bill that requires most employers to give their workers six workweeks of unpaid parental leave and to maintain health insurance coverage during that time.
●A bill that requires drivers to change lanes if they see a tow truck stopped on the side of the road.Returns and exchanges
Refunds will be given if an item was improperly packaged/made or damaged during shipping. If something on an item has come un-glued, un-stitched or whatever the case may be, and you would rather have the item fixed, simply convo me and (depending on the severity of the damage) you can send the item back to me for fixing.
As far as exchanges go, if you are unsatisfied with your item and wish to exchange it, I will do exchanges for similarly priced items.
If the item needs to come back to me, for whatever reason, the buyer pays the shipping. I ship with a tracking number, so I would appreciate that if an item needs to be sent back to me that it is shipped with a tracking number as well.
I will not do exchanges or refunds on clothing or items that have been damaged on the part of the buyer (as in wear and tear due to age), or clothing that has been more than 'gently used'.
All buyers- remember to check the descriptions on the items you buy! If I have an antique item that has age damage or a hand-made item that is sold with an error on my part, I will always note it in the description with a picture of whatever the problem may be- if there is one. Always know what you're buying, but definitely don't be afraid to convo me if you aren't satisfied.Edmunds.com says these are this year's 10 best cars for short drivers.
Kia Soul is among the best cars for short drivers, Edmunds.com says. (Photo11: Kia) Story Highlights Height-adjustable driver's seat is a big help and is common
Adjustable pedals are useful, but hard to find
Physiques vary, so test drive the car you're considering no matter what features it has
Short drivers know how hard it is to find vehicles that let them see out properly and adjust themselves comfortably behind the wheel.
Edmunds.com, the car-shopping and research site, has compiled a list of what it believes are the 10 best cars for short drivers. Some of those cars you probably can afford, others maybe not.
Visibility is the key safety issue. If you can't see what's around you, after all, you're more likely to hit it. Common sense.
Except that car designers have little of that commodity. Looks good, live with it, seems like their attitude.
Thus, many of today's cars rob you of the ability to easily see out because of what's considered attractive. Sheetmetal that comes up high (called a high beltline), roof pillars that are thick or poorly angled, and windows that seem like they start at the second story and you have to jump to see out.
Key features to help overcome comfort and visibility issues for short drivers:
•Height-adjustable driver seat, common.
•Telescoping steering column, fairly common.
•Power-adjustable pedals, uncommon.
Adjustable pedals let short drivers move the pedals within reach without moving the driver too close to the steering wheel -- less than 10 inches between the wheel and your breastbone usually is considered unsafe. General Motors, Ford Motor, Chrysler Group and Nissan Motor are chief among those offering adjustable pedals on some models.
Edmunds points out the individual physiques vary, so two drivers the same height might fit quite differently.
Test drive cars and trucks you're considering to be sure you fit and can see out. And don't think you've simply missed that perfect combination of seat/wheel/pedal settings and it'll somehow get better after you sign on the dotted line. Doesn't happen.
Here are Edmunds.com's favorites for short drivers, in alphabetical order, including the price, including shipping, for the base model:
•BMW 3-series, $33,475
•Honda Accord, $22,470
•Honda CR-V, $23,625
•Kia Soul, $15,200
•Lexus LS 460, $72,900
•Mazda3, $17,495
•Mercedes-Benz S-class, $93,255
•Subaru Forester, $22,790
•Toyota Sienna, $27,445
•Volkswagen Passat, $21,640
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/17kpUjDIt’s not something I ever thought I’d do…. I mean, a weight loss article? The thing is, people keep asking, and it just so happens that mountain biking is one of the best ways there is to lose a bit of weight. So, it’s time to put on my personal trainer hat – let’s have a chat about getting into mountain biking for weight loss purposes.
We’ll have a wee look into the sports science to start with, and then at why mountain biking is so much better than just about any other type of exercise for weight loss.
First, the Science Bit: Weight Loss in General
So, let’s start off simple: mountain biking is exactly the right sort of exercise when you’re concerned with weight loss. Firstly, it’s aerobic exercise (or cardiovascular-based exercise) rather than anaerobic exercise (short bursts of powerful repetitions such as free-weights, push-ups or shuttle runs).
So why is cardio better for weight loss, I hear you ask? Well, that comes down to why we get fat in the first place…
We store fat to provide energy for when we have none readily available in our system. This helps us carry on when we’ve exhausted our energy supplies from recently eaten food. Unfortunately, many people consume more energy than they need and so it gets stored for a later date in the form of body fat. When you’re inactive, this date never arrives and you so the excess fat is never burned up. Cue beer belly, love handles and all those other good things. Without activity, they’re never shifting.
Burning Up that Excess Fat
When it comes to getting rid of this excess body fat, we need to first use up calories that are readily available. For most people, this doesn’t take place until you get your heart rate up to a reasonably high level. The general consensus amongst the sports science community (although this is always debated) is that this takes place after around twenty minutes or so of moderate cardio.
So, Why is Mountain Biking for Weight Loss So Effective?
To start with, Mountain Biking is a sport which is really easy to do for over 20 minutes. You’ll struggle to find a trail that takes less. Second, it’s easily hard enough work to raise the heart rate to a good level. But, that’s not enough – that doesn’t separate us from the road bikers, the runners and the power walkers.
Instead, let’s put forward a case for why mountain biking is particularly awesome at shifting that weight.
The Key: Mountain Biking is Fun!
Doing something that can be extremely repetitive, boring and also painful for long durations takes an extraordinary amount of willpower. Unfortunately, most cardiovascular exercise fits this description perfectly. Take a look at my endless quest to find ways of making the turbo trainer fun for example.
Boredom is one of the biggest reasons why people struggle with exercise. That’s why the Sufferfest videos do so well, although you need a turbo trainer for that. The pain alone is not so bad when you are having fun, it’s easily ignored. But to stare at a blank wall in a gym while on a treadmill, experiencing this pain and listening to awful music; it’s more than most people can bare.
Now think back to the times in your life when you’ve suddenly found yourself absolutely drenched in sweat, without even realizing it. Likely, you were doing something entertaining at the time. Be it a game of football with your friends, a game of volleyball on the beach or while taking a long walk to a new and interesting place in the hot sun. Doing something entertaining while working-out can make it seem that you’re not working out at all.
The Views Make it So Much Easier
Using a mountain bike for weight loss is ideal in this regard. It can be much more interesting than road biking, especially if you live in or near anywhere with some great scenery. Or, if you’re close to a decent forest trail, the variety is so much better. It can seem a lot more worthwhile slowly cycling up a steep incline when you have a beautiful natural vista waiting for you at the top.
Mountain Biking Keeps Your Brain Active Too
If you are traversing down a 30% gradient, on a slippery slope, it’s very difficult to be bored. Quite the opposite, your mind is working so hard that you never notice the effort you’re putting in. Keeping in the right gear, choosing the right body position, keep the wheels on-line, all keeps you more than occupied. Plus, if you are going off-the-beaten-track, there’s even plenty of route-selection to take into account.
If you’re planning a long off-road journey with your mountain bike, then you’ll likely need to learn how to orientate your map, work out the grid/magnetic angle, check the contour lines, and take a bearing with a compass. You may also need to take into account other factors such as; appropriate clothing, water, shelter and food. So there’s plenty to think about if you are planning such a journey.
While road biking is often just a case of blindly following a route which you know well, mountain biking is for the explorer at heart.
Variety of Effort Helps You Lose Weight
The last big advantage of mountain biking is the sheer range of effort you’ll go through during your ride. During other forms of exercise it’s really easy to get complacent. You can be running along and settle into an easy pace, letting your heart rate tail off to the low 100s. It’s the same with road biking, it’s very easy to find yourself coasting.
When using mountain biking for weight loss though, there’s no such thing as coasting. Off-road trails go up and down faster than a see-saw, and require you to change your effort on a minute by minute basis. You’ll be easy pedalling one minute, only to get out of the saddle and power up a 30 degree slope the next. This huge variety keeps your heart rate up, and makes sure you never get complacent.
Variety keeps you and your heart on it’s toes, speeding up that weight loss no end.
What Do You Think?
So, what more reason do you need? I hope this has inspired you to get out on the trails and start mountain biking for weight loss and exercise. Tell me what you think though – let me know if you think mountain biking is good for losing weight.
Tell me your stories, I’d love to hear them!
Image Credit: Agurno on FlickrThank you so much secret santa! When I received the package I knew JUST what it was and was so excited to open it I nearly dropped my armful of amazon boxes onto my dog after going for a walk! I loved the socks and I know I will get use out of them--I love colorful socks! And I think the speaker is really cool! I have recently gotten in the habit of listening to music or a podcast while I'm cooking or cleaning and now I'll be able to connect my phone to the speaker and keep it in the kitchen with me instead of just using my lousy phone speaker! I cannot thank you enough for these gifts. It made me really happy to open them and I appreciate you wanting to participate in this exchange to make a random stranger's day! Thanks again!!Under new law anyone found guilty of trying to change, repress or eliminate a person’s sexual orientation faces fine or jail
Malta has become the first country in Europe to ban gay conversion therapy after the parliament in Valetta unanimously approved a bill outlawing attempts to “cure” homosexuals of their sexuality.
Under the new Affirmation of Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Gender Expression Act, anyone found guilty of trying to “change, repress or eliminate a person’s sexual orientation, gender identity and/or gender expression” will face fines or a jail sentence.
Practising medical professionals who prescribe “gay cure” therapies could face fines of up to €10,000 (£8510) and a jail term of up to a year, with lesser fines of €1,000 to €5,000 and shorter sentences available to judges in other cases, Malta Today reported.
The Mediterranean island nation has launched a number of progressive social reforms since its Labour government was elected in 2013, and has twice been named the European country that best respects the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex people by the advocacy group ILGA-Europe.
The new law also decrees that “no sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression constitutes a disorder, disease or shortcoming of any sort”, and lowers to 16 the age at which people can request a change in gender without their parents’ approval.
Supporters of gay conversion therapy argue it uses common psychological or counselling techniques to help people voluntarily change their sexual orientation, but the practice is widely condemned.
In Britain, the NHS, Royal College of Psychiatrists and all leading counselling and psychotherapy bodies have signed a joint statement describing it as unethical, unscientific and potentially dangerous.
According to the LGBT rights group Stonewall, a 2009 survey of 1,300 mental health professionals in the UK found that more than 200 had offered some form of conversion therapy to patients referred to them by GPs and NHS practices.
In the US, where the practice is banned on minors in several states, the American Psychiatric Association has said it opposes any treatment “based on the assumption that homosexuality per se is a mental disorder or … that a patient should change his/her homosexual orientation”.
Professional bodies representing Malta’s psychologists, psychiatrists, family therapists and counsellors welcomed the bill barring what they called an “inhumane” practice, saying in a joint statement that they were “very proud to have played an integral part” in drafting it.
Gay conversion therapy “not only rejects a group of individuals on the basis of unfounded prejudice and lack of tolerance for diversity, but also impinges on the international recognition of LGBTIQ rights”, the associations added.
“As a body we promote respect and equality for all persons, and are determined to continue working towards ensuring our clients can enjoy as safe a therapeutic experience as they deserve,” their statement said.Get the biggest politics stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
New Labour peer Shami Chakrabarti is slammed today for abandoning her principles, The Sunday People can reveal.
The former director of human rights group Liberty opposed the Government’s Investigatory Powers Bill dubbed the Snooper’s Charter.
But this week Jeremy Corbyn ’s new shadow Attorney-General will abstain with other Labour peers on a vote in the House of Lords allowing it to be passed.
That has infuriated Lib Dem leader Tim Farron whose peers will be voting against the Bill.
He stormed: “Shami sold her principles to get a peerage.
“She has sold the final bit of her credibility by accepting a shadow Cabinet role in a party which plans to sit on its hands and wave through this illiberal and intrusive Bill.”
The new law will allow MI5 and MI6 to collect vast quantities of personal internet data.
The intelligence services argue this will better equip them to fight terrorism.
But in February Ms Chakrabarti said: “The Government needs to pause, take stock and redraft.”
(Image: Getty)
She added: “The case for unprecedented powers to bulk hack, intercept and collect our private data has not been made.”
And after extra safeguards were added she said in March: “Minor Botox has not fixed this Bill.”
Mr Farron added: “What really smarts is that she has spent her whole career attacking others for the craven thing she is about to do.
“Shame on her. I actually thought better of her.”
A Labour source in the Lords confirmed that Ms Chakrabarti will not vote against the Bill.
He said: “Our peers are instructed to abstain.
“We would expect all frontbenchers to follow the whip.”A quick announcement: tomorrow, I will not be posting any articles, as I am gone whole day. I’ll post the translations when I get back (no idea when, probably very late – if there is anything to translate that is)
- Storm confirms that Tiger 1 will definitely be nerfed
- the 9.0 tank size changes (SS: HD Panther got kinda bigger) did not influence their camo factor
- Storm confirms that tanks will definitely have a special set of “historical” characteristics for historical battles only
- Storm states that the armor of the commander’s copula of Tiger II is correct because there are conflicting sources about this
- Svirin’s data on 85mm Ferdinand superstructure side armor thickness are incorrect (SS: it’s 80mm)
- the split of various vehicles (SS: as in Panzer IV, StuG) was needed for historical battles, it does not mean that “less historical” tanks will be removedKakao Games and PearlAbyss announced today that their MMORPG, Black Desert Online, will be made available on Steam to players in North America and Europe on May 24th. Black Desert Online features one of the deepest character customization system ever seen, as well as sweeping landscapes, ferocious monsters, and action-focused combat packed in an unforgettable experience that breathes new life into the MMO genre.
In Black Desert Online, players can choose from one of 13 unique classes and create their character using the incredibly precise customization tools before entering the game’s bustling world.
Here are the game’s key features:
Beautifully designed open world that’s as expansive as it is alive
Heart-pounding skill-based combat
Unprecedented character customization with incredible detail
Crisp next-generation graphics
Extensive open-world PvP modes (Arena mode, guild vs guild, node wars, castle siege, and more)
Engaging story with deep lore and epic quests
Unique farming system – grow and perfect your crops
Personalized stable – catch, tame, and breed wild horses
Deep crafting, housing, fishing, hunting, and alchemy systems
Intuitive action gameplay complete with gamepad support
Frequently updated with enormous free expansions
And here are the official PC requirements for the Steam version of Black Desert Online:
MINIMUM:
OS: Windows 7 or higher (32-bit or 64-bit) Processor: Intel Core i3-530 2.9 GHz Memory: 4 GB RAM Graphics: GTS 250 / GeForce 9800 GTX / Radeon HD 6770 Network: Broadband Internet connection Storage: 52 GB available space
RECOMMENDED:
OS: Windows 7 or higher (32-bit or 64-bit) Processor: Intel Core i5-650 3.2GHz Memory: 8 GB RAM Graphics: GTX 670 / Radeon HD 7970 / R9 280X Network: Broadband Internet connection Storage: 52 GB available spaceHillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails County GOP in Minnesota shares image comparing Sanders to Hitler Holder: 'Time to make the Electoral College a vestige of the past' MORE said on Wednesday that she is willing to “have a discussion” on the role of superdelegates in the Democratic nominating process.
ADVERTISEMENT
“I think we’re going to have, yeah, we’re going to have a discussion,” she said when asked about superdelegates in an interview with The Washington Post, according to a transcript. “I think that’s something that the [Democratic National Committee] does after every convention.”
“I think we’re going to always try to look to see what we can do to improve the process and to try to, you know, get as many ideas about how to do that as possible,” she said.
Clinton noted that her win over Bernie Sanders Bernard (Bernie) SandersSenate Dems seek to turn tables on GOP in climate change fight Bernie Sanders Town Hall finishes third in cable news race, draws 1.4 million viewers Woman to undecided Biden: 'Just say yes' to 2020 bid MORE was propelled by her lead in the popular vote and among pledged delegates.
The role of superdelegates has been criticized by Sanders and his supporters because they see it as a way of giving establishment Democrats undue influenced in the primary process.
Clinton reached the requisite amount of delegates to clinch the nomination on Tuesday night, in part because of her lead among superdelegates — 574 of whom have backed her, compared with 48 for Sanders.Seventy-two hours before 90 minutes to change the White House race, Democrats appealed for fairness. The Republican raised the spectre of media bias
It is 90 minutes that could change the world, but Hillary Clinton is already warning that Donald Trump may overwhelm their first presidential debate on Monday if his “habitual lying” is left unchallenged by the moderator.
Trump v Clinton: 10 awkward debate questions to put candidates on the spot Read more
The “prebuttal” from Democratic campaign headquarters came as both candidates hunker down in preparation this weekend, nervously awaiting an estimated television audience of up to 100 million Americans at what opinion polls suggest is the turning point in their race for the White House.
Clinton’s concern stems from Trump’s fast-and-loose rhetorical style, which has been attacked by newspaper fact-checkers but proved devastatingly effective on TV, first against his Republican challengers in the primary and, more recently, in a candidate forum on national security in which he was allegedly allowed to airbrush his past support for the Iraq war.
“She will respond when he misrepresents her own record, but given the historic nature of how much Donald Trump lies, it cannot be only on her,” Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri told reporters by phone on Friday.
“If the moderator is not willing to stand up and challenge lies, [then] to not do that is to give him a very unfair advantage”.
Trump fired an early counterblast, urging debate moderator Lester Holt not to take sides. “We don’t want another Candy Crowley,” the Republican nominee said, referring to a famous incident in the 2012 debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, where the host |
Intelligence (ODNI) — to coordinate intelligence operations.
The 16 already existing agencies didn't react well, says historian and former intelligence analyst Matthew Aid.
"They hated the idea of a [so-called] 'intelligence czar,' " he tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies. "Each of the 16 intelligence agencies that existed before the creation of the ODNI [are] bureaucracies. They have a bureaucratic identity... and they love their independence."
After much debate, the ODNI was created — but given almost no authority over the 100,000 or so spies who work for the Pentagon. The result? Essentially two separate spy networks within the intelligence community: the civilians who work for the 16 agencies reporting to the ODNI, and the 100,000 spies at the Pentagon who report to the undersecretary of defense for intelligence.
"They have separate budgets, they report to separate committees, and it is a structural nightmare," says Aid.
In his book Intel Wars, Aid details how overlapping jurisdictions, bureaucratic policies and a glut of data have crippled the intelligence community in its war against would-be terrorists.
"You talk to officials who used to work or work today at the ODNI, and there's just frustration," he says. "I quoted one official as saying, 'It would be nice if the boys over at the Pentagon let us know what they were up to,' which I think gives a hint that says things could be more tightly controlled than they are right now."
Drowning In Information
Before Sept. 11, Aid says, the U.S. had 200 drones collecting data all over the world. That number climbed to over 6,000 after the attacks. Many of these drones provide essential information for intelligence forces, says Aid, but there's a problem: Mixed in with the good stuff is also a lot of nonessential information. Aid says intelligence analysts are drowning in the data — particularly because there aren't enough analysts to sift through what's potentially important.
Enlarge this image toggle caption courtesy of the author courtesy of the author
"I've interviewed a number of collectors who worked in Iraq and Afghanistan, and one of their complaints is, 'I'm sitting in a foxhole and I've got 3,000 emails coming in from Washington every morning with all the latest intelligence. And the guy said, 'It's wonderful that they're sharing this stuff with me; I just wish they were a little more selective about what they were sending me.' "
Each new unarmed drone designed by the U.S. sends back even more raw data to be processed.
"They're essential, but the problem is... the amount of data is literally drowning the analyst on the order of something like 275 operators and analysts to analyze the result of each drone intelligence mission," says Aid.
And most of the drones in operation are controlled by the Pentagon, he says, so the ODNI has little control over which drones are purchased, or how the information is then analyzed.
"And just so you know, the people engaged in the drone program working within the military probably [number] about 40- [to] 45,000 people... The CIA has about 25- [to] 30,000 people," he says. "There are more people working on the drone program than [in] the CIA."
Though the agencies are cooperating with each other to some degree, Aid says they're not working together as much as they should — and they're limited by what they can send out into the field.
"[For example] the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan not only controls all U.S. forces but he controls all NATO and Afghan forces, which means the U.S. intelligence community has to sanitize all of the intelligence [the commander] gets, because you don't know who's going to be reading the material," he says. "A lot of the most sensitive material collected by the U.S. intelligence community about al-Qaida... is not cleared for dissemination to the [commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan]. There's a separate headquarters... where all of that sensitive stuff goes."
Technological Challenges
Intelligence analysts are challenged not only by the glut of information coming to them through the unmanned drone program; Aid says that until recently, they also faced a more fundamental problem at the National Security Agency headquarters in Maryland: a shortage of electrical power.
"The NSA was spending billions of dollars on new collection systems and vast amounts of computer hardware and software, and jamming it into its headquarters, but did not build additional power stations to keep the systems up and running," he says. "So you had these embarrassing instances... where if you plugged in a coffee pot, you literally could knock off the electricity for an entire wing at NSA headquarters."
The solution? Every office at NSA headquarters was assigned an "electricity monitor."
"If you wanted to install a new percolator coffee pot in your office, they had to measure the amps that the coffee pot generated and then write up a formal request to install the coffee pot in their office, and then go through 27 approvals before some higher-up official signed it," says Aid.A Valley Village man whose Toyota Prius struck and injured three Oakwood School teens in a North Hollywood crosswalk last June will not be criminally charged, a California Highway Patrol spokesman said Tuesday.
The CHP will not be forwarding the case to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office since it handles felonies and the driver, Vartan Vartanian, is only in violation of running a red light, which is an infraction, said CHP spokesman Leland Tang.
The law enforcement agency cannot prove Vartanian was driving recklessly or had any intent to harm the teens, Tang said.
“It does not rise to a felony,” Tang said, noting no one was killed in the incident. “It’s not going to the city attorney because it doesn’t rise to a misdemeanor. … The law he violated is an infraction.”
The three girls, all 14 at the time, were walking back to school from a P.E. class at North Hollywood Park on June 4, 2014, when they were hit by the 2013 Prius at the bottom of the Magnolia Avenue off-ramp of the southbound 170 Freeway, officials said. The car entered the off-ramp, struck the girls and then collided with a Nissan Sentra that was in the intersection, officials said. One of the girls was critically injured.
Vartanian told investigators his brakes did not work and that he could not stop. The CHP said it found nothing mechanically wrong with the car.
At the request of the students’ parents, Tang is working with Oakwood students to present a school assembly on pedestrian safety, he said.PING Golf has a brand new lineup of equipment coming out for 2013 and you can read all about them right here. Stay tuned because THP will have a full review of this new equipment coming up in the future.
Also stay tuned to the THP Forums tonight for a special Live Chat with PING on this new lineup of clubs. Here is all the info:
What: “Delivering The Anser” Chat LIVE with PING engineers.
When: Wednesday, July 25th starting at 3:15pm (PT)
Where: TheHackersParadise.com
Anser® Driver
The Anser adjustable driver enables golfers to fine-tune trajectory through a combination of loft adjustment and shaft selection. The players can add or subtract ½ degree of loft and also choose one of four high performance shafts to fit their swing profile — a process called Trajectory Tuning™. The shafts are the PING TFC 800D, Aldila Phenom, Fujikura Blur Red, and the Mitsubishi Diamana ‘ahina. They vary in weight, stiffness profile, and the trajectory they deliver.A PING torque wrench is used to add or subtract 1/2° of loft beyond the standard settings of 8.5°, 9.5°, 10.5°, and 12°. The adjustable hosel is lightweight and small in diameter to maintain the size and look of PING’s traditional fixed hosel. With its low-spin head, the Anser driver represents a fully optimized design solution that generates ideal trajectories for maximizing distance and accuracy. A straight bias head rotation promotes square impact, and its low-spin design minimizes sidespin for improved accuracy. The 460cc head is made of Ti 8-1-1, a light, low-density alloy, and has a non-glare matte-black finish.
– Drivers available in 8.5º, 9.5º, 10.5º, 12º with plus or minus ½ degree of loft adjustment.
Shaft options:
– TFC 800D graphite shaft (Soft R, R, S and X)
– Aldila Phenom 50 graphite shaft (R, S)
– Fujikura Blur Red 005 graphite shaft (R, S & X)
– Mitsubishi Diamana ‘ahina 70 graphite shaft (S, X)
– U.S. MSRP: $440.00 per club
Anser Fairway Woods
The Anser adjustable fairway wood features Trajectory Tuning for adding or subtracting ½ degree of loft to the standard setting. To maximize distance and accuracy, the 17-4 stainless steel head has more surface area low on the clubface to make sure the ball contacts the club properly on the face. A rear sole weight optimizes the CG to promote a slightly lower, more penetrating ball flight with low spin, which adds distance and elevates the MOI across the face. The back of the sole is tapered to provide extra relief and ensure clean contact, even from tight lies, uneven lies, and light rough. A traditional shape and a straight lead edge inspire confidence and make aiming easy. A dark non-glare, matte finish reduces distractions.
– Fairway woods available: 3-wood (14.5º), 4-wood (16.5º), 5-wood (18.5º) with plus or minus ½ degree of loft adjustment
– Shaft: TFC 800F graphite (Soft R, R, S, X)
– U.S. MSRP: $275.00 per club
Anser Hybrids
Progressive CG locations in the 17-4 stainless steel Anser hybrids promote high launch and improved accuracy so players of all abilities can gain added distance and control. Through internal and external weighting, CG positions vary in the four loft options to produce the desired trajectory for extra distance and improved accuracy. In the lower-lofted hybrids, the CG is slightly lower and farther back for higher launch and optimal spin. The higher-lofted hybrids have a more forward CG position to optimize launch conditions. The traditionally shaped head is larger to increase MOI and inspire confidence. The lowest portion of the clubface is wider, most importantly in the heel and toe, for improved alignment and to ensure clean contact for more forgiveness and optimal spin. A dark, non-glare, matte finish eliminates distractions.
– Hybrids available: 17°, 20°, 23°, and 27°.
– Shaft: TFC 800H graphite (Soft R, R, S, X)
– U.S. MSRP: $255.00 per club
Anser Forged Irons
An 8620 steel body combines with a dense tungsten weight and internal cavity above the sole positioned close to the face to optimize the CG and elevate MOI. Predictable ball flights are achieved through progressive stabilizing bar technology. In the long irons, the bars angle out wider and are thinner, lowering the CG to launch the ball high. The bars get increasingly vertical and thicker through the shorter irons for more controlled, penetrating trajectories with high spin. A progressive set design makes it easy to launch the ball higher with the long irons and lower with the short irons for precise, consistent shot making. Larger long irons promote forgiveness and higher launch; heads progress to smaller short irons for more control. Machined face and grooves.
– Irons available: 3-PW
-Shaft options: Project X (5.0, 5.5, 6.0, 6.5) or TFC 800i (Soft R, R, and S)
– U.S. MSRP: $200.00 per club, steel or graphite shaft
Tour Wedges
Gorge™ Groove Technology and multiple sole-width options maximize control and consistency. The grooves are milled at PING’s facility in Phoenix, Arizona, to hold extremely tight tolerances that ensure a groove size and shape that provides golfers maximum spin. The 17-4 stainless steel wedges are available in three sole widths: thin sole (TS), for tight lies, firm conditions and shallower swings; wide sole (WS), for soft conditions, from bunkers, and steeper angle of attack and the standard sole (SS), for most turf conditions. All three sole options offer the versatility to open or close the clubface to play most any shot. The traditional head shape features a custom tuning port in the cavity, which increases MOI and contributes to a solid feel across the clubface.
-Wedges available: 47º (SS), 50º (SS), 52º (SS), 54º (SS, WS), 56º (SS, WS), 58º (SS, WS, TS), and 60º (SS, WS, TS).
-Steel shaft: CFS (Soft R, R, S, and X)
-Graphite shaft: TFC 169i (L, Soft R, R and S)
-U.S. MSRP: $140.00 per club w/steel shaft; $167.50 per club w/graphite shaft.
Serene™ Women’s Driver
The Serene’s large, forgiving head, expansive hitting surface, and high-balance-point shaft (lengthened ½” to 45” as standard) offer women longer, more accurate tee shots. Ultra-thin-crown technology in the wide-profile 460cc head utilizes Ti 3-1-1-1 to create discretionary weight that was used to optimize the CG and elevate forgiveness. The lowest portion of the clubface is wide to ensure solid contact and maintain distance and accuracy, even on mis-hits. Two PING ULT 210D high-balance-point shafts, a Lite and Ultra Lite, have a CG closer to the grip end, allowing the golfer to swing a clubhead with more mass at the same speed, generating faster ball speeds and longer tee shots. Using a high-balance-point shaft allowed the shaft to be lengthened, without increasing swing weight, for added distance.
Serene Drivers
– Drivers available: 10.5°, 12° and 14°
– Shaft options: PING ULT 210D Ladies graphite, Lite (49g), Ultra Lite (42g)
– U.S. MSRP: $310.00 per club
Serene™ Women’s Fairway Woods
With the optimized CG and spin rate provided by the Serene 17-4 stainless steel fairway woods, women will be more confident – and longer – off the tee and off the ground. An external weight pad in the wide-profile head positions the CG back and slightly lower to produce high launch and increase the MOI in both axes. Keeping the CG from being too low helps produce moderate spin, which increases carry distance and roll for slower swing speeds. The clubface is slightly shallower to inspire confidence at address, and additional hitting surface low in the face ensures the ball will launch cleanly from a variety of lies.
Serene Fairway Woods
– Fairway woods available: 3 (18°), 5 (22°), and 7 (26°)
– Shaft options: PING ULT 210F Ladies graphite, Lite (47g), Ultra Lite (40g)
– U.S. MSRP: $220.00 per club
Serene™ Women’s Irons/Hybrids
In the Serene iron/hybrid sets, women can blend 4H (22°), 5H (26°) and 6H (30°) hybrids with perimeter-weighted 17-4 stainless steel irons to launch the ball higher for longer results throughout the set while ensuring optimal distance gaps. In the irons, a deep CG and perimeter weighting increase the launch angle and elevate the MOI. The iron’s wide sole carves easily through the grass to launch the ball high and straight, even from the toughest lies. The traditionally shaped hybrids are larger and the CG is back and lower to achieve high launch with moderate spin to maximize distance in slower swing speeds. Camber and sole relief ensure playability from all lies.
Serene Irons/Hybrids
– Irons/hybrids available: 5-9, PW, SW & LW
– Shaft options: PING ULT 210i Ladies graphite, Lite (51g), Ultra Lite (44g)
– U.S. MSRP: $117.50 per club
– Hybrids sold separately: 4H, 5H & 6H
– Shaft options: PING ULT 210H Ladies graphite, Lite (58g), Ultra Lite (50g)
– U.S. MSRP: $185 per club
Serene™ Women’s Putters
The Serene putters feature variable-depth groove technology. PING’s extensive studies show a significant increase in ball-speed consistency when measured at nine points across the face insert. The grooves are deepest in the center and get gradually shallower out to the perimeter of the insert to ensure predictable distances and accuracy, even when the ball is struck toward the heel or toe. The insert is made of 6061-T6 aluminum to provide a crisp feel and sound similar to a traditional steel face. Perimeter weighting in the 17-4 stainless steel heads and a well-balanced geometry add to forgiveness.
Available in Anser 2 (Slight Arc), B60 (Slight Arc), Shea (Slight Arc) and Craz-E Too (Straight) models.
-U.S. MSRP: Anser® 2, B60, Shea® $162.50
-U.S. MSRP: Craze-E® Too $192.50
Nome® 500 Long Putter
The Nome 500-gram Long Putter features an adjustable shaft that allows the golfer to modify the length from 44.5” to 54.5” using a PING wrench. The USGA/R&A-conforming telescoping shaft consists of a steel lower portion, a graphite grip portion and lightweight stainless steel locking ring. By unlocking the shaft, golfers can optimize length to fit their body characteristics, stroke type, and posture. A black alignment bar and white contrasting sightline on the head make aiming easy. The Nome is face-balanced and fits golfers who have a Straight putting stroke. It is precision-milled from high-grade aircraft aluminum and finished with a durable nano-nickel coating. The lightweight frame features tungsten sole weighting to optimize the CG and elevate the MOI.
-Long putter telescoping shaft self-adjusts from 44.5 to 54.5 inches
-WINN AVS 2-Piece grip standard
-U.S. MSRP: $380.00 eachPart 1: Pre-OP and the OP
As many of you will know, I was waiting….constantly waiting. Finally though, the wait was over. A man in very ominous scrubs came to the door….
It’s time!
Thunder cracked ominously overhead, the lights flickered off for a second and lightning flashed across the rain soaked windows…
Ok. So none of that happened really, I was taking a little bit of artistic licence. It didn’t even feel like that that would be much too melodramatic. A man did come to the door to collect me though, that much is true. It felt fine actually, I was scared but not terrified. I was ready for the operation, I needed it and waiting sucks. I got pushed down a few floors in a wheel chair, in my stupid little gown towards the anaesthesiologist’s room. This room is the gateway to the theatre, and so at the door I had to give my mum a hug, tell her I’d be fine and she had to leave. That part sucked, she was upset of course and I was worried about her. I’m not sure how she sat and waited for me for so many hours, must have been horrible. I haven’t really asked what it was like. Maybe she’ll blog about it! Her blog which you can find at:
http://crohnsmum.wordpress.com/
So in the room I had an epidural, it’s a needle in the back that fills you with pain killers or something; it covers your nerves and numbs your whole body. It was fine, there are risks to it apparently but I don’t really know. I wouldn’t say no to something if the surgeon suggests it. After that I was put on the bed, and it was time for the counting part. You know that bit in films, where you see through Brad Pits eyes…
10…9….8…7…
And then the greyness seeps in from the side and the screen goes dark. Yeah that doesn’t happen either. She just put a mask on my face and I breathed in a couple of times and then I was out like a light. Sorry to ruin two pieces of Hollywood glamour in one blog, that could be some kind of record. I do however look like Brad Pit so that is fine.
The shortest part of the blog is actually the operation, which seems like an absolute robbery considering it’s the most important bit. But all I can say is:
It happened here! *CUT CUT, PULL, STITCH*
They said it went exactly as expected and it actually took less time than expected. Excellent!
Part 2: Post OP day 1
I then woke up. This part feels a little like the incredible series by Lemony Snicket ‘A series of unfortunate events’. From now on I am a very unlucky person and I am going to bitch and moan about it so if you don’t want to read that, you have been warned!
Post-Op started fine. I woke up, no pain as expected. Then suddenly and unfortunately (see!) my epidural developed a block. This means that across a part of my spine the pain relief stopped being delivered. So I was in pain, a lot, ya know because of the major surgery and everything. They had to fix that, which they did, it sucked but they got it sorted and the pain went away quickly. Now during the surgery and afterwards you have, alongside many other tubes what’s called an NG tube. That’s the one that goes down your throat and into your stomach. It’s supposed to stay there…
Mine, unfortunately (two!) didn’t. For some reason it ended up in the back of my throat. Where I chocked on it…I don’t know if any of you have ever chocked, you probably have. Well I couldn’t breathe, and then I started being sick and chocking more. I was actually dying, apparently the face was going purple and eyes were beginning to roll. Now that sucks, it’s terrifying. You know when it sucks more. When you have a brand new 10 inch cut down your stomach which is going to hurt a lot. The nurse pulled the tube out eventually, cleaned me up and after 5-10 mins of slow breathing and coughing the pain and panic subsided and I relaxed. The rest of this part is super boring. Relaxed. Chatted to nurses. Got taken to ward. Eventually saw my mum. Told her what happened. Probably exaggerated. Drifted off and slept till 5am where the next adventure began!
Part 3: Post OP day 2
World of sleepy pain, drifting in and out till 5am. Then terrible hip and back pain. They were trying to figure out how they would control it. Was given no pain relief, got worse and worse. They didn’t really suggest anything, claimed they were trying. “trial and error” to manage pain when they spoke to Mum but I’d had no trials! Was trying to move to dissipate the pain but it wouldn’t work in any position. I’ll overuse the word agony in this part but not misuse it. Agony is what it was.
Was examined by a doctor. He said that he was happy with epidural and that the back pain was caused in the long muscles in the side of my back which were pulled by the way they had me lying in surgery. To combat the pain he prescribed IV paracetamol, diclofenac sodium and a suppository. I got none of those meds. Turns out even prescribing the suppository after my surgery was ridiculous and stupid because I couldn’t have it anyway. This isn’t the first time I’ve had someone from the NHS miss-prescribe an unsuitable drug….it beggars belief.
I begged for the pain relief he had prescribed over and over. The nurse effectively ignored me. She was in the ward doing her tablet round, I was lying in pain and she basically told me that it was more important to give out her tablets in order to the guys around me. All of which were semi asleep and in no pain. It felt like neglect but looking back I think I was in such a stressed state they were probably doing everything they could. Still that hindsight didn’t help then. No pain meds had come. The diclofenac sodium they prescribed for back pain 3 hours ago which they couldn’t find in a different ward had still not arrived.
Before 7:30 I’d had absolutely 0 pain my abdomen, obviously a good thing. The epidural was clearly doing it’s job, but at 7:30 a creeping pain began. It developed quickly and by 8 it was so bad it had overridden the back pain totally. I was moaning in agony and begging for relief. Not very dignified I’m afraid and totally not living up to my Brad Pit character who would no doubt have faced the pain with a reckless dismissal and, for an American a surprising level of British stonyface-ness. I’m afraid I let the side down!
You’d think they’d rush to sort the epidural out and fix the pain, but they didn’t. It felt like a hell of a battle to convince them that the back pain was no longer the priority. I’m sure they were as confused as I was and the whole thing has a bit of a shambles. That time is a bit hazy, the pain got worse and worse and I’m not really sure how much time passed but eventually, everyone SPRANG into action.
Someone made a decision! They decided the epidural wasn’t working (claimed a leak), turned it off and put me onto what’s casually referred to by the patients as ‘the button’. It’s real name is patient controlled analgesia machine and basically you press a button to release a small amount of pain relief, in my case ‘oxynorm’. You can press the button every 5 minutes to prevent you from overdosing. All of this happened in the space of 30 minutes. I was glad that things seemed to be progressing.
Sadly, over 8 hours I was self-prescribed, injected, and IV’D enough morphine like opiates to knock out a small elephant they didn’t even touch the sides. They some how managed to have zero affect on the pain I was having. I wish I was overstating that length of time. But my mum sat and diligently held my hand, she can testify that it took eight and a half brutal hours before things improved.
The last 4 hours were so bad I thought I was dying…it sure as hell felt like it. The day was handled poorly, a lot of mistakes made by individuals, facts later admitted by several senior members of staff.
The joyous breakthrough came when they decided to turn the epidural back on. The one they decided was broken and turned off a massive 9 hours ago. It wasn’t broken after all, someone had made that decision without consulting the anaesthesiologist. Which, was a huge F*** up if you’ll pardon my self-censored French.
So I needed it turning back on, but because it was the weekend there was only one person who could do it….! One person who could help in the hospital. No pain nurses. No pain control as I was so vehemently promised.
When he eventually made it to my bed (he was in surgery and very busy, totally understandable). He was absolutely fuming. He was so angry that they had removed it without talking to him or properly checking if it was actually leaking because he said “there is no evidence that it was soaked”. So the question is, why did they do that. Why did they remove it when they clearly were not able to make that decision properly. Because of that mistake they caused me more than 8 hours of agony. That can’t be ok, it just is unacceptable.
During those 8 and a half hours something good did happen though. A little funny episode, sadly only witnessed by my mum as she sat by my side so diligently by my for that whole time.
I’d had so many of these opiates that my mind was completely messed up, I was as high as a kite. I was super drowsy, eyes were drooping and mind wandering in random tangents, in and out of coherent thought. Some of the time I was talking absolute gibberish! I hope she posts in her blog about it so she can recount all of the funny things I said but here is a quote from her just explaining one little snap shot to give you a taster!
“Alex was painstakingly explaining the benefits of buying an I Pod and suddenly said 10. What do you mean 10, I said?. They were asking me what ward I was going to weren’t they, answered Alex. No, I said that was yesterday.”
Anyway this post is already disgustingly long because it’s taken ages for me to be able to get well enough to write and upload it. It’s so long I’m sure no one will read it, but it felt important to get a record of what happened over these life changing hours and I can’t help but ramble! The most important thing is the epidural worked! It kicked in in about 15 minutes. Oh my god sweet relief. I’ve never been so happy.
That joy is where I will leave you,
9pm on Sunday night. Mum finally able to go home and rest, a whopping 30 hours after the surgery and me about to drift off into blessed sleep. I’ll cover the following recovery, it’s ups, downs, scars and gory bits in my next blog post. I think a whirlwind 30 hours is plenty!
Until next time, I’m still here. They did seem to have a bloody good go at finishing me off, but they failed.
I plod on to fight another day, with a brand new stoma and a new lease of life!From October 27 to September 3, the American Library Association, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, and a dozen other organizations made up of creators, publishers, teachers and journalists will be celebrating Banned Books Week. Well, maybe "celebrating" is the wrong word for a 33 year-old campaign designed to raise awareness of censorship by championing books that were challenged or banned from libraries across the country, but there's at least one good reason to have a good time with it.
To mark the occasion, the folks over at Humble Bundle have launched a pay-what-you-want collection of banned and challenged comics, including Jeff Smith's Bone, Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Keiji Nakazawa's Barefoot Gen and more --- complete with reasons why they were challenged.
The listing for each book links to the CBLDF page detailing the challenged, and it can be very enlightening. It's not difficult to figure out why people might find some objectionable content in Garth Ennis, Darick Robertson and John McCrea's The Boys, but a book like SideScrollers, which has actually been described as "wholesome" in reviews, is a much more surprising entry onto the list.
Here's the full rundown of titles:
Customers can name their price for:
Maggie the Mechanic (Love & Rockets)
T he Frank Book
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 3
CBLDF Presents: Liberty
Madame Paul Affair
Bone Vol. 1.
Those who pay more than the average price will also receive:
The Little Man
The Boys: Herogasm
Heartbreak Soup (Love & Rockets)
Barefoot Gen Vol 1: A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima
Essex County
Elfquest: The Final Quest Vol. 1.
Customers who pay $15 or more will receive all of the above plus:
Not Funny Haha
Wytches Vol. 1
Information Doesn't Want To Be Free (Audiobook).
The bundle runs through October 7, benefiting the CBLDF.They are a minority in this country. Their rituals are often secretive. They have their own lingo, etiquette, schools, neighborhoods, and certain places they visit, seasonally. Typically, they partially hide their identities. But in the last five years, some have started to “come out”, not necessarily in pride but simply out of civic-mindedness. What they are revealing is surprising.
They are coming out as rich.
Eric Schoenberg is one of them. “I pay a lower tax rate than you do, which is startling,” Schoenberg, 55, told me. To illustrate this problem, Schoenberg posted portions of his returns online. He wanted to show how much he, a very wealthy person, benefits from our system. He has always benefited from low taxation on his investment income, for instance.
Schoenberg is part of a group I call “the transparent rich”. He is also in an organization that is similarly interested in transparency, the Patriotic Millionaires. The website describes members as “traitors to their class”, and then elaborates: “Patriotic Millionaires are high-net-worth Americans, business leaders, and investors who are united in their concern about the destabilizing concentration of wealth and power in America.”
Schoenberg’s own wealth derives from what he calls a “complicated money story”. “My father was a very successful business person, so I come from a background of wealth,” he says. In turn, Schoenberg became an investment banker on Wall Street and a private investor. He also taught classes on family wealth at the Wharton business school.
And like others before him, he is coming out now because he sees a grave need for social transformation.
“I believe today’s tax proposals will cut taxes on very rich people, and that’s why I posted some of my tax returns online,” says Schoenberg, perhaps referring to Donald Trump’s recent call to repeal the estate tax altogether, as well as Republican plans to cut the corporate tax rate. “Look, if you are uncomfortable about where society is and want to make a difference, this is one way you can.”
Our new TV antiheroes are just like us: they don’t want to fall out of the middle class Read more
By coming out as rich, these affluent progressives are starting to expose their own positions, advocating greater equality in the process. You might call them “class woke” (and I don’t mean that entirely ironically). They hope that they can help bring about change, at least a little.
In addition to making people more aware generally of a preferential tax code, more transparency about inherited wealth might help middle-class or working-class people feel less self-critical after they realize the hidden advantage of others. It would underline how taxes enable and a whole societal structure rewards the wealthiest. It may also help people without such resources to see that they aren’t “doing it wrong”, and stop them from blaming themselves when they are struggling.
After all, an estimated 35% to 45% of wealth is inherited rather than self-made. The Brookings Institution’s Richard V Reeves and Kimberly Howard have called this a “glass floor”, one element that protects the wealthiest from ever losing their mobility.
This inherited wealth can be passed on to one’s family members tax-free unless it’s larger than $5,430,000 – an extremely generous arrangement. (This means that fewer than 1% of all estates are taxed.) This is part of why social mobility is no longer what it once was. There are real racial gaps in upward mobility as well.
For instance, Iimay Ho, the executive director of Resource Generation, a nonprofit working to “organize young people with wealth and class privilege” to work to relieve inequality, came out to me when we first spoke on the phone.
We had never previously crossed paths, but she immediately told me
that she has personal access to net assets of $100,000 and that she makes $68,000 a year. (In New York City, these figures don’t necessarily read as “rich”, but they do, demographically, put Ho in the top 10% of those in her 18-to-35 age bracket, she said.
Ho also owns a $370,000 apartment. “Homeownership is a marker and a part of a huge transfer of wealth,” she explained. Wealth was being defined here as US households with at least an income around $148,000 and home equity above $1.3m, but RG’s other wealthy young recruits can have considerably more.
My fascinating and somewhat vertiginous chat with Ho seemed a salve for the tendency toward covertness among the rich, especially those who have inherited their fortunes. And I’ve long noticed among my creative-class social set in New York City a mysterious silence around family money. So do others, like my journalist friend who was struggling from paycheck to paycheck and, when she was younger, wondered how her successful-seeming writer friends were getting by: the secret lay in the fact that their parents had bought their homes for them or offered them the capital to do so.
Outclassed: how your neighbor’s income might affect your happiness Read more
But it’s not just the wealthiest who are reassessing how they think about themselves. Scholars who study the 1% are as well. There are new books on the warily wealthy, including Rachel Sherman’s Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence.
When I spoke with Sherman, she told me that while talking about money remains a social taboo for many, for rich people it can be even more extreme.
For the liberal well-off in particular, “having money is a source of shame”. The people she interviewed with inherited wealth were also, on some level, embarrassed that they hadn’t worked for it. Perhaps because they were progressive, they also often had people in their lives with less money than they did. As a result, they were often pretending they were not as rich as they were, “hiding their heads in the sand about it”.
“The fact that they have wealth goes against their politics,” Sherman said of her subject. “They want to be ‘morally worthy’ of being wealthy, to be prudent, to not be greedy and ostentatious.”
They may try to maintain the illusion that they live ordinary lives, even though data about American income inequality has assured us that their lives of ease and pleasure are anything but.
As Sherman |
to the NHL and that both Byfuglien and Ladd could be rentals, it would probably take trading both to land such a high quality prospect. Cheveldayoff should be going after high quality not quantity.
This Summer
I know what I am proposing is not the greatest from a PR standpoint in terms of the message sent to the fan base. But remember, trading Byfuglien and Ladd is not about not paying top dollar to your players. It’s about not over paying players in their thirties where the clock is ticking. If these moves are made it will open up a lot of cap space and the Jets payroll budget heading into the summer. Winnipeg can use these dollars and sign a younger UFA such as Kyle Okposo. If Winnipeg follows this road map they will be the better for it in the long term and I believe a sleeping giant in the West who will be awoken very soon.
Main Photo:From the letter (Thanks to David for the heads up)
Bowing down to corporate pressure, the heads of the movie studio resigned today. Major layoffs are expected imminently.
New Line will now be folded into Warner Bros.
Here is the email that was just sent out to all staffers:
“February 28, 2008
To: New Line Colleagues
From: Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne
Subject: Our Company
This afternoon, Time Warner is announcing that New Line will become a unit of Warner Bros. This is, of course, a very difficult and emotional time for all of us who have worked at New Line. While there is not much we can say that can lessen the impact of this announcement, we did want you to know about the decision before you read about it in the press.
New Line will maintain its own identity and will continue to produce, market, and distribute movies. But New Line will now do so as part of Warner Bros. and will probably be a much smaller operation than in the past. Time Warner hopes that operating New Line as a unit of Warner Bros. will allow New Line to focus on the creative side of movie-making, while reducing costs and taking advantage of Warner Bros.’ distribution systems. The company will be holding group meeting with New Line employees tomorrow in Los Angeles and New York to discuss this announcement, and is committed to letting employees know as soon as possible about how this change affects them individually.
For our part, we will be stepping down as Co-Chairmen and Co-CEOS of New Line. This was a painful decision, because we love New Line and the people who work here have been like our second families. But we will be leaving the company with enormous pride in what all of us at New Line have accomplished together. From its humble beginnings 40 years ago, our studio has created some of the most popular and successful movies of all time. Those movies are a tribute to the amazing creative energy and entrepreneurial abilities of the talented people at New Line. They are a legacy that will endure forever.
Although we are stepping out of New Line, we intend to remain actively involved in the industry in an entrepreneurial capacity, and will keep you advised of developments.
We thank all of you who have worked so hard to make New Line such a success. We are very proud of every one of you.
Bob & Michael”Posted Saturday, February 23, 2008 1:15 am
Saturday, February 23
BENNINGTON If early voting is any indication of interest in the upcoming presidential primary and local town elections, then Bennington could see an all-time-high number of voters at the polls, according to a local official.
Town Clerk Timothy Corcoran said more than 300 people have already submitted ballots ahead of the March 4 presidential primary and local elections. Vermont allows early voting, or voting by absentee ballot, he said. The number of people using early voting is significantly higher than in years past, he said.
Close race
The increased interest, he said, is undoubtedly caused by the close race among Democratic Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who are seeking the party's nomination for president.
"There are school and select board races but there's a tremendous amount of interest in the presidential primary," Corcoran said.
Republican Sen. John McCain, although it's not official, appears to have sealed up his party's nomination for president.
According to Corcoran, a low voter turnout in Bennington is considered to be about 2,000 people and a high turnout to be around 3,000 people. The town has about 9,500 people on the voter checklist.
This year's turnout could be the highest ever, though, Corcoran said.
"I predict there will be as many as 4,000 out this year. There's some interest in who Vermont votes for," he said.
Both Democratic candidates have now begun to organize supporters throughout the state, hoping to gather as many nominating delegates as possible. To become the party's nominee, a candidate must have 2,025 delegates out of the 4,049 available. According to an Associated Press tally, Obama, to date, has 1,358 delegates. Clinton has 1,264.
Both candidates have sent paid campaign workers to Vermont and are now airing television commercials. Both are also focusing on early voting, hoping supporters will cast their ballots early.
Rob Hill, state director for the Obama campaign in Vermont, said the campaign will be making "an aggressive push to encourage as many supporters as we can to vote early."
"Yesterday we sent out an e-mail to our list of supporters that encourages people to go to our Web site to see where they can get their ballot and where to send it," Hill said. "We found that it's a really great way to make sure that the most people can get out and cast their votes for us."
Clinton spokesman Blake Zeff said the Clinton campaign is also reaching out to supporters by telephone.
"We certainly are encouraging Vermonters who are excited about Hillary's candidacy to cast their votes early. That's the best way to ensure their votes get cast and we are going to be working the phones aggressively to reach out to them," he said.
Corcoran said ballots for people wishing to vote early are available at the town clerk's office. They must be returned by March 4, he said. For residents who are not registered to vote and want to vote on March 4, they must register to vote by Wednesday, Feb. 27.Who the Clix? is a series of articles featuring information on comic book characters that have been made into figures for the popular tabletop game Heroclix. These articles are meant to help Heroclix players learn more about the characters behind their favorite pieces.
Today we look at the Frankenwolfculafromtheblacklagoon : Monsterex
Appearances in Heroclix: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
First Appearance: TMNT Adventures Special #3
Team Affiliations: N/A
Created by: Stanley Wiater and Ken Mitchroney
Monsterex is created when Krang attempts to blast the turtles back into baby turtles with a mutagen ray and instead hits their television. The ray interacts with the monster movie they were watching and creates the strange patchwork monster out of thin air. Though the turtles attempt to stop this threat before it can begin, Monsterex proves too strong for them and escapes. The turtles follow in pursuit and with the aid of Bookwurm, head to the Magic Castle amusement park in New Jersey where they suspect the monster will be.
The turtles are again bested by the incredibly powerful Monsterex and are only saved when the approaching rays of sunlight come with dawn. Monsterex retreats as the turtles celebrate their lucky victory.
Months later, the turtles visit the amusement park again on Halloween. With Splinter and their friend Ninjara in tow they wander through the wax museum only to find Monsterex frozen in mud. Donatello accidentally knocks Monsterex over, freeing the enraged creature. Monsterex leads the turtles on a chase through the populated amusement park with patrons believing that all of the strange mutants are merely people in costumes. Again, dawn is their saving grace when Monsterex takes refuge in the hall of mirrors. With a simple smash of the skylight, sunlight floods in and melts Monsterex into a puddle of water.fullscreen continue view fullscreen close
It's been nine months since Governor Andrew Cuomo unveiled his plans for an all-new, all-glass Penn Station (and it's been six months since the unveiling of plans for the even newer, even glassier Two Penn Plaza). But 2016 has been a hell of a year, and a lot has changed in that time, including Cuomo's vision for the future Penn Station, which he officially presented today. And it now looks like it is an airport where everyone from Lost could meet up after dying.
The latest new plan which is definitely happening this time, we swear, is to transform the James A. Farley Post Office on the west side of Eighth Avenue into the 255,000-square-foot Farley Train Hall; it will accommodate both Amtrak and Long Island Rail Road passengers. There will be 112,000 square feet of retail and nearly 588,000 square feet of office space. And, the kicker: construction is set to start this fall, and be completed by December 2020.
At the same time, Cuomo said that the MTA will initiate the comprehensive redesign of the LIRR’s existing 33rd Street concourse at Penn Station and an extensive renovation to the adjacent Seventh and Eighth Avenue subway stations. In a press release, he says, "The redesign will include nearly tripling the width of the existing corridor, which will significantly decrease congestion and result in notably higher ceilings—providing bright lighting, new way-finding, ticketing and informational systems."
Below, you can watch Cuomo's full presentation of the new plan, which was made at a luncheon for the Association for a Better New York.
“This plan is smarter and better for people who will use the complex,” Cuomo said in an interview with the Times, “and it will actually happen.”
As for critics who might bring up the fact that there have been many gubernatorial plans to transform Penn Station over the last 20 years that have fallen by the wayside, Cuomo said: "With more than twice the passengers of all JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark airports combined, the current Penn Station is overcrowded, decrepit, and claustrophobic. The Moynihan Train Hall will have more space than Grand Central’s main concourse, housing both Amtrak and LIRR ticketing and waiting areas, along with state-of-the-art security features, a modern, digital passenger experience, and a host of dining and retail options. This is not a plan—this is what’s going to happen. People are going to walk through this station and recognize that this is New York."In a major pick-up for competitive Madden, Frank "Stiff" Sardoni Jr. signed Thursday with Versus Sports. The contract will see the 2016 championship holder compete full time in the Madden NFL '17 Championship Series. Editor's Picks Professional eSports Association unveiled The Professional eSports Association (PEA) is an owner-operated league that splits profits between players and owners. The association has announced an inaugural CS:GO league.
The groups of life and death at the 2016 LoL World Championships We break down the group of death, the group of life and... the group of Faker?
Na'Vi bids farewell to Hearthstone roster Natus Vincere is discontinuing its trophy-winning Hearthstone division. The last tournament as Na'Vi representatives for some of the players will be DreamHack Bucharest. 2 Related
Sardoni is fresh to the Madden game, having started his competitive career only three years ago. Toppling the two-time Madden Challenge champion Eric "Problem" Wright this past June was a landmark victory, and now Sardoni looks to continue his run into the Madden Majors.
For Stiff, signing with Versus means not having to approach sponsors or juggle too many concerns on his own. Sardoni gets to focus more on his content creation, like his YouTube channel, and on improving his game.
"I'm making this my primary thing right now," Sardoni told ESPN, "because I can see what the future holds for Madden and what EA is doing to develop this as an esport."
Versus, a relatively new organization in esports, boasts its first signing in Sardoni. A conversation with founder Manny Anekal indicated that it might not be the last, however. Anekal told ESPN that Versus is "absolutely looking into other athletes" to add to the roster, hinting at more announcements to come. Anekal also identified some high-level sponsorships the team is working toward, pursuing "non-endemic" brands to work with Versus.
"I want to build this up slowly, and from the ground up, starting with Frank," Anekal said.#INFO
Just prior to the business strategy announcements made yesterday on May 16, NJPW trainer Takeshi Misawa was joined by Chairman Sugayabashi and President Harada to give an update on the health conditions of Tomoaki Honma and Katsuyori Shibata. He also outlined New Japan’s health policy for its wrestlers.
Misawa firstly explained that Honma has been moved from a hospital specializing in cervical vertebrae to a rehabilitation hospital in Osaka. While his discharge date is currently unknown, he has begun muscle training at the gym with permission from doctors. His rehabilitation includes activities such as light running as well.
As for Shibata, his original condition was considered to be life threatening. However, after follow up operations he has now been moved to the general ward. While he currently has no trouble walking and talking, it is impossible to comment right now on any possible after-effects due to his condition. He is currently focused on being discharged from the hospital, so he asks for everyone to “send your shouts of support.”
Next, a description of New Japan Pro-Wrestling’s Medical Committee highlighted efforts to support the health and well-being of NJPW wrestlers. The Committee consists of a team including neurosurgeons, spinal specialists, orthopedic surgeons, and New Japan Pro-Wrestling trainers. Misawa elaborated, “The Medical Committee decides on the best course of action to deal with these circumstances,” referring to accidents during matches or training. The Medical Committee’s function in these scenarios is to quickly assess the best treatment and support the immediate follow through of that treatment through its network of professionals.
As of 6 years ago, all New Japan wrestlers undergo a yearly MRI and CT scan. This data is analyzed by the Medical Committee to assess each wrestler’s condition. Also, medical staff are on-hand at venues to monitor for health risks and help prevent injuries.
Finally, it was announced that the Medical Committee will limit the number of matches a wrestler may compete in during a series if there is any question over the wrestler’s health.Click to download audio version
One of the sectors which is ripe for disruption is the real estate industry. In the US for instance, a handful of historic and very powerful players operate what is known as MLS, or Multiple Listing Services, and hold unofficial monopolies on residential and commercial real estate listings. Brokers, who depend on these listing services to sell properties, agree that their incumbent positions have created a situation where fees have continued to rise, while little to no added value has been added for their users.
Stephen King and Russel McLernon join us to explain RexMLS, a decentralized Multiple Listing Service built on Ethereum and IPFS. Currently in beta, the DApp would allow brokers to list properties at a very low cost, and be accessible to international markets, something which is lacking in the current model.
Topics discussed in this episode :
The basics of MLS or Multiple Listing Services
What is RexMLS and the problems it is trying to address
The benefits of a decentralized MLS
The different technical components of RexMLS
Why they chose Ethereum and IPFS
The user experience of RexMLS
The product's roll-out phases
How users are incentivized to participate in the system
The RexDex token exchange and the token injection model
RexMLS's governance model
Links mentioned in this episode:
Sponsors:
Jaxx: Wallets that Unify the Blockchain Experience Across Devices JAXX.io
Show notes
YouTube
SoundCloud
Epicenter Bitcoin is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain, Sébastien Couture & Meher Roy.
Views: 7,261Sanders Statement on Voter Fraud Commission
WASHINGTON, May 11 – Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) issued the following statement Thursday after President Donald Trump signed an executive order launching a commission to review alleged voter fraud led by Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach:
“The president has issued an executive order to establish a commission to examine ‘voter fraud.’ The only problem with that proposal is that there is virtually no voter fraud in this country. In other words, the idea that significant amounts of voter fraud exist is itself a fraud. The sole purpose of this commission is to propagate a myth and to give encouragement to Republican governors and state legislators to increase voter suppression.
"At a time when we already have one of the lowest voter turnouts of any major country, Republicans are working overtime trying to make it harder for poor people, people of color, older people and young people to vote. Our job is to fight back and make it easier for people to vote, not harder. Our job is to bring millions of young people and working people into the political process and create a government which works for all of us, not just the 1 percent.”A pizza joint located near Stanford University is used to getting odd requests from college students attending raucous parties.
But this party turned out to be different. Very different.
Pizza My Heart received an online delivery order for two large pizzas. In the request field, the customer had entered, “Send us your cutest delivery boy. Tell me I’m pret,” which the restaurant assumed meant “pretty” but the online form had cut off the last part of the message.
>> Read more trending stories
The male pizza employee expected to encounter a group of college girls when he made the delivery. Instead, he found a house decorated for a birthday, but only one woman at home, according to Fox News.
The woman told the delivery driver that she had thrown herself a birthday party but no one else came.
She invited the driver in for cake. Hesitantly, he accepted.
The driver reports that he stayed with the woman for about an hour, and they talked and laughed the whole time.
Before he left, he hugged the woman and told her she was pretty.
Good deeds sometimes are punished, as the employee received a written warning from his manager for taking so long on the delivery order.
The employee, who has not been identified, says the time spent on the unusual birthday request was well worth it.As people around the U.S.—and the world—struggle to process the result of last Tuesday's presidential election, many are wondering what they can do to combat the negative impact that Donald Trump's rise to power is expected to have on a wide range of issues, including civil rights, women's rights and climate change.
The founders of Brooklyn product design company Breakfast, for their part, have chosen to do what they do best—design a product.
In this case, it's a simple blue ring, made from aluminum and meant to symbolize peaceful resistance and social justice, that supports major causes that chief creative officer Andrew Zolty says we need "to protect for our families, friends and children."
In other words, at $20 each, the rings aren't just a fashion statement. They're meant to raise money for key advocacy organizations. All profits from their sale, via an Indiegogo fundraising page, will go toward five nonprofits whose areas of activity are threatened by the incoming Trump administration—the American Civil Liberties Union, the Environmental Defense Fund, Everytown for Gun Safety, GLAAD and Planned Parenthood.
The political stance is a departure for Breakfast, a small independent firm that has created work for the likes of Google and Major League Baseball. The ring is also a significantly less technologically complex product than most of its previous projects, which have included a giant screen that recreated Instagram photos using spools of colored thread for Forever 21, and an Internet-connected street sign that Breakfast created as part of its own intellectual-property business.
The fundraising effort has a fixed goal of $10,000. Breakfast expects to be able to deliver the rings in January.Any part of a car that talks to the outside world is a potential opportunity for hackers.
That includes the car’s entertainment and navigation systems, preloaded music and mapping apps, tire-pressure sensors, even older entry points like a CD drive. It also includes technologies that are still in the works, like computer vision systems and technology that will allow vehicles to communicate with one another.
It will be five to 10 years — or even more — before a truly driverless car, without a steering wheel, hits the market. In the meantime, digital automobile security experts will have to solve problems that the cybersecurity industry still has not quite figured out.
“There’s still time for manufacturers to start paying attention, but we need the conversation around security to happen now,” said Marc Rogers, the principal security researcher at the cybersecurity firm CloudFlare.
Their primary challenge will be preventing hackers from getting into the heart of the car’s crucial computing system, called a CAN (or computer area network).- If you've ever wondered where world-class talent comes from, their stories don't all begin in Rome, Vienna or New York City. For some - the journey begins in downtown Detroit.
Javon Jones already won a Young Visionary Award, and now the 16-year-old from Cass Tech has achieved the pinnacle of dreams - attending Juilliard this fall to continue his passion for dance.
"It's kind of surreal at some moments. I was always kind of afraid to say that I wanted to go to Juilliard," he said.
"We are excited that he is up and on his way to doing bigger and better things," says Cass Tech's Director of Dance, Anthony Smith.
Juilliard isn't just elite. The Manhattan conservatory is considered one of the world leaders in training the best-of-the-best in performing arts. Its classes are measured in hundreds, not tens of thousands.
Into this rarefied company Javon will step, or rather, dance, straight from the D to New York City. He'll be there on a full-ride scholarship, but he's not forgetting the 3-1-3.
"I'm going to keep my will to work and the hard work," he says. "That's one thing about Detroit, that we're highly persistent and we work hard, and our work ethic is very much, move forward; keep moving forward. Nothing can knock us down, and I'm going to take that with me and I'm also going to take the flavor and the style that I get from the city."
Javon credits the dance department at Cass Tech, but he drew on a book from his English class to interpret its themes in his choreography.
"It was just a very heavy scenario situation, and it just spoke to me," says Javon. "That's when I began to choreograph the piece. From there the ball was rolling. The emotions; the movement; the connection with the breath; the connection with who I am and what I go through in life."
And for Cass Tech? This is another feather in its cap for producing such a high achiever.
"He's what we call a triple threat," says Smith. "He's gifted in music, dance and theater, but I immediately saw that this is a dancer."
"That's the greatest feeling in the world - to have your art and who you are as an individual accepted," Javon says.
And dance he will.(Newser) – A judge in Rome handed down an unusual sentence to a man convicted of hiring a child prostitute, ordering him to give the 15-year-old girl 30 books on the subject of women's dignity, reports the BBC. In addition to two years in jail, the 35-year-old man must buy the victim novels by Virginia Woolf, poems by Emily Dickinson, The Diary of Anne Frank, and other famous works. The order "suggests that the judge favored a remedy that would help the young girl to understand the real ‘damage’ that she had suffered was damage to her dignity as a woman," the newspaper Corriere della Sera wrote, via the AFP.
One author on the list, however, said it was the man who could use some feminist enlightenment. "Adolescence is not the time for reflection. What he did was much worse: an adult who, knowingly, paid for sex with a minor," said Adriana Cavarero, author of Notwithstanding Plato. The unidentified john was busted as part of a three-year probe into a pedophile ring in an upscale suburb of Rome. Teens aged 14 and 15 were lured into sex work and used the money they were paid to buy new clothes and cell phones. The mastermind was sentenced to nine years in jail in 2014. At his trial, the judge said the ring preyed on "children who got carried away with debauchery, without restraint, so they could easily earn money." (Read more Anne Frank stories.)Who are the most underrated players in the NBA?
We reached out to a number of individuals from around the league to get their thoughts on their underappreciated peers. Here’s what they said:
Eastern Conference center: “The most underrated player in the NBA is TJ McConnell from the Sixers. If you just look at his stats, they’re never going to jump out at you, but that little f***er is tough. He’s a tough kid. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, I’ll just screen this little white boy and lay him out,’ but he fights through every screen. He’s gritty and he doesn’t back down from anyone. It’s hard being a point guard in today’s NBA because you’re going against a star most nights, but he holds his own. He demands respect every single night. If you don’t respect him entering the game, you’ll respect him by the second half.”
Western Conference guard: “Wilson Chandler comes to mind. He is one of the most versatile players in the league. He can guard any position and he’s very skilled. I’ve seen him start at the two and I’ve seen him start at the four, and he’s equally effective at both positions.”
Eastern Conference forward: “I’d have to say James Johnson. He’s so versatile offensively and defensively, and I don’t think he got the credit he deserved this past year. He made a huge difference for Miami and was one of the most impactful players on the team, if not their most impactful.”
Western Conference guard: “Taj Gibson because he’s so good defensively – he can switch, guard on the perimeter and defend in the post. He is efficient on the offensive end too. And he’s very unselfish.”
Eastern Conference guard: “I’d say Gordon Hayward. He’s a quiet guy, he’s white and he played in a smaller market, so he doesn’t get the attention he deserves.”
Former NBA player: “Draymond Green because he does all the things you don’t get credit for in the box score. He makes hustle plays and he moves the ball well, making the pass that leads to a great shot. They’re a totally different team without him, as we saw last year in the playoffs.”
Western Conference forward: “Marcus Smart comes to mind immediately. That dude always competes at a high level and he makes a ton of winning plays.”
Eastern Conference guard: “Justin Holiday is definitely underrated. He’s a very good shooter and a valuable defender.”
Western Conference guard: “It may seem crazy, but I’m going with John Wall. He’s makes an impact on both ends, he is always near the top of the league is assists and he improves his scoring every year. He should’ve been mentioned more in this year’s MVP discussion.”
Eastern Conference guard: “Kentavious Caldwell-Pope is one of the most underrated guys. He’s a very good two-way player who gets overlooked.”
Western Conference forward: “Dame Lillard. Being in a small market, he doesn’t get the recognition he deserves considering the numbers he puts up. He should be a perennial All-Star.”
Eastern Conference center: “I think Tyler Johnson is really underrated. He’s so good at getting to the free-throw line and he really showed a lot of improvement shooting the ball from three-point range this season. His game took a big step forward.”
Eastern Conference guard: “Mike Conley got his payday, but he’s still underrated. He’s a winner and he’s crafty. It’s crazy that he’s never been an All-Star. He’s underrated because plays in a small market and doesn’t have a sexy game. But Mike gets the job every night on both ends of the court.”
Former NBA player: “CJ McCollum is still underrated, in my opinion. He would be a superstar if he had his own team. He definitely should’ve been an All-Star this year, but being in a small market hurts him. It hurts Damian Lillard to an extent too. Put CJ or Dame on, say, the Lakers or the Celtics and they’re superstars.”
Western Conference forward: “I think Marcus Morris is really underrated. He can play multiple positions and he went from being a role player to someone who scores the ball really well. When other players have made that leap, they got more attention. Take Chandler Parsons, for example. When Chandler made big strides, he got a ton of attention and a huge contract. Marcus hasn’t gotten the recognition or the payday that he deserves.”
Eastern Conference guard: “Brad Beal is getting more attention lately, but he’s still underrated. He’s such a good player and he should’ve been an All-Star this season. John Wall gets the majority of the attention there. And I get it, John is a superstar; I just think Brad should get more credit too.”
Eastern Conference forward: “Marc Gasol is extremely underrated. He’s not flashy or anything, so he doesn’t get a lot of love. But when you play against him, you see all of the ways he impacts a game and realize he’s very underappreciated.”A Soyuz spacecraft carrying three crew members is heading for the International Space Station after taking off from Russia's launch facility in Kazakhstan.
American astronaut Joseph Acaba and Russian cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Sergei Revin were on board the Russian rocket, which blasted off around 11 p.m. ET Monday, or 9 a.m. Tuesday at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
A live video stream on NASA TV showed the preparations for the launch. Shortly after takeoff, the crew reported that everything was OK on board.
The trio will dock with the ISS early on Thursday for a four-month stay, joining three astronauts who have been on board since December.
Russian security team members stop to take a photo as the Soyuz spacecraft is rolled out to its launch pad. (Bill Ingalls/NASA/AP)
The six will work together until July, when Oleg Kononenko of Turkmenistan, Don Pettit of the United States and Andre Kuipers of the Netherlands will head back to Earth. NASA, the Russian Federal Space Agency and the European Space Agency work together on the space station.
"Due to the facts that I will be launching on a Russian vehicle and the true international nature of the Space Station, my training has taken me to Russia, Canada, Japan and Germany," Acaba wrote on his blog.
On Friday, Acaba, Padalka and Revin completed their final inspection of the Soyuz vehicle, which was then rolled out to its launch pad on Sunday.
Soyuz rockets, which have been sending Russians into space since 1961, are now the only way crews reach the space station since the United States retired its space shuttle program in July.
An Orthodox Christian priest blesses the Soyuz rocket on Monday. (Bill Ingalls/NASA/AP)
The rockets have grown taller and have better electronics, but have basically remained the same over the decades, providing the highest number of launches of any spacecraft in the world.
On the station, the three crew members (part of the ISS's Expedition 31) worked on science experiments and cargo transfers as they awaited their new crewmates, NASA said.
Pettit conducted experiments about the effects of spaceflight on humans, the effectiveness of high-intensity exercise as a tool to guard against a loss of muscle mass and bone density in weightlessness, and how a variety of solid materials burn and extinguish in low gravity.
Meanwhile, Kuipers performed cargo operations and Kononenko performed routine maintenance on the life support systems.President Trump visited his Palm Beach, Fla., golf club on Sunday for the fifth day in a row during his Thanksgiving holiday.
He arrived at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach on Sunday morning, according to a White House press pool report.
ADVERTISEMENT
Trump has played golf with several golf legends over the past few days. On Friday, he played with Tiger Woods and Dustin Johnson, and on Saturday with Jack Nicklaus.
While Trump frequently visits his golf properties, the White House notes that he often takes meetings or does work while there. Trump infrequently acknowledges publicly that he is golfing and regularly criticized former President Obama for golfing while he was president.
Trump is staying at his Mar-a-Lago resort with his family over the holiday and will return to the White House on Sunday afternoon.An unlicensed and unqualified well driller who tapped into a pressurized aquifer in southwest Vancouver last year triggered an uncontrolled flood of water that is threatening as many as a dozen multimillion-dollar homes.
For more than six months, millions of litres of water a day have been flowing out of the ground at 7084 Beechwood St. onto public property, prompting concerns about erosion and the possibility of a sinkhole that could affect several homes.
Despite efforts by the homeowner and consultations with hydrogeologists to halt the breach, the leak has only increased in volume from 800,000 litres a day to more than two million litres.
It is now so serious that the city has issued evacuation alerts for homeowners on either side of the property and says as many as a dozen homes could be ordered evacuated.
"This is a serious situation," Vancouver city manager Sadhu Johnston said Wednesday morning. "We are quite nervous about a sinkhole."
Johnston said the incident occurred in September when the owner of the property hired a contractor, Libo Sun, "on a handshake" to build a new house.
The contractor hired Geoenergia Projects (Canada) Inc., a Port Coquitlam company, also on a handshake, to install a geothermal loop to heat the home, he said.
But according to the provincial water branch and a consulting hydrogeologist, Geoenergia wasn't qualified to do the work, and it punctured a large regional aquifer, triggering one of the largest uncontrolled artesian well spills in the province.
According to Johnston, the driller "freaked out," packed up his equipment and not only abandoned the site but also fled the country. Attempts to reach the company, which advertises it now operates in Italy, were unsuccessful.
A check of the company's provincial registration status shows its directors, Tomasso and Armando Mascetti, live in Frosinone, Italy, which is near Rome, and that the company is listed as not in good standing. Johnston also said the driller was not "licensed, bonded, insured or anything else."
The city says the builder didn't indicate on his plans he intended to install a geothermal loop. The city also doesn't require permits for such installations but says it refers builders to the provincial government for consultation to make sure they know what is underground.
Both the city and the provincial ministry responsible for water regulations have since issued orders to the homeowner, Feng Lin Liu, to fix the breach.
Johnston said Liu has been cooperative and has hired a company, B.C. Groundwater Consulting Services, to fix the problem. The company is trying to install several relief wells to control the flow before it can try shutting down the puncture.
Johnston said although Liu is responsible for the accident and the B.C. government oversees the Water Act, the city is concerned about the mounting expense.
In January, Vancouver city council was alerted to the problem when staff asked for an order declaring the leak a nuisance. That allows the city to fix the problem and charge the costs against the property if Liu were to default, Johnston said.Cris Toala Olivares/Reuters Bart Jansen poses with the "Orvillecopter," a quadcopter made out of his dead cat. Halfway through our conversation, Bart Jansen cuts me off.
"There's a dead rabbit!" he exclaims.
I ask if he's going to keep it.
"No. There's no head."
Talking to anyone else, it would seem like a bizarre exchange. But with Jansen, it makes total sense. He's the Dutch artist who made headlines a few years back after transforming his dead cat into a drone.
Now, he's gearing up for his next project: a jet-propelled badger submarine.
The man behind the unusual art is a normal-looking, 30-something Dutch man. He has kids, and fits solar-panels for a living. But in 2012, when his cat Orville got hit by a car, everything changed.
Jansen decided it would be a shame to simply bury his late feline friend, so he drew inspiration from his pet's namesake — Orville Wright, one of the Wright Brothers, the inventors of heavier-than-air flight. So Jansen gutted Orville, preserved him, and turned him into a custom quadcopter.
Here's some video footage:
The response was huge. Jansen had recruited the help of technical engineer Arjen Beltman to design and help fly his "half-cat, half-machine creation," and it was covered everywhere from Mail Online to Forbes. According to the Los Angeles Times, the unconventional drone caused "global outrage" after footage of it went viral. The "Orvillecopter," as Jansen calls it, was subsequently exhibited as the Kunstrai art festival in Amsterdam.
Bart Jansen Orvillecopter More
Cris Toala Olivares/Reuters Arjen Beltman flies the "Orvillecopter" as Bart Jansen looks on.
After that success, Jansen got more ambitious. In 2013, his next project was again using a taxidermy animal as its base — but a far larger one. Jansen asked around local farms for a suitable animal, and one eventually got back to him with news of a recently deceased candidate: An ostrich.
Arjen Beltman again offered his services as engineer and pilot — "Without Arjen there are no flying animals," Jansen told me. "I build the puppet, he does all the electronics." RC Technics also gave financial support to the project, according to a WIRED interview Jansen gave at the time. "I thought it was really funny to make fly a bird that can't," the artist said. Weighing 21 kilos, it was a far greater logistical challenge to get airborne than Orville, and required a custom-built flying mechanism.
"Getting the shape done was the most difficult part," J |
city over the weekend killed seven and injured nearly 50 more.
In an NBC interview on Monday morning, counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway dinged the American press’s “obsession with covering everything he says on Twitter and very little of what he does as president.”
The president’s activity on Twitter is hardly only an “obsession” of media outlets—in fact, it’s one of the few ways the president is actually changing how Washington works. Multiple lobbying firms in Washington, DC, have even hired new staff just to stay up all night monitoring Trump’s Twitter feed in case he targets their clients, according to a source familiar with the practice.
The current White House line on Trump’s tweets comes after months of unsuccessful attempts by Trump’s top advisers to rein in his caustic, factually challenged presence on Twitter, where Trump frequently undercuts his administration’s own legal and communications strategies.
Trump’s behavior and lashing out on Twitter has become such a hassle and burden for his senior staff that aides have brainstormed different possible strategies to curtail the political and professional damage he does online. One option considered in the White House involved having a group of lawyers review and vet President Trump’s tweets in advance, as The Wall Street Journal reported late last month, to ensure Trump wasn’t singlehandedly destroying his own administration’s case in court or elsewhere.
When asked by The Daily Beast this week if this plan had gone anywhere, a White House official simply messaged back, “LMFAO,” popular shorthand for “laughing my fucking ass off.” The floated idea to have a legal team screen Trump tweet has “not been moving forward,” according to this official with knowledge of the internal deliberations.
Asked whether his aides are still trying to get Trump’s Twitter presence under control, another exasperated White House official replied, “How do you suggest we do that exactly? This isn’t Intervention,” an apparent reference to the popular A&E reality-TV show.
Officials spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak freely.
On Monday, Trump’s tweeting habits dealt a blow to the administration's efforts to enforce a ban on immigration from six Muslim-majority nations. “I am calling it what we need and what it is, a TRAVEL BAN!” the president tweeted, directly contradicting White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s insistence that the measure is “not a travel ban.”
And just hours after Conway downplayed the relevance of president’s tweets, her husband, who was until recently in line to lead the Justice Department's civil division, laid out the consequences of those tweets for the administration’s efforts to uphold the travel ban.
“These tweets may make some ppl feel better, but they certainly won't help [the Justice Department] get 5 votes in SCOTUS, which is what actually matters. Sad,” George Conway wrote in his first tweet since 2015.
Neal Katyal, a former DOJ official now representing plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the travel ban, seemed giddy at the prospect of using the president’s own words—which have been invoked by judges who have temporarily blocked the measure—on his clients’ behalves. “Its [sic] kinda odd to have the defendant in [Hawaii v Trump] acting as our co-counsel. We don't need the help but will take it!” Katyal wrote in a tweet.
The American Civil Liberties Union, a plaintiff in the suit, wrote it “may incorporate @realDonaldTrump's tweets about the ban into our Supreme Court argument.”
The president’s habit of actively painting himself into legal and political corners with his own tweets is a habit that no one in Trump’s inner circle—however frustrated or undermined they feel—expects him to stop, or alter to any significant degree.
It has become a running joke within the Trump administration that deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ most commonly uttered phrase is, “The tweet speaks for itself,” referencing how often she has to respond to reporters inquiring about Trump’s latest Twitter outburst.
At a White House press briefing on Monday afternoon, Sanders called Twitter “a very important tool” for a president with a deep hostility towards the press. “It gives him the ability to speak directly to the people without the bias of the media filtering those communications,” Sanders said.
But in his rush to get around those media outlets’ filter, Trump has often left his own staff in the lurch.
“That’s the way he likes to communicate,” a senior Trump administration official said. “That’s how he won the presidency in his mind. He’s able to dominate media coverage, it takes little to no effort for him to create national news. But for a comms staff it’s impossible to know how to get out ahead of things.”
The political and strategic ramifications of @realDonaldTrump are also very familiar territory for veterans of Trumps’ 2016 presidential run. One Trump campaign aide recalled lining up a series of surrogate hits on a Thursday. “It was gonna be perfect, we were gonna dominate coverage over the weekend,” the ex-aide said. Then Trump launched a Friday pre-dawn Twitter tirade about former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, and suddenly practically every single press question was about his feud with Machado, which included the then Republican nominee urging his followers on Twitter to watch a nonexistent sex tape.
Nowadays, some members of the U.S. government are now in the positions of directly contradicting the president’s angry tweets. Over the weekend, after news broke of a deadly terror attack at the London Bridge, Trump took to Twitter to push for his blocked travel restrictions and “Muslim ban”—and to bash London’s mayor Sadiq Khan, who is Muslim, by taking the mayor’s words completely out of context.
Still, the acting U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom Lewis Lukens dutifully tweeted on Sunday that “I commend the strong leadership of the @MayorofLondon as he leads the city forward after this heinous attack.”
The Global Rumble
Credit to SmashWiki for results image
Credit to SmashWiki for results image
Pools Without Floats
Setting the Bar High
_______
The Genesis tournament series has remained an integral part of thecommunity since its inception in 2009. The events supported the universal growth of the community and rooted themselves as highly anticipated gatherings of talent for all iterations ofIn January of 2016, its third installment was hosted with much success, blowing open the gates for the international community and showcasing that there was much to be seen in the world ofArguably the most importanttournament to date, let’s take a look back at how big of an impact Genesis 3 had on the growing and thriving scene ofGenesis 3 hosted what would be remembered as the first truly international crew battle at amajor. Various regions of the United States had players representing them and while international players were no strangers to the main stage, both Japan and Mexico were fully represented by teams of players from their respective regions as well. For many spectators, this was their first time seeing how players like Rei “” Furukawa of Japan or Alejandro “” Martinez of Mexico performed.Through a daunting 10 crew single elimination bracket, it was ultimately the Japan Crew who came out on top of the world.This year's crew battle will use a round-robin format and is looking to be just as exciting as last year. Three teams will compete in a round robin bracket, namely Team USA, Team Japan, and the specially formed Team MexiCanEU (an amalgam of top players from Mexico, Canada, and Europe).Genesis 3 was and still remains one of the largesttournaments to date, boasting a grand total of 3,592 entrants across all three games it held events for. Due to the intense numbers they had to deal with, the Genesis 3 staff had originally intended to float the top 64 seeds inand top 32 seeds inpast the first round of pools. While this was generally agreed to be a fair decision for thecommunity, there was immediate backlash from thecommunity.The Genesis 3 team promptly made a public statement reversing their decision to floatplayers:The decision to cancel player floating proved to be a positive one for the outcome of the tournament’s brackets in terms of narrative value. Many top players were knocked into the loser’s bracket or outright eliminated early on, like Yuya “” Araki being sent into loser’s by Angel Cortes and knocked out of bracket by Anthony “” West.The idea of these being upsets set the tone for what would come to be commonly expected inGenesis 3 and onward, newer names such as Tyler "" Martins and Carrington "" Osborne rose to international relevance, proving that players couldn’t grow complacent with their skills and tactics. Those at the top were given a reminder that they needed to adapt to the ever-evolving metagame in order to maintain their stature.In reference to the minor debacle caused by the previous decision, the Genesis 4 team has publicly stated that they have no intentions of floatingplayers for now.Through all of the hard work the event organizing team had put in, Genesis 3 provided thescene with a springboard to success in 2016. The top-notch quality that the event possessed raised many Smashers' standards for the better. Many events soon followed suit with maintaining the high expectations set by the Genesis 3 team, much to the benefit of both players and viewers.Genesis is often regarded as one of the Smash community's most important event series. With everything it has brought to the scene-at-large, it isn't hard to see why.Genesis 4 is fast approaching and the Smashboards team is looking forward to covering every bit of it right here and on Twitter. Stay tuned.Protesters forced three large malls in St. Louis to close their doors on one of the busiest shopping days of the year Friday, as other protests were held nationwide to protest a grand jury's recent decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson, who shot and killed teenager Michael Brown.
The protests were organized on Twitter and other social media platforms using the hashtags #NotOneDime, #Blacklivesmatter and #Stlblackfriday, MyFox2Now.com reported.
Several stores lowered their security doors or locked entrances as at least 200 protesters sprawled onto the floor while chanting, "Stop shopping and join the movement," at the Galleria mall in Richmond Heights a few miles south of Ferguson, Missouri, where Officer Darren Wilson fatally shot Brown, who was unarmed, in August.
The action prompted authorities to close the mall for about an hour Friday afternoon, while a similar protest of about 50 people had the same effect at West County Mall in nearby Des Peres. It didn't appear that any arrests were made. Later Friday, the appearance of several dozen demonstrators led to the early closing of the Chesterfield Mall.
Small business owners told MyFox2Now.com that the protests were hurting them financially on a day they count on to make money.
Cell phone case salesman Abdullah Noman held out as long as he could, telling MyFox2Now.com, “Basically we’re losing a lot of business...I think we’re going to leave in a minute if we stay like that.”
Protests continued in Ferguson during the night leading to the arrests of 15 people for disturbing the peace and impeding flow of traffic. Two others were arrested with resisting arrest and the other with assault.
This stemmed after group of 100 protests marched down West Florissant Avenue in front of Ferguson’s police and fire departments.
The demonstrators began to chant, block traffic and stopping in front of businesses.
"I served my country. I spent four years in the Army, and I feel like that's not what I served my country for," said Ebonie Tyse, 26, of St. Louis as National Guard trucks and police cruisers roamed the street in front of her. "I served my country for justice for everyone. Not because of what color, what age, what gender or anything," she said
The protests, along with demonstrations in Chicago, New York, Seattle and northern California -- where protesters chained themselves to trains -- were among the largest in the country on Black Friday.
"We want to really let the world know that it is no longer business as usual," Chenjerai Kumanyika, an assistant professor at Clemson University in South Carolina, said at a rally at a Wal-Mart in Manchester, another St. Louis suburb.
Monday night's announcement that Wilson, who is white, wouldn't be indicted for fatally shooting Brown, who was black, prompted violent protests that resulted in about a dozen buildings and some cars being burned. Dozens of people were arrested.
The rallies have been ongoing but have grown more peaceful this week, as protesters turn their attention to disrupting commerce.
Mindy Elledge, who runs a watch kiosk at the Galleria, said it was working.
"I think people are afraid to come here," Elledge said. "With the protests going on, you never know when or where they're going to happen."
In northern California, more than a dozen people were arrested after about 125 protesters wearing T-shirts that read "Black Lives Matter" interrupted train service from Oakland to San Francisco, with some chaining themselves to trains. Dozens of people in Seattle blocked streets, and police said some protesters also apparently chained doors shut at the nearby Pacific Place shopping center.
In Chicago, about 200 people gathered near the city's popular Magnificent Mile shopping district, where Kristiana Colon, 28, called Friday "a day of awareness and engagement." She's a member of the Let Us Breathe Collective, which has been taking supplies such as gas masks to protesters in Ferguson.
"We want them to think twice before spending that dollar today," she said of shoppers. "As long as black lives are put second to materialism, there will be no peace."
Malcolm London, a leader in the Black Youth Project 100, which has been organizing Chicago protests, said the group was also trying to rally support for other issues, such as more transparency from Chicago police.
"We are not indicting a man. We are indicting a system," London told the crowd.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.A group of U.S. senators has revived an effort to require major online retailers to collect sales tax from shoppers.
The nine senators on Tuesday reintroduced legislation that would allow states to collect sales taxes -- more than 9 percent in a handful of states -- from large Internet sellers with no operations in the states collecting the taxes.
The Marketplace Fairness Act is similar to legislation that was introduced but failed to pass in the past two sessions of Congress. A version of the bill passed the Senate by a vote of 69-27 in May 2013, but the House of Representatives failed to act on it.
Lawmakers have tried for more than a decade to pass an Internet sales tax. Supporters of an online sales tax say local businesses are at a disadvantage because they have to collect sales taxes, while online retailers, in many cases, do not.
The legislation is "about supporting the jobs we have in our towns," Senator Mike Enzi, a Wyoming Republican and bill sponsor, said in a statement. "It is about the people who are our neighbors who work in our local stores."
Some e-commerce groups and anti-tax lawmakers have opposed an online sales tax. A new tax system would be difficult for online sellers to comply with, and would subject them to tax audits from jurisdictions across the U.S., critics have said.
Other critics see an online sales tax as a new cost to shoppers. Most states with sales taxes have laws requiring shoppers to calculate their own online purchases and pay sales tax to the state, but only a small percentage of people comply, and states don't actively enforce those provisions.
Currently, online retailers have to collect taxes only in states where they have a physical presence, including retail stores and warehouses. Some businesses have called on Congress to change the tax rules after a 1992 Supreme Court case prohibited states from collecting sales tax from out-of-state sellers.
The court, however, left an opening for Congress to streamline sales tax collection and allow out-of-state sales tax collection.
The Retail Industry Leaders Association, a trade group, praised the bill, saying in a statement that it would end "special tax treatment afforded to online-only retailers."
Sponsors of the sales tax bill include Senators Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat; Heidi Heitkamp, a North Dakota Democrat; Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican; Angus King, a Maine independent; Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker, both Tennessee Republicans; and Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse, both Rhode Island Democrats.Canada's first black jet fighter pilot and an air force flying instructor, Walter Peters helped in the development of the Snowbirds and counted the two years he later spent flying with the military's aerobatic team as the highlight of his long aviation career.
In the early 1960s, when at the age of 24, Mr. Peters enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force and entered pilot training, he had no role models to emulate. Without intending it, he became a trailblazer in Canadian military aviation.
"I hadn't really thought of being a pilot as a career, there weren't many black people in the air force. There were times I could sense some tension, but I was a little older than many of the other pilots and, as a result, ended up being a tutor to many of them. My mantra was always, 'You don't have to accept me, but you do have to respect me,' " he told Mount Allison University's alumni magazine.
Story continues below advertisement
Born in Litchfield, N.S., in 1937, Mr. Peters was the youngest of six children. When he was a young boy, his family moved to Saint John in search of work. "He said they [his family] had nothing, but they probably had less than nothing," said Mr. Peters's eldest daughter, Shelley Carey.
A gifted athlete, he won a scholarship to Mount Allison University, where his presence on campus proved controversial. Some of his classmates refused to room with him in residence because he was black. But, while completing his engineering degree, he earned a reputation as the fastest running back of his day. He won several awards for his skills on the football team, including rookie of the year and most valuable player.
"He was very humble, very modest, but also very proud," Ms. Carey said.
While studying at Mount Allison, he met and married Nancy, a white woman from Sackville, N.B. Being an interracial couple in the 1960s proved difficult at times, but Mr. Peters never spoke publicly about the discrimination he faced, preferring instead to pursue his goals quietly and resolutely. "You never heard a complaint from Dad about race," Ms. Carey said.
However, his graduation from flying school, he later recalled, was tainted by racist comments made by the guest presenter. "What are you doing here?" the man asked Mr. Peters. When he replied that he was graduating, the man asked him as what. Mr. Peters told him that he was graduating as a pilot. The response: "In my day … you would never had got past rear gunner," Mr. Peters recalled in a Veterans Affairs Canada Heroes Remember video.
Mr. Peters went on to have a distinguished aviation career that included becoming the Canadian Armed Forces' first human rights officer, as well as an adviser to the United Nations Security Council, offering advice on the tactical movement of troops by air. While in that position, he analyzed and briefed the council after the Soviet military shot down a Korean civilian jet in 1983.
"I remember sitting on the 32nd floor of the United Nations, allowing myself to daydream, and say: 'Boys, this is a long way from Litchfield, Nova Scotia,' " he recalled in a Veterans Affairs Canada video for a series called Heroes Remember.
Story continues below advertisement
Story continues below advertisement
Mr. Peters, who retired from the Canadian Forces with the rank of major, also played a role in the establishment of the Canadian Aviation Safety Board, which investigated Air India Flight 182 that was brought down in the Atlantic Ocean in June, 1985, by a Sikh terrorist bomb.
He also worked with Transport Canada, where he was responsible for creating and implementing safety programs for aviation.
"His life was aviation," said Stephen Blizzard, a close friend and fellow pilot. "He would tell people: You set your goals and you go ahead and do it. Don't ever say you couldn't get there because of the colour of your skin."
Mr. Peters clearly loved flying and told Veterans Affairs that his first solo flight in a Chipmunk aircraft – a two-seat, single-engine aircraft that was the standard primary trainer for the RCAF and other air forces after the Second World War – was followed by the elation of landing safely, and by a ritual he shared with his fellow air force pilots.
"You start to breathe a sigh of relief and then you get a feeling of accomplishment – 'I've done it, I've done it' – and then you taxi into the flight line and there you're met by your buddies," he said in a video. "And what your buddies do is they cut off your tie because that is the ceremonial act for soloing an aircraft and they have a big board in the mess, which is the officer's mess in this case, and they pin your tie up on the board on the day you soloed."
"He was an exemplar to everyone he came in contact with, especially minorities," Dr. Blizzard said.
Story continues below advertisement
Mr. Peters died on Feb. 24 in an Ottawa hospital after suffering a stroke. He was 76. He leaves his wife Nancy, daughters Shelley, Laura and Catherine, and five grandchildren.
Special to The Globe and MailA Department of Justice grant will be used to pursue and prosecute those involved in gun violence as well as study ways to stop the area’s cycle of shootings.
Pursue, prosecute and prevent. Those are the three areas of emphasis that will be addressed with a nearly $500,000 grant from the Department of Justice intended to stem gun violence in Seattle and the surrounding region.
In a statement announcing the award on Friday, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said money from the grant will go toward three primary efforts: helping law-enforcement agencies trace guns used in crimes; supporting efforts to prosecute gun crimes; and funding research on preventing gun violence and injuries.
The bulk of the new funds — made available under the 2001 Project Safe Neighborhood federal initiative — will go to the Puget Sound Regional Crime Gun Task Force. The multiagency task force is focused on increasing the ability of law enforcement personnel to trace shell casings and firearms used in crimes and identify shooters, according to the statement.
A U.S. Attorney’s Office spokeswoman said $50,000 will be allocated to eliminating the backlog of 5,000 recovered shell casings in Western Washington waiting to be entered into the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network (NIBIN) database.
The NIBIN, which is overseen by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), uses digital images of shell casings to link crimes involving firearms.
Emily Langlie, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, said the Seattle Police Department has caught up with its backlog of shell casings and that now all casings found at crime scenes in Seattle are being entered into the NIBIN within 48 hours. However, there are many other local agencies that can benefit from the network.
“Part of the money for the backlog is to allow multiple agencies to have the ability to enter in their crime guns and shell casings into NIBIN through a comprehensive training program that will be conducted in Seattle,” Langlie said.
Police in Seattle have responded to an increase in gun violence by beefing up the department’s gang unit, adding emphasis patrols in high-crime areas and teaming with the ATF to speed up the analysis of spent shell casings found scattered around crime scenes, according to Police Chief Kathleen O’Toole.
Money from the grant will also be used to help fund the salaries of a federal prosecutor dedicated to prosecuting gun crimes and a King County prosecutor trained to evaluate whether cases should be federally prosecuted.
In addition, nearly $40,000 will go to the Seattle Police Department to develop a plan for addressing gang violence, and $50,000 will be used to partially fund research into gun-violence prevention at Harborview Medical Center.
Staff at Harborview’s Injury Prevention & Research Center hope to work with gunshot victims in an “innovative hospital-based intervention and structured outreach program to prevent future firearm-related crime,” according to the Department of Justice.
“Research led by Harborview Injury Prevention & Research Center shows that individuals admitted to the hospital for gunshot wounds are at a significantly higher risk of being killed, arrested or reinjured with a gun in the five years following admission,” U.S. Attorney Annette L. Hayes said in a statement. “This grant not only helps law enforcement identify and prosecute those who are involved in gun crime, it works to help stop the cycle of violence by intervening with high-risk individuals.”
Dr. Monica Vavilala, director of the Injury Prevention & Research Center at Harborview, said past research shows that survivors of shootings are 20 times more likely to be shot again.
The question for researchers is how to prevent the survivors from ending up back at the hospital.
‘We’re very grateful for the opportunity to launch what we think is a really important initiative which is how best to prevent future gun crimes and future injuries from gun violence,” she said.
The research will involve a randomized controlled trial in which half the hospital’s adult survivors of gun violence will receive the usual medical care and social-work engagement, she said. The other half will receive enhanced care over six months that could address employment, housing, mental-health issues and more, she said.
“We are trying to figure out an effective strategy to decrease the morbidity that these patients have and to improve their quality and quantity of life,” Vavilala said.UnitedHealth Group, in a surprising announcement, said this morning it has revised its profit expectations for the rest of the year due to what it called a “deterioration” of its individual commercial insurance offerings on government-run exchanges under the Affordable Care Act and offered no commitment it would stay in the business beyond next year.
The nation’s largest health insurer said it was "evaluating the viability of the insurance exchange product segment," pulling back on its marketing efforts for individual exchange products for next year and “will determine during the first half of 2016 to what extent it can continue to serve the public exchange markets in 2017.” The insurer sells individual plans on public exchanges in 24 states and covers more than a half million Americans in these plans.
UnitedHealth had been among the more cautious in offering coverage to individuals on the exchanges, entering only a handful of markets in 2014, the first year such coverage became available. The company expanded for this year and only recently said it would expand its offerings in nearly a dozen more states for 2016. But this morning, it said the business has deteriorated and it expects a reduction in earnings for the fourth quarter of this year of $425 million, or 26 cents per share “driven by 2015 and 2016 exchange product pressure.”
Just last month, UnitedHealth president and chief financial officer David Wichmann touted growth for the individual commercial business, saying “we continue to expect exchanges to develop and mature over time into a strong viable growth market for us.”
But UnitedHealth and other insurers need more Americans to come into the public exchanges because the patients that are signing up for coverage are sicker, making a "higher overall risk pool," insurance executives say. It's a key reason many Americans are seeing rate increases of 10% or more across the country on public exchanges.
UnitedHealth CEO Hemsley said on a 35-minute conference call this morning that they have “identified higher levels of individuals coming in and out of the exchange system to use medical services.” Though they aren't pulling the plug on public exchange business at the moment, they said they don't yet see any data showing them situation will improve.
UnitedHealth lowered its earnings forecast for this year to $6 per share from a projection of $6.25 to $6.35 that was made just one month ago. Had they not been on the public exchanges, UnitedHealth said they'd be forecasting earnings per share of $6.40, executives said this morning.
“In recent weeks, growth expectations for individual exchange participation have tempered industrywide, co-operatives have failed, and market data has signaled higher risks and more difficulties while our own claims experience has deteriorated, so we are taking this proactive step,” Stephen Hemsley, chief executive officer of UnitedHealth Group said in a statement.
UnitedHealth remains commited to the Medicaid business for poor Americans, which is another key part of the health law. Medicaid remains a strong growth business for insurers.
“We continue to be pleased with the growth and overall performance of our company outside of the individual exchange products and look forward to strong, positive and broad based earnings growth across our enterprise in 2016,” Hemsley added.
UnitedHealth is the latest company to retreat from certain aspects of the exchange business. Humana said it was terminating plans that would result in more than 100,000 individual insured customers to switch to different plans for 2016. Aetna has also said it was leaving two markets but entering another.
UnitedHealth Group said it expects net earnings of "$7.10 to $7.30 per share in 2016" and plans to offer a more detailed outlook in December.
Also on Forbes:I’m a game designer. And I teach game design. So I have a lot invested in the idea that game design is a discipline, maybe a young discipline, one that is still defining itself, but nonetheless a legitimate, professional design discipline with established principles and techniques and hard-won knowledge to be cherished and preserved. And I believe that idea. I do believe game design is something you can study and learn and work to master.
But lately I find myself questioning design as a way of understanding where games come from and what makes them work. There are so many great games in the world that don’t reflect good design principles, or that don’t seem designed at all.
Look at Shadow of the Colossus for example. What do we, as game designers, know about videogames? Well, we know a few things, we know boss battles suck. We know jumping puzzles suck. We know you get great games by focusing on meaningful interaction and you don’t get great games from aping cinema and focusing on graphics.
So, how about a videogame that is nothing but boss battles, and each boss battle is a jumping puzzle, and the whole thing is set in a giant empty world with nothing to interact with, and a lot of the main motivation of the game was an attempt to achieve some film-inspired visual effects? Does that sound like a good recipe for creating one of the greatest videogames of all time?
Or take League of Legends. This game breaks so many rules of “good design”. It is a clone. It is over-complicated to the point of utter indecipherability. It is fussy, baroque, full of arbitrary, non-intuitive details (Last hitting? Inhibitors??). It makes no attempt to teach the player or draw them into its labyrinthian systems. If you didn’t grow up playing it you might as well not bother trying to learn. And it’s the most popular videogame in the world, and maybe the most important and the most beautiful.
Look at the AWP, the signature 1-hit-kill weapon in Counter-Strike. It’s completely unbalanced. Any sensible game designer would have rejected it. Luckily for us, Counter-Strike wasn’t made by sensible designers, it was made by unreasonable people who kept this unbalanced ingredient and evolved the rest of the game around it.
Or look at Counter-Strike surfing, one of the weirdest, most beautiful and interesting game genres of the past 10 years, which was created by players and map-makers without the help of any official game designers at all, thank you very much.
I admire good design. I respect good design. But I have to admit that many of the games I have truly loved do not seem to be the result of good design, they seem like beautiful accidents, hot messes, mistakes that worked, acts of God, or lucky, miraculous mutations.
Design implies a kind of rationality, an ability to identify clearly-defined problems and apply known techniques to solve them. But I think we overestimate the utility of our definitions and the power of our techniques. Like economists who overestimate the predictive power of their mathematical models we are overconfident about our ability to predict and explain the qualities that make great games.
I have even grown skeptical of the iconic image of the designer – smart, confident, sophisticated, stylish, informed. This image has come to represent a romantic illusion about the scope of our ability to define and solve problems.
But songs are not designed, paintings are not designed, poems are not designed.
The alternative is terrifying. That we don’t know, that we will never know, that the problems we are trying to solve are not only unsolvable but undefinable, inexpressible, beyond comprehension. That we are negotiating with trees and shouting at volcanoes. But I have come to believe that this alternative is the truth. Or, more precisely, that the truth resides somewhere in between – close enough to seduce us with faint glimpses of its profile, far enough to forever elude the grasp of our design patterns, our textbooks, our lesson plans and our clever blog posts.
I recognize the value of building an established discipline, and of crafting a shared set of principles that define game design as a profession. But, I also think that in our efforts to define and legitimize our practice as a professional discipline we sometimes forget the history we inherit, the legacy of games made by communities of players, games made by amateurs, by dilettantes, by mathematicians, mothers, scientists, gym teachers, shepherds, inventors, philosophers, eccentrics and cranks.
And in honor of this tradition I would like to suggest other verbs for us to describe where games come from, alternatives to the overconfident precision of the word “design”. Words like invent, discover, compose, write, find, grow, perform, build, support, identify, copy, re-assemble, excavate and preserve.
At the NYU Game Center we struggle with this issue daily. Our approach is to define game design broadly, as the act of making games in a way that is driven by vision, in pursuit of a creative goal, mindful of how what you make will intersect with the people who play it, of how it will intersect with the world. We teach critical literacy and the fundamental principles of solid design, but within a context that leaves space for the unknown. Game design, from this perspective, is not so much the application of rules and guidelines as it is an unruly collision of divine inspiration, hard work, and good taste.
And for my part I will continue to design games, because that’s all I know how to do. But I will attempt to do so with a renewed sense of humility before the inexplicable greatness of games that have managed to spin the silver thread of love from the wool of the world in ways that I cannot hope to understand. Clutching my rulers and my pencils to my chest, in the night, in the middle of the storm, begging for lightning.ORCHARD PARK, N.Y. (AP) — Seantrel Henderson has decided to drop plans to appeal the NFL’s four-game suspension even though his agent said the Bills right tackle was using marijuana for medicinal purposes to relieve the effects of Crohn’s disease.
The Bills announced Friday that Henderson was suspended for violating the league’s substance abuse policy.
Henderson’s agent, Brian Fettner, told The Associated Press that his client tested positive for marijuana. Fettner added it was “futile” to appeal the league’s ruling.
Henderson was diagnosed with the inflammatory bowel disease late last year and had two operations on his intestines this past offseason. Doctors removed a section of diseased tissue in January, and Henderson then had his intestines reattached in April.
Henderson declined to comment following practice Friday, two days before Buffalo opens the season at Baltimore. Jordan Mills will start at right tackle after taking over the job once Henderson was sidelined in December.
Several studies have found marijuana can be an effective treatment for Crohn’s. In New York, the state’s medical marijuana program specifically lists patients diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease as being potentially eligible to obtain medical marijuana.
Henderson previously acknowledged testing positive for the drug at the NFL combine in 2014 and said positive tests led to him being suspended several times in college.
He rejoined the team in late May and was cleared for practice last month. He won’t be eligible to practice until Oct. 3, a day after the Bills play at New England.
Henderson was Buffalo’s starting right tackle since his rookie season in 2014, when Buffalo drafted him in the seventh round out of the University of Miami.
The Bills filled Henderson’s roster spot by promoting kicker Jordan Gay from their practice squad. Gay was cut by Buffalo last month after spending the past two seasons as the team’s kickoff specialist. The Bills re-signed him this past week.It was not the heavenly respite Ronald Jared Sorensen was expecting.
“Every minute was accounted for,” Sorensen complains in Three Hours in Mormon Heaven, a new book published today. In the exposé, he chronicles a stroke he experienced in 2009 at age 73, and describes the three hours he alleges he spent in the Celestial Kingdom, the highest Mormon heaven, which he had been preparing for with great zeal all his life.
“Right away, they put me on an eternal missionary rotation. They paired me up with this guy who never stopped smiling to go preach the gospel to the dead. Forever! I mean, I served a mission for two years of my life and was glad to do it, but that doesn’t mean I want to knock on doors for all eternity,” Sorensen explained in an email interview.
His memoir claims that after he died he was met at the pearly gates not by Saint Peter, who was attending a meeting at the time, but by a former cruise director with a clipboard:
She was very welcoming, and wanted me to feel at home. She gave me Lion House Rolls and told me to take all I wanted. But she also made it clear right from the start that this was not a holiday. We were Mormons, and we needed to put our shoulders to the wheel. (p. 9)
Sorensen’s unusual experiences are in line with his religion’s beliefs, according to Yale scholar Harold Bloom, who has called Mormonism “perhaps the most work-addicted culture in religious history.” Unlike other Christian denominations, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has long put forward a more active view of heavenly life, in which the deceased assist with missionary work, learn how to become more like God, and possibly even raise children they never got to parent in this life.
“It was very exciting and wonderful to be reunited with my own parents and my older siblings who died before me,” Sorensen said, treading carefully. “I cried with joy at seeing them all again. But this whole idea of having more children after we die? That’s pretty intense. I’m not sure my wife is going to be thrilled with it when she gets to heaven, frankly. We already raised seven kids.”
Sorensen’s claims have been disputed. The LDS Church has largely stayed above the fray, its only comment being that Sorens |
Human Rights Act 1998 to a fair trial by an independent tribunal. The accused has a right to be tried by a compliant court, and there is no incentive to refrain from exercising that right because by doing so the accused does not risk incurring a more severe punishment.
125. However, section 165 itself deals only with relatively straightforward cases: the more complex situations are the subject of Court Martial rules made under section 163. Part 20 of the Armed Forces (Court Martial) Rules 2009 (S.I. 2009/2041) supplements section 165 in a number of ways. For example, it requires the court to pass a single sentence, like a CO, where the accused is convicted of two or more offences which, but for the election, the CO would have heard together.
126. Clause 14 replaces both section 165 of AFA 2006 and Part 20 of the Court Martial Rules with a new Schedule 3A to AFA 2006 (set out in Schedule 1 to the Bill), so that the relevant provisions will be all in one place. The overall effect is unchanged, with two exceptions (as to which, see paragraphs 129, as to paragraph 3 of new Schedule 3A, and 162, as to paragraph 9 of Schedule 3, below).
127. The substantive provisions of the new Schedule 3A apply where the Court Martial convicts a person of a "relevant offence" (or, in the case of paragraph 13 only, where the court acquits a person of, or makes certain other findings in relation to, an offence which would be a relevant offence if the person were convicted of it). Paragraph 1 defines a relevant offence as one that falls within any of cases A to D.
128. Under paragraph 2, an accused is convicted of a case A offence if he or she elects Court Martial trial of a charge and is convicted on that charge.
129. Under paragraph 3, an accused is convicted of a case B offence if he or she elects Court Martial trial of one charge, the Director of Service Prosecutions substitutes another, and the accused is convicted on the substituted charge. But this is so only if the substitution is one which, under the new section 130A inserted by paragraph 9 of Schedule 3 to the Bill (see paragraph 162 below), does not require the accused’s consent. Under the current rules an offence is relevant if the charge in respect of it was brought in addition to the charge on which the accused elected (which would always require the accused’s consent) or substituted for that charge (which might or might not require the accused’s consent, depending on the charge substituted). The new rule is based on the assumption that an accused will not be deterred from electing by the risk of the Director’s taking a step which cannot be taken without the accused’s consent.
130. P aragraph 4 provides for the case where an accused elects on one charge, and the CO then refers a second charge (which would otherwise have been heard separately from the first) to the Director without offering the opportunity to elect on the second charge. For example, the accused elects Court Martial trial on a charge of common assault. There is also an outstanding charge of fighting. The CO decides not to offer the accused the right to elect Court Martial trial in respect of the fighting charge, but instead refers it to the Director together with the assault charge. The accused is convicted on the fighting charge, but not on the assault charge. The conviction on the fighting charge is a conviction of a relevant offence (a case C offence). If this were not so, the accused might be deterred from electing on the assault charge by the possibility that this might prompt the CO to refer the fighting charge, and that the Court Martial might then award a more severe punishment on the fighting charge than the CO could have awarded.
131. Case D is to case C as case B is to case A. Under paragraph 5, an offence is a case D offence if the charge of the offence is substituted (without the accused’s consent) for a charge of an offence which, if the accused were convicted of it, would be a case C offence. In the example at paragraph 130 above, if the Director substituted for the fighting charge a charge of conduct prejudicial to discipline, and the accused were convicted of that offence, it would be a case D offence.
132. P aragraph 6 restricts the Court Martial’s sentencing powers in respect of a single case A or B offence. The court may not award any punishment which the CO could not have awarded if the charge on which the accused elected had been heard summarily. Paragraph 16 makes it clear that for this purpose it is irrelevant that the CO may have been promoted since the time of the election - even if, had the accused not elected, the higher rank would have meant that the CO had extended powers of punishment - and that, had the accused not elected, the CO might have applied for such powers. In other words it is to be assumed that the CO would not have had extended powers, unless such powers had already been granted when the accused elected (or the CO had them automatically, by virtue of holding at least 2-star rank).
133. Similarly, paragraph 7 prohibits the court from punishing a case C or D offence more severely than the CO could have punished the offence alleged in the charge that was referred to the Director without the accused’s being offered the opportunity to elect on it. In the examples at paragraphs 130 and 131 above, this would be the fighting charge.
134. P aragraphs 8 to 10 provide for the case where the Court Martial convicts an accused of two or more relevant offences which, had the accused not elected (or, in relation to offences within case C or D or both, had the CO not referred the charge without offering the right to elect), would have been heard summarily together. Paragraphs 6 and 7 do not apply in this case. Because the CO would have awarded a single punishment (or combination of punishments) in respect of both or all the offences proved, paragraph 9 requires the Court Martial similarly to pass a single sentence for both or all of the relevant offences. This is an exception to section 255 of AFA 2006, which would otherwise the court to pass a separate sentence for each offence. Under paragraph 9(3) and (4), the punishments awarded by the single sentence must be punishments which the CO could have awarded had the accused not elected (or, in relation to offences within case C or D or both, had the CO not referred the charge without offering the right to elect).
135. P aragraph 10 modifies several sections of AFA 2006 which differentiate between the principles applicable to the passing of individual sentences by the Court Martial and those applicable to the award of "global" punishments by a CO, so that, where paragraph 9 requires the Court Martial to pass a global sentence, it is the principles relevant to global punishments awarded by a CO that apply. Paragraph 15 similarly modifies certain sections of the Court Martial Appeals Act 1968 so that, where the Court Martial Appeal Court substitutes a different sentence for that passed by the Court Martial, the substituted sentence is also a global sentence.
136. P aragraphs 11, 13 and 14 disapply some provisions of AFA 2006 which would otherwise apply in relation to an offender convicted of a relevant offence (or, in the case of paragraph 13, where the court makes certain other findings instead of convicting the accused of a relevant offence), which are potentially disadvantageous to such a person, and which would not apply if the charge had been heard summarily.
137. P aragraph 12 makes provision in relation to the Court Martial’s power to activate a suspended sentence of service detention passed by a CO or the Summary Appeal Court. Section 194(1) prohibits a CO from activating such a sentence for more than 28 days, unless the CO has extended powers. Where the Court Martial activates such a sentence by virtue of having convicted the offender of a relevant offence, paragraph 12(2) accordingly prohibits the activation of the sentence for more than 28 days unless the CO would have had extended powers for the purpose of section 194. Paragraph 12(3) similarly prevents the Court Martial from making the activated sentence consecutive to another sentence in such a way that the aggregate of the terms is longer than that which would have been permitted by section 194(2) if the CO had heard the charge.
138. P aragraph 17 ensures that, where the Director replaces one charge with another and then substitutes a third charge for the second, for the purposes of references in the Schedule to substituted charges the third charge is treated as having been substituted for the first; and so on.
Schedule 2 – Judge advocates sitting in civilian courts
139. P aragraph 1 of Schedule 2 amends section 8 of the Senior Courts Act 1981 to provide for a "qualifying judge advocate" to be able to exercise the jurisdiction of the Crown Court in relation to any criminal cause or matter other than an appeal from a youth court, including when sitting with not more than four justices of the peace. The definition of a "qualifying judge advocate" is provided for by paragraph 5 (see note on that paragraph below).
140. P aragraph 2 amends section 73(2) of the Senior Courts Act 1981 to provide for a power for rules of court to authorise or require a qualifying judge advocate to continue with any proceedings with a court where one or more of the justices initially constituting the court has withdrawn, or is absent for any reason. Paragraph 2 also amends section 73(3) of the Senior Courts Act 1981 to provide that a qualifying judge advocate sitting as a judge of the Crown Court with justices of the peace shall preside and so that, if the members of the court are equally divided on a decision, the qualifying judge advocate shall have a second and casting vote.
141. P aragraph 3 amends section 74(1) of the Senior Courts Act 1981 by adding a qualifying judge advocate to the list of judges who, subject to the other provisions of section 74, shall sit with not less than two nor more than four justices of the peace where the Crown Court is to hear any appeal. Section 74(3) provides so that rules of court may authorise or require specified judges in certain circumstances, to enter on, or continue with, any proceedings, although the court does not comprise the justices required by subsections (1) and (2). Paragraph 3 also amends section 74(3) so that the rules of court can apply to qualifying judge advocates.
142. Section 75(1) of the Senior Courts Act 1981 provides for the allocation of cases to judges and other matters relating to the distribution of Crown Court business to be determined in accordance with directions given by or on behalf of the Lord Chief Justice with the concurrence of the Lord Chancellor. Section 75(1) is amended by paragraph 4 of the Schedule to include qualifying judge advocates in the list of judges referred to in the subsection.
143. Paragraph 5 defines "qualifying judge advocate" to mean the Judge Advocate General, or a person appointed under section 30(1)(a) or (b) of the Courts-Martial (Appeals) Act 1951 as the Vice Judge Advocate General or as an Assistant Judge Advocate General. This is inserted by paragraph 5 into section 151(1) of the Senior Courts Act 1981.
144. P aragraph 6 adds new subsection (2A) to section 66 of Courts Act 2003. The new subsection provides that a qualifying judge advocate has the powers of a justice of the peace who is a District Judge (Magistrates’ Courts) in relation to criminal causes and matters. Paragraph 6 also inserts into section 66 a definition of "qualifying judge advocate" in the same terms as the definition inserted into section 151(1) of the Senior Courts Act 1981 (see the note on paragraph 5 above).
145. P aragraphs 7 and 8 amend section 9(5) of the Criminal Justice Act 1967 to include a qualifying judge advocate in the list of judges who may sit alone to hear an application under section 9(4)(b) of that Act. An application under section 9(4)(b) is for a person to be required to attend court to give evidence (notwithstanding that the person has provided a written statement which may be admissible in evidence under section 9). However, qualifying judge advocates will only be able to hear such an application where it has been made to the Crown Court. The amendments made to section 9(5) by paragraphs 7 and 8 are alternatives; which of them has effect depends on whether amendments made to section 9(5) by the Courts Act 2003 have come into force before paragraph 1 of this Schedule is commenced. Paragraph 7 applies if the amendments to section 9(5) have come into force before the commencement of paragraph 1.
146. P aragraphs 9 and 10 amend section 9B(3) of the Juries Act 1974 to include a qualifying judge advocate in the list of judges who may determine whether a juror is to be discharged on account of physical disability. However, qualifying judge advocates will only be able to make such a determination where the juror has been summoned to attend jury service at the Crown Court. Again, paragraphs 9 and 10 contain alternative sets of amendments; which set has effect depends on the commencement of amendments made to section 9B(3) by the Courts Act 2003.
147. P aragraph 11 amends Schedule 1 to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 to include a qualifying judge advocate in the list of judges who may hear an application by a police constable to obtain access to excluded or special procedure material.
Schedule 3 – Minor amendments of service legislation
148. Section 22A of the Armed Forces Act 1991 permits a service policeman to remove to suitable accommodation a child who appears to be at risk. For this purpose "service policeman" is defined as having the same meaning as in the Armed Forces Act 1996. Paragraph 1 of Schedule 3 redefines the expression as having the same meaning as in AFA 2006.
149. Section 67 of AFA 2006 confers powers of arrest for service offences. Subsection (2)(c) allows an officer to be arrested on the order of another officer, by a person who is lawfully exercising authority on behalf of a provost officer. Paragraph 2 of the Schedule amends this provision so as to make it clear that an officer may be arrested by an officer exercising authority on behalf of a provost officer: there is no need for such an officer to order a third officer to carry out the arrest.
150. P aragraph 3 extends section 90 of AFA 2006, which permits a service policeman to enter and search certain premises for the purpose of arresting a person, so as to apply where the person is unlawfully at large and is to be arrested under section 303 of the Act.
151. Part 3 of AFA 2006 deals with powers of arrest, search and entry. It replaced Part 2 of the Armed Forces Act 2001, in which "service living accommodation" was defined as including accommodation occupied either by service personnel or by civilians to whom service law applied. In AFA 2006, however, the expression was erroneously defined so as to include only the former. Paragraph 4 of the Schedule corrects the error by including accommodation occupied by a civilian subject to service discipline, thus reverting to the position as it was before AFA 2006 came into force.
152. P aragraph 5 is explained in paragraphs 160 and 161. Section 115 of AFA 2006 (duty of commanding officer with respect to investigation of service offences) establishes a general duty on commanding officers as to the investigation of possible offences by those under their command. In particular, if a commanding officer becomes aware of an allegation or circumstances which would indicate to a reasonable person that a service offence may have been committed by someone under his command, the commanding officer must ensure that the matter is investigated appropriately or ensure that a service police force is aware of the matter.
153. Additionally, under sections 113 (commanding officer to ensure service police aware of possibility serious offence committed) and 114 (commanding officer to ensure service police aware of certain circumstances) of AFA 2006, if a commanding officer becomes aware of an allegation or circumstances which would indicate to a reasonable person that an offence listed in Schedule 2 to AFA 2006 may have been committed by someone in his command or if he becomes aware of any circumstances prescribed by regulations made under section 128 of AFA 2006 (Regulations for purposes of Part 5), he must ensure that a service police force is aware of the matter.
154. The Director of Service Prosecution is tasked under AFA 2006 with the conduct of prosecutions before service courts.
155. Section 116 (referral of case following investigation by service or civilian police) of AFA 2006 applies where the service police have investigated a possible service offence or where a civilian police force has investigated a matter and referred it to the service police.
156. Section 116(2) provides that a service policeman must refer the case to the Director of Service Prosecutions (for a decision on whether to charge etc) if he considers that there is sufficient evidence to charge:
(a) an offence listed in Schedule 2;
(b) if he is aware of any prescribed circumstances, any service offence.
157. The duty to refer relates to the most serious cases (Schedule 2 offences) and to a number of other cases in which it is considered especially important to ensure that the key decisions on prosecution are decided by the Director (the "prescribed circumstances cases").
158. Under section 116(3), if the service policeman considers that there is sufficient evidence to charge a service offence but the case is not within section 116(2), he must refer the case to the suspect’s commanding officer.
159. While it is for the service policeman to decide whether there is sufficient evidence to bring a case within section 116(2) or (3), section 116(4) provides for a duty on the service policeman to consult the Director.
160. Paragraph 5 provides for the substitution of a new subsection (4) and the insertion of a new subsection (4A) into section 116 to clarify that the duty to consult the Director is not limited to when a duty has fallen on the commanding officer under section 113 or 114 (i.e. he has actually become aware of allegations or circumstances which gave rise to such a duty), but arises by reference to the type of allegation or circumstance investigated. Under the new subsection (4), the duty to consult arises if:
a) the allegation or circumstance would indicate to a reasonable person that a Schedule 2 offence has or might have been committed, or
b) any circumstances investigated are circumstances of a description prescribed by regulations under section 128 for the purposes of section 114,
and a service policeman proposes not to refer the case to the Director under subsection (2).
161. The new subsection (4A) provides that where subsection (4) requires a service policeman to consult, the service policeman must do so as soon as reasonably practicable and before any referral of the case under subsection (3).
162. P aragraphs 6 and 9 make related amendments in respect of the powers of the Director of Service Prosecutions to change the charges against an accused who has elected Court Martial trial. At present these powers are restricted by rule 157 of the Armed Forces (Court Martial) Rules 2009 (S.I. 2009/2041). Rule 157 requires the accused’s consent before the Director can add any charge, or substitute a charge which could not be heard summarily or which the accused’s commanding officer could not have heard summarily because section 54 of the Act would have required the permission of higher authority. Rule 157 is in Part 20 of the rules, the remainder of which is concerned with the powers of the Court Martial and is replaced by the new Schedule 3A (see the note on Schedule 1 above). Consistently with the policy of incorporating the whole of Part 20 into the Act, paragraph 6 of Schedule 3 repeals the provisions of section 125 which permit the restrictions to be imposed by court rules, and paragraph 9 inserts a new section 130A which replaces rule 157. However, the new restrictions are slightly different from those currently imposed by rule 157. The accused’s consent is still required before a charge can be added, or a charge which could not be heard summarily is substituted; but the substitution of a charge within section 54(2) of the Act (namely a charge of an offence listed in Part 2 of Schedule 1 to the Act, or of an attempt to commit such an offence) will require the accused’s consent unless the original charge was also such a charge. It is irrelevant whether section 54 would in fact have precluded the commanding officer from hearing the new charge.
163. Section 129 of AFA 2006 requires a commanding officer, before hearing a charge summarily, to give the accused the opportunity of electing Court Martial trial. If the accused chooses not to elect, the summary hearing will normally begin immediately. The commanding officer may, in the course of the hearing, amend the charge, substitute another charge or bring an additional charge. In these circumstances, section 129(4) provides that the right to elect Court Martial trial must be re-offered. However, section 129(4) applies only if the charge is changed after the start of the hearing. If there is a delay between the offer of the right to elect and the start of the hearing, it appears that the commanding officer may change the charge before starting the hearing; and the legislation does not expressly require that the right to elect be re-offered before the hearing begins. Paragraph 7 of the Schedule amends section 129 so as to make it clear that the right to elect must be re-offered if the charge is changed at any time after the first offer, whether before or after the start of the hearing.
164. The commanding officer’s powers of punishment will depend on whether the commanding officer has extended powers. If the accused is subject to a suspended sentence of detention, the commanding officer’s power to activate that sentence may similarly depend on whether the commanding officer has extended powers for that purpose. AFA 2006 provides that the commanding officer has extended powers if, before the summary hearing, an application for such powers has been made to higher authority and granted. If there is a delay between the offer of the right to elect and the start of the hearing, on a literal reading it would seem that the commanding officer can obtain extended powers during that interval without re-offering the right to elect. The amendment of section 129 made by paragraph 7 of the Schedule makes it clear that, if extended powers are obtained after the right to elect has been offered, that right must be re-offered.
165. Section 130(3) of AFA 2006 ensures that the right to elect is not re-offered where the accused first elects but then consents to the charge being referred back to the commanding officer. This does not apply if the charge is amended by the commanding officer after being referred back. But, read literally, it does apply if the commanding officer adds another charge, or substitutes a new charge for the one referred back. Similarly, a literal reading would suggest that the commanding officer can obtain extended powers after the charge is referred back, even though section 130(3) does not allow the re-offer of the right to elect. Paragraph 8 of the Schedule amends section 130(3) so as to make it clear that the right to elect must also be re-offered if, after the charge is referred back, the commanding officer adds or substitutes another charge or obtains extended powers.
166. AFA 2006 provides that the commanding officer has extended powers only if such powers have been granted before the summary hearing. It follows that extended powers cannot be obtained where the charge is changed in the course of the hearing (even though section 129(4) already requires that the right to elect be re-offered if the charge is changed). Paragraphs 10, 11, 15 and 16 of the Schedule amend the relevant provisions so that, where the charge is changed in the course of the hearing, extended powers can then be obtained before re-offering the right to elect under section 129(4) and proceeding with the hearing.
167. P aragraph 12 removes the requirement for a commanding officer to have extended powers of punishment in order to award a fine of more than 14 days’ pay to an officer or warrant officer. The possession of extended powers is a procedural requirement that must be satisfied before certain punishments can be awarded summarily. The maximum fine that a commanding officer can award to a person of any rank remains 28 days’ pay.
168. P aragraph 13 amends section 153 of AFA 2006 so as to enable the summary hearing rules made under that section to make provision as to grants of extended powers and of permission to hear a charge which under section 54 may not be heard summarily without permission. For example, the rules could provide that in specified circumstances a grant of extended powers, or of permission to hear a charge, ceases to have effect.
169. P aragraphs 14, 17 and 19 amend provisions of AFA 2006 which refer to an offence "in the British Islands" so as to make it clear that they include conduct which is an offence under the law of any part of the British Islands even if it occurs outside that part.
170. Section 213 of AFA 2006 provides that certain provisions of the Powers of Criminal Courts (Sentencing) Act 2000 apply to a detention and training order made by a service court as well as one made by a civil court. The provisions thus applied do not include section 106 of the 2000 Act. Subsections (4) and (5) of that section provide for the case where an offender is subject both to a detention and training order and to a sentence of detention in a young offender institution; subsection (6) provides for the effect of a detention and training order made in the case of a person aged 18 or over (by virtue of a provision enabling a court to deal with the person in a way in which a court could have dealt with the person on a previous occasion). Paragraph 18 of the Schedule amends section 213 of AFA 2006 so that these provisions of the 2000 Act apply equally to a detention and training order made under section 211 of AFA 2006.
171. Section 270 of AFA 2006 prohibits a service court from awarding a "community punishment" (a service community order or an overseas community order) unless the offence is serious enough to warrant it. This corresponds broadly to section 148 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, which imposes a similar restriction on "community sentences" passed by civil courts in England and Wales. Section 151 of the 2003 Act makes an exception to this principle for an offender who has been fined on three or more previous occasions: in this case a civil court may pass a community sentence even if the latest offence is not itself serious enough to warrant such a sentence. Section 270(7) of AFA 2006, as enacted, applies section 151 of the 2003 Act (with modifications) to a court dealing with an offender for a service offence. However, the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 amends section 151 of the 2003 Act so as to provide separately for community orders and youth rehabilitation orders (the new form of community sentence for offenders aged under 18). A new section 150A is inserted into the 2003 Act, prohibiting a court from making a community order (but not a youth rehabilitation order) unless the offence is punishable with imprisonment or section 151 so permits. In order to keep the powers of service courts in relation to community punishments aligned with those of civil courts in relation to community sentences, the 2008 Act inserted new sections 270A and 270B into AFA 2006 (corresponding respectively to the new section 150A of the 2003 Act and section 151 of that Act as amended), and repealed section 270(7). This overlooked the fact that community punishments under AFA 2006, unlike community orders under the 2003 Act as amended, include orders made against persons aged under 18 (which, under AFA 2006, would necessarily be overseas community orders). A service court would thus be prohibited from making an overseas community order against a young offender in circumstances in which a civil court would be able to make a youth rehabilitation order. The provisions of the 2008 Act inserting the new sections 270A and 270B into AFA 2006 were therefore not brought into force. But section 270(7) cannot be left as it stands because it no longer works in conjunction with section 151 of the 2003 Act as amended. Paragraph 20 of the Schedule therefore amends section 270 of AFA 2006 so that, instead of being subject to section 151 of the 2003 Act as modified, it is subject to a new section 270A. The new section will enable a service court to award a community punishment, even if the latest offence is not serious enough to warrant it, where the offender has been fined on three or more previous occasions for offences committed since the offender reached the age of 16. The uncommenced amendments made by the 2008 Act are repealed.
172. Section 301 of AFA 2006 provides, in effect, that any period during which a person sentenced to service detention is unlawfully at large does not count towards the period of detention. The definition of a period when such a person is unlawfully at large assumes that that period will necessarily begin at a time after the sentence is passed - which is not the case if the sentence is passed in the offender’s absence. Paragraph 2 1 of the Schedule amends section 301 so as to make it clear that in these circumstances the person is unlawfully at large until taken into custody.
173. In the past the Provost Marshal of the Royal Air Force Police and some of the senior officers appointed to carry out police functions within that force were not members of the force. Section 375(5) of AFA 2006 provides for Provost Marshal and such officers to be treated for the purpose of the Act as members of the service police force within which they worked. Such appointments are no longer made. Paragraph 22 accordingly provides for the repeal of section 375(5).
174. Section 380 of AFA 2006 made provision for the Secretary of State to make transitional provision by order in connection with the coming into force of that Act. It may be necessary to make changes to provisions of the order made under section 380 by way of transitional provisions for the Bill. Paragraph 23 amends section 380 so that the power to amend the order under section 380 includes amendments in connection with the coming into force of the Bill as well as amendments in connection with the coming into force of AFA 2006.
175. Schedule 12 to the Criminal Justice Act 2003 permits a civil court to activate a suspended sentence of imprisonment where the offender is convicted of another offence committed during the operational period of the suspended sentence. Schedule 7 to AFA 2006 applies that Schedule with modifications so that, in similar circumstances, a suspended sentence of imprisonment passed by a service court can be activated by the Court Martial. But this applies only if the offender is convicted of another offence. AFA 2006 does not refer to a person as being "convicted" where a charge is found proved at a summary hearing. Section 376 provides that references to conviction in that Act include such a finding, but does not expressly apply to references in the 2003 Act as applied by AFA 2006. It may therefore be arguable that the Court Martial cannot activate a suspended sentence of imprisonment on the basis of a further offence if that offence was found proved at a summary hearing. Paragraph 24 of the Schedule amends Schedule 7 to AFA 2006 so as to make it clear that the Court Martial can do so.
Schedule 4 – Consequential amendments
176. This Schedule is given effect by clause 30. See the note on that clause.
Schedule 5 – Repeals and revocations
177. This Schedule is given effect by clause 30. See the note on that clause.
FINANCIAL EFFECTS OF THE BILL
178. Two significant new costs arise from the provisions contained in the Bill. One is in relation to the cost of independent inspections of the service police forces carried out by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary. The other is the costs incurred in defending claims, where the liabiliBy some estimates, there are over 15,000,000 cafes around the world.
Which are the best ones? We went to look them up.
Here are some of the most popular ones we’ve found.
1. La Caféothèque de Paris
Not just about atmosphere (which you can get everywhere in Paris, because it’s… Paris), La Caféothèque has an incredible collection of beans from all over the world.
2. Cafe Tortoni, Buenos Aires
Cafe Tortoni is Argentina’s oldest cafe, opened in 1858. The specialty is chocolate con churros, crunchy fried dough dipped into thick hot chocolate. And apparently they have live tango from time to time!
3. Cafe Central, Vienna
Cafe Central in Vienna is incredibly beautiful. It looks like a literal palace. It also has a lot of interesting history behind it, and it was frequented by all sorts of intellectuals throughout history – including Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and Freud.
4. Sant’Eustachio il Caffe, Rome
A cosy, relaxed sort of atmosphere.
5. Winkel 43, Amsterdam
Apparently, they have the best apple pie in Amsterdam.
6. Kaffeine, London
Very modern.
7. Toma Cafe, Madrid
8. Caffe Vita, Seattle
It’s a cliché to describe Seattle as grungy, but that’s certainly what it looks like – in the best possible sense!
9. Analog Coffee, Calgary
“Staff always friendly, decently priced, espresso and hand pour are good”
Excellent coffee and selection, friendly atmosphere and very cool atmosphere!”
10. The Coffee Academics, Hong Kong
Very warm and homey.
11. LES, Moscow
Certainly interesting to see a coffeeshop with all the signage in Russian!At the recent announcement of the AFC Asian Cup domestic media ambassadors, I sat around a table of highly-regarded football pundits in Australian media. In each of us, AFC CEO Michael Brown said he recognised a passion and a commitment to the game not expressed in other codes.
With less than 135 days to go until Australia faces Kuwait in the opener, we spoke about how we could help raise the profile of the Asian Cup and which locations needed further encouragement to get on board.
Canberra and Newcastle were implicated, to which several people said we should get down to the home of the roundabout to spread the message about the tournament. It was also suggested that the nation’s capital should consider getting behind the Asian Cup more strongly if it wanted to prove that it was worthy of an A-League team.
It struck a sensitive chord with me. Along with being born and raised in Canberra – I lived there for 26 years – I was also very much aware of the pain and heartache that Canberrans experienced when they received word their bid wasn’t successful in 2009.
To set the record straight, the bid committee, spearheaded by Ivan Slavich, the 100-odd who actively engaged in the process and the wider football community in Canberra tried their best. Media and communications manager at Capital Football, Russell Gibbs, still recalls the moment he was told the feedback from the Football Federation Australia “was as good as any bid they’d received”. At the time, they were hopeful and based on what they were told, they had every right to be.
Bolstered by more than 2000 foundation members who each pledged $200, the $2.5 million grant from the ACT government, Canberra Stadium locked in as the venue, the Australian Institute of Sport providing training facilities, the pre-sale of 10 corporate boxes, private investors and a five-year business plan from Price Waterhouse Coopers, all that was left was to prove Canberra had community support.
Told by FFA that if Canberra managed to secure more than 20,000 fans to an Australia v Kuwait friendly, it would prove there was a large enough fanbase to sustain an A-League team in the capital.
And so 20,032 fans turned up to that match, including myself. It was the biggest football crowd Canberra had ever seen. But financially, the bid fell short – raising only five, of the six-million-dollar capital FFA had asked for. People were willing to invest, they just needed something tangible. But without the guarantee of a team, investors protected their pockets.
Still, they put together their 38-page submission, which included a commitment from the ACT government that it would contribute $1 million from an existing fund for every season the Canberra team was alive and the confidence they would achieve up to 10,000 fans for each game based on research they had conducted. Throughout the entire process, the bidding team was led to believe it was in with a real chance, but perhaps it never was.
Five years on and recalling the failure, I spoke to Ivan Slavich, who said: “We were extremely disappointed that Canberra didn’t get up. We kept getting told that we were the next cab off the rank but we’re still waiting.”
Instead, North Queensland Fury and Gold Coast United were given the nod. The sheer disaster that we all saw unfold as the two sides crumbled left many of us either saying “we told you so” or “who didn’t see that one coming”? Everyone but the decision makers.
On the back of the FFA Cup fixture between South Coast Wolves and Central Coast Mariners, 5238 fans made their way to WIN Stadium to witness it. In the post-match press conference, Mariners coach Phil Moss said: “I would like to say that any bid for an A-League club from this area should be fully supported because it’s a fantastic football area.”
Formerly Wollongong Wolves, it, along with Canberra Cosmos, recorded less than impressive crowd figures during the National Soccer League. The Cosmos capitulated in 2001 after financial hardship and a struggling supporter-base, while the Wolves dissolved along with the NSL in 2004.
This marked an end to its top level football presence across Australia, leaving fans asking for more in the current A-League climate, or at the very least, a second chance to prove they were worthy.
Times have indeed changed, and we have moved into a new era of football in Australia. For as |
. Added Multiple new chest types
:
Desktop 1.0.6: Loot All, Deposit All, and Quick Stack functions added.The Uqba bin Nafi Battalion, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb’s (AQIM) branch in Tunisia, has claimed an attack today on Tunisian soldiers in the Mount Ouargha region of Kef Governorate.
The jihadist statement said that on April 6 its forces detonated an IED on Tunisian troops patrolling the area, which lies close to the borders with Algeria. The blast left two soldiers wounded, according to Uqba’s statement. The IED assault was confirmed by local media, however, Tunisian authorities downplayed the incident by saying only one soldier was wounded with non-life threatening injuries.
This IED attack only just a week after a similar incident in the Mount Chaambi region of Kasserine Governorate. That strike followed a similar pattern in that it was also targeting Tunisian soldiers patrolling in the area. The March 26 blast left one Tunisian soldier wounded according to the jihadists, which was later confirmed in the media.
Uqba bin Nafi has claimed several assaults in the area for over two years. In Dec. 2014, the jihadist group claimed two attacks on Tunisian forces in the Mount Chaambi region, posting photos from the raids days later. Just two months later, it took credit for killing four soldiers in an operation in Kasserine. In August of 2015, it killed a customs agent in Bouchebka. In the initial claim of responsibility released for the Aug. 24 strike, the jihadist group said that it ambushed a number of customs agents, “killing a group of them.” It also said that it took three weapons, identified as Steyr AUG’s in photos released from the attack.
In August 2016, it claimed a deadly ambush in the Mount Sammama area of Kasserine Governorate. That assault left three Tunisian soldiers dead and seven others wounded. A month earlier, the jihadist group claimed targeting the military with two landmines, killing one soldier in the Mount Sammama area. That claim marked the first attack since March 2016. In that strike, Tunisian border guards were targeted in another assault in Bouchebka near the border with Algeria.
Its most deadly ambush on the Tunisian military happened in the Mount Chaambi region in July 2014, an incident that left 15 soldiers dead and 20 others wounded.
While Tunisia has been relatively stable, it faces a residual jihadist threat. This is largely from the Uqba bin Nafi battalion, which continues to target Tunisian security forces. However, Tunisia also faces a threat from the Islamic State. In 2015, the small North African country saw a spate of attacks claimed by that jihadist group. This includes the terrorist attack on the Bardo Museum, an ambush on a popular beach just three months later, and then a suicide bombing in the capital Tunis in November. In March 2016, the Islamic State also claimed an assault on the Tunisian town of Ben Gardane near the border with Libya. All four strikes left a total of 93 people dead and over one hundred wounded.
Caleb Weiss is a contributor to FDD's Long War Journal.
Are you a dedicated reader of FDD's Long War Journal? Has our research benefitted you or your team over the years? Support our independent reporting and analysis today by considering a one-time or monthly donation. Thanks for reading! You can make a tax-deductible donation here.Foto: Facebook
"SAMO mi nije jasno zašto su joj smanjili terapiju?", napisala je na Facebooku Snežana Andrejev Majcan o Aleksandri Kolarić i njenoj želji da se vrati u SDP te da svi sadašnji članovi predsjedništva stranke podnesu ostavke.
To je samo jedan od ružnih komentara na račun bivše članice stranke koji dolaze od SDP-ovaca, popularno nazvanih "Bedem ljubavi" zbog njihovog nekritičkog obožavanja Zorana Milanovića i proganjanja svih koji se s njim ne slažu.
"Kravetino jebala sebe kud bi ti", piše stanoviti Djuro Mihalic, dok Božica Pintar smatra da je Aleksandra Kolarić "luda samohlepna baba". Za ostale je Aleksandra Kolarić: "kobra, kobila, bolesna krava, šuga, glupača, potrošena fufa, rafulja...".
Nije ružno pitati se što je s Kolarićkinom terapijom
Status Snežane Andrejev Majcan posebno je zanimljiv jer je ona predsjednica Savjeta za ljudska prava SDP-a u Istarskoj županiji.
"Nije ružno to što sam napisala. Aleksandra Kolarić ima pravo reći što god hoće, ali i ja imam pravo reći svoje. To što ona govori nije baš normalno. A ovo što sam ja napisala je neka vrsta sarkazma i osoba koja se smatra obrazovanom bi to trebala razumjeti", rekla je Snežana Andrejev Majcan za Index. Za sebe kaže da od SDP-a nema nikakve materijalne koristi pa se nema razloga cenzurirati.
SDP-ovcima nije baš najbolje legla ofenziva koja je nakon najavljenog odlaska Zorana Milanovića pokrenula Aleksandra Kolarić. Zahtijeva da cijelo predsjedništvo podnese ostavku, da se nju odmah vrati u stranku kao disidenticu te da joj se omogući kandidatura za predsjednicu stranke. U zanosu je uspjela zaratiti i s mirnim Toninom Piculom koji se usudio ustvrditi: "Želim da Aleksandra Kolarić svoje ideje, koje već dugo prezentira izvan SDP-a, predstavi stranci jer bolje je da se te ideje rasprave u stranci i da vidimo jesu li nam prihvatljive. U svakom slučaju, ja sam uvijek bio za inkluzivnost, a ne ekskluzivnost. Njezine ideje trebaju proći verifikaciju stranke, moramo o njima raspraviti. Naravno, postoje tijela na kojima se o tome odlučuje, ali nedopustivo mi je i strano da je netko osuđen zbog verbalnog delikta i izbačen samo zato što ima drukčije mišljenje od vodstva". U njegovim riječima Aleksandra Kolarić je pročitala da bi je Picula slao na sud partije te ga optužila da nastavlja Milanovićevu politiku.
Tekst se nastavlja ispod oglasa
Izbačena zbog protivljenja "Lex Perković"
Aleksandra Kolarić otkako su je izbacili iz SDP-a često upada u ogorčene bitke s članovima svoje bivše stranke, a na društvenim mrežama je brza na blokiranju onih koji se s njom ne slažu. Iz stranke je izbačena nakon što je objavila otvoreno pismo kojim osuđuje Zorana Milanovića zbog takozvanog "Lex Perković". U SDP-u joj to nisu oprostili i brzo su je isključili iz stranke te joj nisu dozvolili povratak u članstvo nakon isteka statutarnog roka.
Ne odustaje
Odlaskom Zorana Milanovića ponadala se da će se vratiti u stranku što je dočekano salvom uvreda iz SDP-a. Na uvrede je odgovorila statusom prepunim upitnika iz kojeg izdvajamo:
"Znate li onaj osjećaj gađenja nad licemjerima koji igraju ulogu kvasca za mržnju, podlo omogućavajući, potičući i podržavajući druge, a sami direktno pri tome ne vrijeđaju? Znate li nevjericu kad shvatite kako se neke duše hrane isključivo ponižavanjem i omalovažavanjem, te pokušajima verbalnog cipelarenja drugih ljudi? Jeste li gledali kako takav nihilistički pohod mržnje prelazi u hajku, a ona s vremenom raste kao val u oluji? Znate li ljutnju, koja vas nakraju obuzme, kad gledate kako se čovjeku nanosi zlo i nepravda? Znate li koliko je mučno i teško samo promatrati kako se križarski pohod mržnje događa? Znate li kako je biti objektom mržnje i predmet organizirane i podsticane hajke i linča od strane političke stranke? Znate li koju mučninu vam izazivaju oni koji šute o toj mržnji, a imaju mogućnost javno dignuti riječ? Znate li kako se osjeća vaša obitelj, vaše sestre, vaša ljubav, vaši prijatelji kada čitaju tu esenciju mržnje, koja tako jasno ocrtava želju da vas se uništi? Znate li kako se osjećate kada to promatrate i ujedno ste i objekt te mržnje? Znate li kako je biti predmetom hajke i verbanog zlostavljanja mjesecima
Ja znam.
Zato jer sam rekla istinu i jer tražim ispravljanje nepravde.
Ja nisam ona koja odustaje."
Zoran Milanović još nije ni otišao s mjesta predsjednika stranke, a krv se po SDP-u i izvan njega već počela prolijevati. S obzirom kakva to mišljenja imaju SDP-ovci jedni o drugima i svojim bivšim članovima te kakvim se riječima časte, nije ni čudo da su izgubili izbore.Things To Consider
Window Managers are X clients that control the frames around where graphics are drawn (what is inside a window). Linux window managers are plentiful and can be very different from what most users are used to in the mainstream computing world. Some window managers tile, some stack, and some float. Within those three different categories are even more subcategories.
This question in particular consists of all types of window managers, not to be confused with desktop environments. While some window managers can, by design, take the place of a desktop environment, many of the features normally found in a desktop environment will not be included.
Many window managers are used by those who enjoy having complete control over their computing experiences, as well as those who enjoy minimal interfaces. Many often work well on low-end systems because they do not use as many resources to run, due to the majority being minimal by design. Therefore, as they do not use many resources they are often used in distributions that target low-end hardware or power users.
For stacking only window managers, please look here.
For tiling only window managers, please look here.The focus will be on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects
A training revolution to boost the skills of 16 to 24-year-olds is to be launched by Theresa May as part of a new Modern Industrial Strategy.
She aims to shake up technical education with a £170m investment in new technical colleges for young people who do not go to university.
A new research institution will also be set up to develop technologies like electric cars and boost energy supplies in a bid to cut household bills for consumers.
The Prime Minister will launch the strategy at her first Cabinet meeting outside London, in the northwest of England on Monday, ahead of a Green Paper on Tuesday.
"Our modern industrial strategy is a critical part of our plan for post-Brexit Britain," said Mrs May ahead of the skills shake-up.
"As we leave the EU it will help us grasp the bigger prize: the chance to build that stronger, fairer Britain that stands tall in the world and is set up to succeed in the long-term.
"And it is a vital step towards building a country where prosperity is shared and there is genuine opportunity for all.
"Our action will help ensure young people develop the skills they need to do the high-paid, high-skilled jobs of the future.
"That means boosting technical education and ensuring we extend the same opportunity and respect we give university graduates to those people who pursue technical routes."
Image: A new research institution will also develop technologies like electric cars
The training shake-up will attempt to address concerns that Britain's education system is failing to teach youngsters the skills necessary for the country to compete.
A report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has revealed that England is the only country where 16 to 24-year-olds are no more literate or numerate than 55 to 64-year-olds.
"The UK has some of the best universities in the world and our schools are improving," said the Business Secretary, Greg Clark, who will launch the Green Paper.
"Yet for too long technical education for school leavers has been neglected - with large differences in skill levels between regions.
"We must improve skills and opportunities so we can close the gap between the best people, places and businesses and the rest.
"It is about making our country one of the most competitive places in the world to start and grow a business. We are inviting people throughout the UK to contribute to this work to create a high-skilled economy that works for everyone."
The £170m for overhauling technical education is to be spent on setting up institutes of technology teaching science, technology, engineering and mathematics, so-called STEM subjects.
There will also be reform of technical qualifications, a university-style application system for courses, specialist maths schools and action to tackle skills shortages.
As well as boosting skills and training, Number 10 is pledging further research and development in battery technology, energy storage and grid technology.
The OECD has also revealed that Britain currently invests just 1.7% of GDP on R&D, well below the average of 2.4%.
The Green Paper on industrial strategy - a consultation paper - will feature a call for suggestions on how to boost the UK's industrial sector.The minor coverage by Arab media and the relatively low number of participants at Sunday’s protests attest to the failure of “Naksa Day.” The Syrian regime also failed in its efforts to divert local and global public opinion away from the Syria uprising to the Palestinian “marches of return” towards the Golan border fence. At this time, “Naksa Day” on the Syrian border and in the territories was a weak imitation of “Nakba Day” events some three weeks ago. There are three main reasons for this.
Multiple Casualties 'Naksa Day': Deadly clashes on Syrian border Ynet reporters (Video) Syrian media says 14 killed, hundreds wounded after protestors attempt to storm Israeli border; protestors: We'll either die for Allah or return to our occupied land 'Naksa Day': Deadly clashes on Syrian border
The first reason is the lack of motivation and enthusiasm on the Palestinian side, which was noticeable several days ago on social networks. The calls urging people to protest were sporadic and unfocused, and did not show a significant effort by the large organizations and their leaders to excite the masses. To begin with, “Naksa Day” was meant to imitate the events of “Nakba Day,” which also wasn’t such great success, with the exception of the Majdal Shams border breach.
IDF deterrence
The Palestinians aren’t stupid. They know that this time around the IDF was better prepared. They also realized that “Naksa Day” was merely the promo meant to maintain the momentum ahead of the major events planned for September. Besides, imitation is always a weak duplicate of the original, especially when dealing with masses who must be excited again a short while after the original event and brought in from their homes to the area of confrontation with the IDF.
One of the characteristics of Arab world uprisings is that protests are spontaneous outbursts of fury that take place right at home, and the casualties are relatives or neighbors, rather than unknown persons from a distant refugee camp who arrived by bus.
The second reason is the deterrence produced by IDF reaction during “Nakba Day.” Israel’s decisive response that day and the warnings issued by senior political and military leaders in recent days minimized the hopes for another significant achievement like the Majdal Shams border breach. It also made it clear to potential protestors that they may pay a terrible price for a brief TV appearance, the first and possibly last of their lives.
The third reason is that authorities in Lebanon, Gaza, the Palestinian Authority and apparently Syria as well did everything they could to prevent mass events that could spin out of control and mix them up in a major, direct confrontation with Israel. Even Hezbollah enlisted to the cause of restraint for fear that Shiite residents of Southern Lebanon may be hurt and for fear that events my prompt a major flare-up.
Syrian fingerprints
On this front, we should also credit the diplomatic effort undertaken by Israel in advance, with the active assistance of the US Administration, the Europeans and the UN. The clarification that Israel is entitled to prevent harm to its sovereignty and citizens, and that any state or government element that allows such harm will be held legally accountable for the fatal results of such incidents, was clearly understood in neighboring states and in Damascus as well.
Yet while this was known in Damascus, Syrian officials, for considerations pertaining to regime survivability, could not pass on the opportunity to undertake a provocation on the Golan that may moderate and divert the attention of the masses at home. As they usually do in their conduct vis-à-vis Israel, the Syrians chose to use emissaries – that is, the Palestinians. Syria’s fingerprints were evident in every detail: Starting with driving the protestors to the site, through Syrian TV, which set up several broadcast points and covered the events live, and including the ambulances and medical teams deployed in advance at points of friction.
However, this time around the IDF and Israel’s other security forces were thoroughly prepared on the operational, planning, legal and intelligence fronts. The difference was mostly evident on the Syrian and Lebanese borders. IDF Northern Command officials conducted deep analysis of “Nakba Day” events and embarked on thorough preparation work weeks ago.
Creating an obstacle
The major insight was that the most important means for containing rioting masses is an obstacle that would hinder them. All obstacles can be breached, yet the minutes, hours or days it takes to do so usually make all the difference between the success and failure of the defenders. The obstacle allows defenders to break the momentum of the initial assault wave, whether we are dealing with excited masses, infiltrators, or even suicide bombers.
The obstacle also allows the IDF to channel infiltrators into what army officials refer to as the “playing field,” where forces are deployed to “contain” the incident and cope with the oncoming rush using crowd dispersal means, arms that are less lethal, or sniper fire aimed at the legs in line with predetermined rules. An obstacle also grants defenders precious time to dispatch reserve forces to points of friction that were not predicted in advance.
Near Majdal Shams, the obstacle set up in recent days proved its efficiency. The protestors failed to reach the border fence as they did on “Nakba Day.” The combination of barbed wire and trenches made progress almost impossible. Those who nonetheless attempted to move towards the border fence and ignored warnings in Arabic on the loud speaker, as well as warning shots in the air, were shot in the legs by snipers deployed at predetermined positions.
Everything was done in a controlled, level-headed manner with minimal use of live fire. Most of those shot were wounded, and those killed were apparently moving fast, thus making it difficult for snipers to hit accurately. Alternately, they may have died as result of blood loss during the lengthy evacuation process. The IDF prepared a large quantity of crowd dispersal means on the Golan which were mostly unused. Large reserve forces were also prepared but were not used.
At the time of writing this, “Naksa Day” events have not ended yet. However, even when they wind down, likely overnight, we must keep in mind that what we saw today was merely the promo ahead of what’s in store; in the future, Israel’s security forces will have to prepare for and contend with situations that are much more complicated.The jobs are part-time or full-time, pay between $15-17 an hour with a completion bonus on hand. Candidates are to have past retail experience, a knowledge of technology and of course passion for the job.
The job requests are smartly being targeted at colleges where students could surely use the extra money and who would be more familiar with the nomenclature. We’re actually a bit excited to see this as it ties in nicely with Microsoft’s own Holiday stores and kiosks that are appearing in malls across the country.
From a new job posting that was sent in to Windows Phone Central, it appears that Nokia will be hiring folks from November 12th through December 31st to work in direct retail situations in mall kiosks and shops in the US.
Nokia has done direct marketing and sales in Europe but never in the US
We’ve seen Nokia increase its sales and promotions of the Lumia line (i.e. 'Rolling Thunder') and even though some were underwhelmed by the AT&T Lumia 900 campaign, it looks like Nokia is taking matters into their own hands, bypassing and augmenting any AT&T effort.
It’s a great idea as, like Microsoft, Nokia can more effectively control the message. And if they setup these kiosks in shopping areas and malls in key positions, they could have an important impact on sales and visibility for the new Lumia 820 and Lumia 920.
Nokia has done such direct sales attempts before, mostly in Europe and the UK e.g. Westfield Mall, but we have never seen such an effort in the US.
Anyone who has been in the US during the shopping holiday season knows malls are the new “main square” in America, often packed 14 hours a day with people shopping, eating, watching movies and more. If Nokia can pull this off on a wide-scale, we’ll be impressed as there is no way HTC or Samsung would do anything remotely similar.
Update: Fan sites Nokia Innovation & The Nokia Blog inform us that Nokia has done something similar in the past with Symbian, but we're hoping for a larger impact this time
Check out the full job request below for Queens, New York. Thanks, madogmoody, for the info!
Nokia Holiday Marketing Job Opportunity- Queens Center Mall
Nokia is currently seeking motivated and outgoing candidates with previous retail sales experience and technology to promote our wireless phones beginning November 12 and ending December 31st.
Candidate must have reliable transportation and experience in Retail/Mall/Kiosk/Promotions. Must have passion for technology and be available to work from November 12 until December 31.
Compensation - This job pays from $15-$17 plus completion bonus.
Work Schedule - Part-Time or Full Time
How to apply - Please send your resume to rpol@allegisgroup.comJACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- Jacksonville Jaguars rookie Myles Jack has spent all his time at middle linebacker -- until this week.
Jack, the team's second-round pick, will play weakside linebacker in the preseason finale at Atlanta on Thursday. It's not a permanent move -- at least at this point -- but it will give the Jaguars a good look at Jack at a position that he could eventually end up playing regularly.
Jack is eager for the different look.
"It actually kind of simplifies my world a little bit more, which is cool," Jack said. "... I just kind of take it as I'm getting a better understanding of the defense. Knowing Mike and then Will, those are the two linebacker spots, so I guess learning and knowing what's going on is the biggest thing."
The Jaguars started Jack at middle linebacker so he could learn the entire defense, including play-calls, adjustments, and making sure everyone is lined up properly. He missed valuable time in the spring, though, because he was forced to sit out organized team activities due to the NFL's graduation rule. He got a brief introduction during the three-day minicamp in June but was still behind when training camp began.
Jack said the duties at weakside linebacker are similar to middle linebacker, which helps make the transition easier, especially since he'll only have three days of practice at the spot before the game. He might play the entire game, too, because it's likely that Telvin Smith will be among the starters held out -- or plays only one drive.
"I'd say the toughest part is to transition my mind because I've been playing Mike this entire time," Jack said. "It's all I've been honed in on, so now I've got to adapt and figure out the Will spot. It's not much of a difference. I've just got to open up my mind and see the bigger picture.
"I'll just try to really focus on my mental reps and watch film and watch how Telvin does the position and see his issues and how he plays and try to learn from that."
Weakside linebacker is where the 6-foot-1, 247-pound Jack could eventually end up, at least later this season, even though the long-range plan is for him to take over for middle linebacker Paul Posluszny. Sources inside the organization say the defensive coaching staff is not pleased with Smith because he gets himself out of position and that results in big plays. The two long pass plays the New York Jets hit in the preseason opener, for example, came because Smith chased a route he wasn't supposed to and left the middle of the field open.
Jack's strength is his athleticism and coverage ability -- he even lined up against USC receiver Nelson Agholor during a game while at UCLA -- and it wouldn't be surprising to see him and Posluszny on the field together in nickel defense during the regular season instead of Posluszny and Smith. That might be getting too far ahead, though, because right now the Jaguars haven't even seen Jack at weakside linebacker.
Posluszny said he believes Jack will be fine on Thursday.
"To show the coaches that he can do both is really, really cool for him," Posluszny said. "There's a lot of carry-over between the Mike and the Will. We're both off-the-ball linebackers, so there's a lot of carry-over, things he can transfer from one position to the next. He'll be able to step right in, play with a clear mind and be able to play fast.
"It's going to be an interesting challenge but he can handle it."I had the opportunity to have a chat with CLG.NA's support player, Steve 'Chauster' Chau. He is one of the worlds most famous theorycrafters and one of the most outspoken players in the competitive scene. He has been with CLG.NA throughout his professional LoL career playing many roles for the team.
NA Regionals were last week. Coming into the event, what were your expectations?
Chauster: I expected to finish top 3. I was feeling pretty confident coming into the tournament because I feel like the North American scene is among the weakest in the competitive scene right now and we had improved a good amount.
How did it compare to past events such as MLG and IPL?
Chauster: The venue was pretty amazing. The design and the ambience made it feel like it was a huge event, which for League of Legends players it was. Riot also treated all the players well and provided a night of fun at the arcade so we were all taken care of.
You beat Legion in your first round 2-1 pulling out a mass TP strategy in games 1 and 2. What was the reasoning behind this?
Chauster: Most people think it is stupid to show your strategies in the first round of the tournament. However, since the NA regionals were single elimination we could not afford to lose in the first round, so we used our strategy we crafted in Korea. The strategy is pretty simple and revolves around split pushing. After laning phase the team with the teleports just have to group up and push 1 or 2 lanes while the promote minion secretly pushes another lane.
This produces pressure on all 3 lanes. Teams will have to send at least one person to each lane to deal with the threat or lose free objectives. They will have to respond, and when that happens, my team can at any point collapse on one single point (a tower or Baron) and force an objective. You rinse and repeat this over and over and eventually you just win the game from securing free objectives
Coming into the games vs Team Dignitas, were you confident in a win? How did you think the games were going to play out?
Chauster: I was not confident because historically my team has a problem playing against Dignitas. Their playstyle somewhat counters ours and as a result we have a tougher time facing them. I thought the series was going to be close and go 2-1 to either team.
After losing 2-0 to Dignitas, what was going through your mind after that 76 minute game?
Chauster: I didn't really think about too many things other than the fact that if we lost the game versus Curse the next day we would be in deep shit. I know that if Dignitas played the game correctly, we would have had no chance to come back into the game. However, Dignitas threw the game and let us get a baron and gave us complete control of the game. However, we tossed the game back into the hands of Dignitas with horrible decision making and ultimately did not deserve to win.
What went wrong in those matches?
Chauster: The first game every lane did well except top lane, and it snowballed very hard. Originally we picked Vladmir to outscale Irelia and it is pretty much an impossibility to lose lane with jungle Shen pressure. Voyboy managed to lose lane with this and we did not have an exhaust to deal with the fed Irelia. This made team fights very hard even though we outcomped them so heavily and we just lost the game.
Second game they caught us off guard with their poke comp and we did not have a hard initiate. As a result they played it out well in the beginning but ended up giving us a chance to win the game. The biggest mistake I remember is Doublelift getting too greedy and dying in Dignitas' base when the inhibitors were up. We could have taken 2 inhibitors and snowballed the game to the end but we failed when he died randomly.
How did you feel knowing you would be facing Curse in the third place match with so much history between them and yourselves?
Chauster: I felt pretty confident because we know how Saint plays and we know that our team does very well against Curse's set of players. We were given enough information from the previous rounds of the tournament to also not run into anything unexpected so we were able to predict and prepare for most outcomes.
After winning against Curse 2-0 to secure your spot in the S2 final next month, what emotions were you going through?
Chauster: I was relieved that we did not have to go home losers. CLG has been losing popularity in recent months because of our stint in Korea and a loss at Regionals would have sealed our fate as a mediocre team that has fallen from grace. Now we are still known as one of the top teams in NA and have another chance to redeem ourselves.
If you could go back and give yourself/teammates advise coming into the regionals, what would it be?
Chauster: Suck your pride up and only play champions you know you can play. Don't waste time playing things outside of your comfort zone, chances are you will never be good enough doing it anyways.
You are now going to live in a gaming house with CLG.NA and CLG.EU to prepare for the S2 finals, will you be exclusivly scrimming each other, or do you plan to scrim other teams too?
Chauster: We plan on scrimming other teams too. Scrimming exclusively against one team has a lot of downsides.
Can we expect more crazy strategies being prepared in this time?
Chauster: Perhaps. We will see come S2 Finals.
What are your predictions for the S2 Finals?
Chauster: I don't really have many predictions because there are too many teams and any team can beat another team on any given day at the finals.
What’s the future like for CLG.NA after S2 finals are done with?
Chauster: After S2 finals are done with we will have to sit down and talk about our plans for S3. We need to solidify our roster and recruit subs in case any of us can't make events or starts underperforming. I am sure everyone will go home after S2 finals are done also for a small vacation.
Any shoutouts?
Chauster: Shoutout to CLG sponsors Razer, own3d, and XMG. You can follow me at my non-twitter at facebook/LoLChauster or come into my channel on IRC @ #chauster. Also ♥ MaggieFrom the WWE Rumor Mill: India is now #1 market for WWE
Harry Kettle FOLLOW FEATURED WRITER News 1.13K // 01 Jun 2017, 18:34 IST SHARE Share Options × Facebook Twitter Flipboard Reddit Google+ Email
The WWE are expanding their horizons
What’s the story?
As reported by 411Mania, India has supposedly overtaken the United States to become World Wrestling Entertainment’s number one market in a lot of fields. The Asian nation has been in the pro wrestling headlines as of late following Jinder Mahal’s WWE Championship triumph.
In case you didn’t know...
Over the last twelve months or so we’ve heard a lot of rumblings about India becoming one of WWE’s primary target markets. With more and more focus being put onto this, a lot of fans were almost expecting Jinder to defeat Randy Orton for the WWE Title – because it would make sense to put the belt on a superstar of Indian descent right now.
The heart of the matter
According to Wrestling Observer Newsletter, WWE has claimed that when you take all factors into account, India is now their biggest target market. This includes television viewers, YouTube views, social media viewers and more. The US are close behind in 2nd, with South Africa taking the bronze in this regard.
Also read: 5 hints that Jinder Mahal’s title run is going to last months
What’s next?
Mahal is currently preparing to defend the title against Orton at Money in the Bank, which recent reports suggesting that he could hold onto the belt all the way through until at least September. The reason for this would be because that’s when the company is heading over to India for a tour and keeping Mahal as a strong champion could possibly help to boost business.
Author’s take
It’s a bit of a joke that they’d put the title on someone just for the purpose of growing their Indian fanbase, but we can understand the logic behind it. With that being said, it’ll be interesting to see how Jinder fares over the next few weeks – with this latest shocking revelation perhaps proving just how valuable the Indian wrestling market is.
Send us news tips at fightclub@sportskeeda.com
AdvertisementJoseph Stalin is not yet dead, it would seem. The Soviet leader who was responsible for the deaths of millions over his thirty-year rule still commands worryingly high levels of admiration for a host of reasons. These findings are clear in the first-ever comparative opinion polls on the dictator in the post-Soviet countries of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Russia. The surveys, commissioned by the Carnegie Endowment in 2012, suggest de-Stalinization has not succeeded in the former Soviet Union and most post-Soviet citizens have not come to grips with their history.
Poll Findings
In Russia, support for Stalin has actually increased since the end of the Soviet Union.
There is a correlation between Stalin’s rehabilitation in Russia and the presidency of Vladimir Putin.
There is a growing level of indifference toward Stalin, especially among young people. This is especially apparent in Azerbaijan, where 39 percent of young respondents do not even know who Stalin is.
Georgians display alarmingly high levels of admiration for Stalin—45 percent of them express a positive attitude toward the former Soviet leader.
The polls are symptomatic of a case of “doublethink.” Respondents say that Stalin was both a “cruel tyrant” and a “wise leader.”
Analyzing the Results
Post-Soviet citizens are confused. The poll results are more an illustration of feelings of dependency and confusion than genuine support for a dictatorial government. Russians in particular lack alternative historical models.
Stalin is still identified strongly with victory in World War II. The memory of the defeat of Nazi Germany remains very strong in all four countries polled, especially among older citizens. Stalin is still admired as a wartime leader—even as the same people reject his acts of repression.
De-Stalinization in Russia has been half-hearted. There have been two-and-a-half attempts to engage the public in a debate on Stalin’s crimes, but only one of them, begun under Mikhail Gorbachev, had some success. Putin’s Kremlin has found the image of Stalin useful in his effort to solidify his authority.
A new generation thinks differently. Many Russian urbanites are de-Sovietized, more self-sufficient, and more critical of Russian history. Stalin is losing his power to attract or repel this segment of society.
De-Stalinization in Georgia has not run deep. The anti-Sov |
."
Focusing too much on the stark "trolley problem" risks marginalizing the study of how best to address self-driving ethics, said Noah Goodall, a scientist at the Virginia Transportation Research Council. Engineers already program cars to make moral choices, such as when they slow down and leave space after detecting a bicyclist.
"All these cars do risk management. It just doesn't look like a trolley problem," Goodall said.
Rahwan agrees with self-driving enthusiasts that freeing vehicles from human error could save many lives. But he worries that progress could be stalled without a new social compact that addresses moral trade-offs.
Current traffic laws and human behavioral norms have created "trust that this entire system functions in a way that works in our interests, which is why we're willing to fit into large pieces of metal moving at high speeds," Rahwan said.
"The problem with the new system it has a very distinctive feature: algorithms are making decisions that have very important consequences on human life," he said.In her powerful poem, “Fear of Men,” Susan DeFreitas explores the ever-evolving puzzle of gender, feminism, and family.
Susan DeFreitas performs at Jade Lounge for INK NOISE Review.
“Fear of Men”
I.
When I was young I had no fear
of men, though of dogs I did. My grandfather, a gentle man
with large hands, walked me every morning
past the beast, that explosion of barking
that broke the day, the fence that strained
to contain it. Men, as far as I knew,
were helpful. They fixed things, opened doors, jars,
and reached the canned peaches on the top shelf.
Sometimes I feared my father, true,
the way he could ignite without warning,
but this was because he was my father.
It did not occur to me it was because he was a man,
like my grandfather, who never raised his voice,
and patiently walked me to school each day
past the thing I feared.
II.
Fear of men is a learned thing.
First, you must fear boys.
Boys like cousins, always breaking
bones, always setting things on fire.
Boys tenderly holding each other’s heads down
in the snowbank, boys’ arms and legs kicking and flailing.
Boys swinging and missing, hitting and running.
One boy I knew lay in wait each morning
of sixth grade to taunt me, to run close like a firework,
whistling with menace, and dart away again.
I dreaded the new day, the way I was, whatever it was
he had singled out about me—felt like the mouse
under the couch with the cat’s eye always on me.
Looking back, I suppose you could say
maybe he liked me.
III.
Junior high in Hart was a constant effort
to keep boys from taking your clothes off.
It’s the same in many places, and it’s true:
saying no all the time makes you feel like your mother.
By the time we got to high school we were tired, and besides,
we were happy to give it up for our steady fellas,
in part because they protected us from other boys.
I’m not trying to say anything here.
Except maybe if you were Catholic, or unlucky,
you’d be stuck with him forever.
This guy who was basically your bodyguard.
Plenty of nice girls did.
IV.
I do not like this fear of men
on the street, in the park, in the parking lot
after dark. I do not like it when one approaches me
walking and I must look away.
I dislike it especially when he is black.
Because perhaps he thinks that his being black,
the fact of that, has something to do with this.
Girls, listen: Eye contact with a man of any color
can be hazardous to your health. Something in them
catches fire, then it’s your job to put it out.
And when your car is robbed, the catalytic converter lifted,
when the gunshots fire in the distance, when the bottle is broken
in the alley, when a child is forced to do
what a woman does, when a woman is,
my sweet boy children, it’s all men.
And they walk, I think, in fear of each other.
V.
My husband is a gentle man.
He produces jars of jelly from the top shelves for me,
unscrews their lids if stuck. If I asked him,
I bet he’d tie my shoes for me, the way my grandfather did.
There is no sweetness greater than his way
with children. And yet,
he lives with a beast; I’ve seen it,
watching our quiet dinners,
barking silently at the sliding glass door.
The beast wants that glass to explode ecstatically,
breaking the bone china, shattering that fussy
sugar dish. This beast believes it wants
to run the tundra and eat whatever it is fast enough
to catch, to wolf down its meat
bloody and rare. But what it’s really hungry for
(and only now am I old enough to know this)
is a wide open space on the edge of town
where it can hiss past at a safe distance
and explode gloriously against the sky,
to burn itself off and disappear.
But how can it, when I’m always right here?
VI.
I am tired of this fear of men.
I think men too are tired.
Tired of inventing acceptable excuses
to touch one another. Tired of extracting
the shrapnel of other men
from the bodies of women. Tired of the vigilance required
to protect their daughters. Tired of murders.
They are tired of being beaten up
and they are tired of doing the beating, tired of being jumped in
and tired of jumping, tired of the love they carry but dare not
speak. Someday, maybe, the beast in the brain, that beautiful animal,
will have its room to run,
and our boy babies with their lovely bodies
will no longer leave us for war.
And out in a glorious field somewhere,
those men who cannot help but break
our hearts will do so at a distance,
burning off their arsenals, singly and together,
in great, glittering explosions.
And our fathers and brothers and husbands and lovers will watch
that heroic display, maybe, the way they do the Super Bowl,
with something akin to longing,
then offer us their large hands to hold
on that long journey home.
INK NOISE Review is a reading series dedicated to bridging the various branches of the Portland, Ore. poetry scene. Follow them on Facebook.
Production and editing by Heliorana Filmworks.
Susan DeFreitas is a writer and book coach, an associate editor with Indigo Editing & Publications, and a reader for Tin House Magazine. Her work has appeared in the Utne Reader, the Nervous Breakdown, Southwestern American Literature, Fourth River, Weber—The Contemporary West, and Bayou Magazine, among other publications. Follow her on Twitter
Like this? Please share:
Tweet
PocketPARIS — Leftist firebrand Arnaud Montebourg is basing his bid for the French presidency on a simple bet: that François Hollande is so dismally weak in opinion polls a strong left-wing candidate could easily snuff out his chances of winning re-election next May.
"I ask him [Hollande] to think about his decision, to consider the facts, to take into account his historical and unprecedented weakness in the eyes of the French," Montebourg said Sunday in a speech announcing his candidacy. "Our failure in front of France has everything to do with being resigned to our fate."
It's an argument that echoes the logic behind Bernie Sanders' surprisingly successful primary campaign in the United States.
Like the Vermont senator, Montebourg, a former industry minister, sees a strain of resentment for the mainstream Left's candidate that, if anything, is more widespread in France, for Hollande, than it was in the United States, for Hillary Clinton.
But even if the diagnosis is similar on both sides of the Atlantic, the political landscapes are very different. In the United States, Sanders enjoyed sublime isolation on a left fringe of the Democratic Party empty of serious competitors, leaving him free to fight the establishment on his own. In France, Montebourg faces the opposite situation: a far-left lane already choked with eager Bernie clones, all of whom are desperate to take down Hollande.
The leftmost lane is now so clogged it will be difficult for Montebourg, or anyone, to break out ahead of Hollande.
From Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a cantankerous far-left MEP who calls Germany a "poison" for Europe; to Benoît Hamon, a rising Socialist scrapper and wealth inequality crusader; to Gérard Filoche, an über-gruff ex-Trotskyite who has carved out a niche as Hollande's most vicious left-wing critic; and others — the leftmost lane is now so clogged it will be difficult for Montebourg, or anyone, to break out ahead of Hollande.
Four months before Socialists vote to pick their presidential candidate in a primary, here is a close-up view of France's Sanders clones along with how they score on a scale of Bernie-ness, from 1 to 10. Each candidate carries his or her own banner of leftism. All want to feed off the carcass of Hollande's cautious, establishment socialism.
Arnaud Montebourg
Tall and tousle-haired, with a florid speaking style and rebellious streak, Montebourg exploded onto the political scene in 2012 when his anti-globalist current won 17 percent of the vote during a Socialist primary. His success forced Hollande to give him a cabinet seat, where he immediately created trouble for the president: As industry minister, Montebourg insulted foreign business tycoons (famously telling Arcelor-Mittal CEO Lakshmi Mittal he could "get out of France") and intervened willy-nilly in private business, single-handedly reviving France's reputation as a statist nightmare for foreign investors.
His run ended in 2014 after he was caught making a bawdy joke at Hollande's expense, and ever since Montebourg has been anxiously toeing the sidelines, casting himself as the chief of Socialist rebel backbenchers as he prepared a comeback to politics.
Now that he is officially back, things are looking tricky for Montebourg. In his Sunday speech, he ran through a litany of familiar campaign themes: Hollande's legacy of hopelessness; Germany's unfair domination of fiscal and monetary policy in the EU; the need to reassert France's voice in the bloc; and kickstarting France's industrial sector via a protectionist "Made in France" trade and investment policy.
But what he left out was arguably the key practical consideration: exactly how he will run. If Montebourg signs up as a candidate in the Socialist primary next January, he faces a serious challenge from Hamon, his former sidekick in government who also styles himself as the chief of rebels, with both standing a good chance of getting knocked out by Hollande (the president is expected to run but has not declared his candidacy).
If Montebourg runs as an independent, with or without Hollande in the race, he has a slightly better chance of making it to the run-off round against a right-wing challenger, possibly National Front chief Marine Le Pen. But the second option includes several caveats. As an independent, Montebourg would be up against Mélenchon, whose anti-German agenda is remarkably similar to his own. Having both in the race could well split the left-wing vote, bury Hollande and any other left-winger, and all but guarantee a Right-only final battle.
Asked about his choice Monday on France 2, Montebourg said: "I have no decision to take, because we don't know exactly how the primary will be organized." That excuse will hold for a while longer, with candidates facing a December 15 deadline to join the primary. Until then, Montebourg will play the clock, probe his rivals' weaknesses and hope for the best — that Hollande drops out of his own volition.
Bernie-ness score: 6 out of 10
Montebourg is a protectionist, a major critic of international finance and a big advocate of direct democracy. But he splits with Sanders on big corporations, which Montebourg defends fiercely as part of a statist, top-down vision of how the French economy should be run. Montebourg also cultivates ties with business leaders, like investment banker Matthieu Pigasse, that Sanders might denounce as corruption.
* * *
Jean-Luc Mélenchon
Twelve years older than Montebourg, Mélenchon at times seems to have been teleported from another era. His stump-thumping speeches are unapologetically Marxist in the way they embrace class struggle as a fact of life, and Mélenchon delivers them as if he were haranguing a crowd of striking miners in 1930s France.
Despite his gritty style, or perhaps because of it, Mélenchon has successfully positioned himself as France's dominant hard-left politician at a time when Hollande's Socialists are struggling to decide between their Marxist roots and a shift to social democracy. In the first round of a 2012 presidential election, Mélenchon won 11.1 percent of the vote, before rallying behind Hollande and ultimately handing him a victory.
Over the past four years Mélenchon has refashioned himself as a major scourge of Hollande, as well as France's most outspoken critic of Germany. His book "Bismarck's Herring," a nakedly anti-German screed, sold more than 37,000 copies, making it one of the year's best-selling political titles. In it, Mélenchon argues that Germany's pursuit of economic self-interest is a "poison" that has infected the rest of Europe, relegating France to the status of a second-tier nation.
But there is competition on the anti-German market. Montebourg may be less fiery, but his critique of the European Central Bank is just as wary of German influence as Mélenchon's attacks on the country's export model. Last year, Montebourg touted a bromance with former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, whose main point of convergence was resentment for austerity policies originating in Berlin.
The overlap might explain why Montebourg is hesitating on how to run. Mélenchon, who is polling above Hollande, is set on challenging the president outside the Socialist party by running as an independent far-left candidate. If Montebourg chooses the same tactic, the two men will face off in a destructive battle of leftists that would have the effect of eliminating them both, with the former stronger among younger voters and Mélenchon heavily supported by trade unionists.
Bernie-ness score: 4
If Sanders shocked some Americans by calling himself a socialist, the question for Mélenchon is: Are you a communist? Formerly a member of the Socialist party, Mélenchon shares Sanders' basic software when it comes to class struggle and income inequality. And he has explicitly tried to model some of his social media tactics to bolster his own following. But Mélenchon lacks the Vermont senator's progressive vibe and anti-authoritarian appeal.
* * *
Benoît Hamon
Once upon a time, this fresh-faced 49-year-old was Montebourg's sidekick in government. Residing two floors below the industry minister at the finance ministry, Hamon complemented his elder's "Made in France" ethos with hip advocacy for collaborative economics, as secretary of state for the social economy. In 2014, having been promoted to education minister, he followed Montebourg out of Hollande's government on a wave of disgust for its shift to supply-side economic policies — and has lived on as a rebel backbencher ever since, leading votes against the majority.
As such, Hamon became a competitor for Montebourg, and their friendship did not survive. In fact, it's turned into a low-key sniping war ever since Hamon said he would run in the Socialist primary, and Montebourg's team dismissed his candidacy as nothing to be afraid of. "Benoit will create a buzz for 48 hours; Arnaud will create a buzz for 48 weeks," a Montebourg backer whispered to the Canard Enchainé. That prompted Hamon to invite Montebourg to join his campaign as a supporter.
In terms of voter recognition Montebourg is undoubtedly the bigger fish, but Hamon has an edge: As an MP with time on his hands, he's worked much harder to win support from other elected officials, and claims to have the backing of 22 rebel backbenchers versus just nine for Montebourg. The latter's lieutenants are not impressed. At some point, they argue, Hamon should see the light and rally behind his political big brother.
Bernie-ness score: 8
Heavily focused on wealth inequality, wary of big banks and corporations, obsessed with citizen initiatives and alternative economic models, Hamon falls short of a perfect Bernie score only in one area: the enthusiasm he generates among voters.
* * *
Gérard Filoche
Burly and gruff to the point of caricature, Filoche is often a punchline of jokes on the outdatedness of French leftist politics. The former labor inspector and militant communist joined the Socialist party late in life, but lost nothing of his disdain for establishment politicians. Announcing his intention to run in the Socialist primary, he dismissed Hollande as having zero chance of winning the presidency given the depth of anger against him among traditional Green party and left-wing voters. "Even a goat would win against Hollande," he told Le Point magazine in June.
But Filoche is not to be dismissed. At 70, he is more plain-spoken and frank than his younger rivals, and there is no ambiguity about his political positioning. He is staunchly pro-union, anti-establishment and anti-capitalist. As such, he shares many traits with Sanders in the U.S. and Jeremy Corbyn of the Labour Party in Britain. Both men were dismissed as laughing stocks before they rose to prominence in their parties.
Bernie-ness score: 8.5
Filoche has in common with Sanders his white-hair, commitment to the working man and immaculate record of left-wing activism. Another shared trait: the fact that neither man has participated in a government or held executive office.
* * *
Marie-Noëlle Lienemann
Less well known than the other candidates, Lienemann is a career Socialist who has occupied a range of positions in government, from housing minister to deputy mayor and, currently, senator. Her name is sometimes cited derisively as proving that the Socialist primary consists of various "nobodies" sent to compete against Hollande and make him look good.
But it would be foolish to overlook Lienemann, who is one of the few women in the race, more qualified and tested in office than Mélenchon or Filoche, and largely in tune with the anti-Hollande feeling in the party. A backbencher rebel, she will run against Hollande by arguing that he betrayed leftist values and the voters who put him in office. Explaining her choice to run in the primary, she cited... guess who? "Everywhere in the world, globalization is starting to be rejected by the people," she told Le Monde in March. "Even in the United States. On the Right, it's the populism of Donald Trump; on the Left, it's the search for a new path with Bernie Sanders."
Bernie-ness score: 4
Lienemann may feel the Bern, but her career in government means that she lacks the ideological purity of the former Democratic candidate.New Temple University signage on the southbound side of Cecil B. Moore station. (Credit: Cherri Gregg)
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — Some might say Temple University has earned another notch on its belt, with nearly 300 people signing up to become a ‘Sugar Baby’.
More than a thousand Temple Owls are now signed up on the website SeekingArrangement.com, in hopes of finding a ‘Sugar Daddy’ or
‘Sugar Mama’.
“It’s an older person that a younger person dates for money,” said one senior on campus.
Song Proven To Help Babies And Adults Fall Asleep In Just Eight Minutes
But college students on campus are not new to the list, as Temple ranked 4th in 2015.
“It is always surprising and alarming when I hear this statistic come up, because I’m like looking around and being like ‘Who are you with these sugar daddies and sugar mamas paying for everything?'” said another student.
“I think it is hilarious,” said one male student. “I think it is so funny that that is what our school is number one at.”
And when asked if they knew any ‘Sugar Babies’ or ‘Sugar Parents’, most said they didn’t.
“I do not. I don’t know anyone.”
WATCH: Trump Gets Into Heated Exchange With CNN Reporter, Calls Them ‘Fake News’
But, there was one student who heard of a sort of arrangement:
“They were dating someone who was over 70, and they were like 20. This is a woman, and she was dating a man,” said the male student. “If people are just for the money, than I think we should investigated the financial situation that people are in.”
According to CollegeData.com, the cost for an in-state student to attend Temple University for the year, and live on-campus is $32,138 and $42,444 for all out-of-state students.
When reached for comment, a Temple University spokesman said, “We have no comment other than to marvel at how media outlets continue to give this company free advertising.”Kelly Harrison Thorp said she was working as a waitress at age 17 when Moore asked her out, allegedly telling her, “I go out with girls your age all the time,” according to a report by AL.com.
Tina Johnson told AL.com earlier this week that Moore groped her in 1991 as she was visiting his law office regarding custody paperwork for her son.
Two other women shared stories about Moore in a report published by the Post on Wednesday, saying the incidents occurred when the women worked at an Alabama mall as young adults. Gena Richardson said Moore repeatedly asked her out around the time of her 18th birthday. She initially denied his request but finally agreed to a date, but it ended in what she described as a “forceful” kiss that left her scared. The other woman, Becky Gray, said that when she was 22, Moore repeatedly pressed her for a date in a way that made her uncomfortable.Everyone handed the AFC East to the New England Patriots before the season began. The Miami Dolphins served notice Sunday that it could be more interesting than that with a 33-20 victory over the Patriots on Sunday. Our takeaways:
1. Knowshon Moreno fittingly scored the game-sealing touchdown because he was the best player on the field. His 134 yards only tell part of the story. He ran like a man possessed and broke tackles on almost every snap. Lamar Miller started and was quite active (78 yards on 15 touches), but Moreno gives this running game a much different look.
2. Cameron Wake and the Dolphins' defensive line absolutely terrorized Tom Brady throughout the second half. The Patriots gave up more sacks in the second half (four) than they gained first downs until a meaningless late drive. Brady was knocked down at least 10 times. Miami's defense took over after halftime.
3. The Dolphins won the game despite three turnovers in the first half and a B- effort from Ryan Tannehill. Consider that a good thing. Miami outscored the Patriots 23-0 in the second half because its lines dominated on both sides of the ball.
4. Offensive coordinator Bill Lazor's offense looks like a big upgrade. There were plenty of open receivers for Tannehill to throw to. Lazor comes from Philadelphia, where the running game truly leads the way.
5. Brady was on point with his short passes early, but he was not accurate whatsoever deep. He missed a number of open receivers down the field. That's how he wound up with an ugly 3.8 yards per attempt to go along with two lost fumbles.
6. Perhaps it's to be expected, but Rob Gronkowski did not look as fluid or explosive as usual in his return from surgery. He wound up with four catches for 40 yards and a score.
The latest "Around The NFL Podcast" covers the Falcons' impressive offense, RGIII's struggles and recaps all Sunday's Week 1 action.Last month came the news that Josh Duggar, now-former executive director of the Family Research Council’s lobbying arm and eldest son on the TLC reality show “19 Kids and Counting,” had apologized and said he had “acted inexcusably.” As In Touch Weekly magazine put it: “Josh Duggar was investigated for multiple sex offenses — including forcible fondling — against five minors. Some of the alleged offenses investigated were felonies.” Those minors apparently included his sisters. Duggar was around 14 years old when the reported assaults took place.
Last week, The New York Times reported that “J. Dennis Hastert, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, was paying a man to not say publicly that Mr. Hastert had sexually abused him decades ago, according to two people briefed on the evidence uncovered in an F.B.I. investigation into the payments.”
The F.B.I. announced their indictment of Hastert on Thursday, and The Times reported: “The indictment said that in 2010, the man met with Mr. Hastert several times, and that at one of those meetings Mr. Hastert agreed to pay him $3.5 million ‘in order to compensate for and conceal his prior misconduct against’ the man.”
There were quick and clamorous reactions on social media and some mainstream media about the irony and even hypocrisy of these conservative icons being caught in unseemly, counter-their-apparent-convictions circumstances.Admit it—even if your desk could be the cover shot for Organized Worker Monthly, your data is all over the place. Between desktop apps, online networks, and webapp tools, it's easy to lose track of data and duplicate tasks, simply because it's not all accessible, or it takes too much of your time to keep it all synced up and together. Conduit, an in-development program for the Linux desktop, makes it simple to link your web data, desktop files, and other information all together, then synchronize them all with a single click. Follow along as we check out how Conduit works, peek at its potential, and try out a few examples (and solicit your own clever ideas).
Getting started
If your Linux system's app-installing repository has a copy of Conduit that's at least at version 0.3.12, go ahead and install that. Otherwise, follow the links at the Conduit project page to add Conduit's PPA to your third-party sources, or grab a source package.
Advertisement
Conduit's interface is meant to make data-syncing simple, and, for the most part, it does. Simply drag and drop icons that represent your data in the "cloud" (Flickr photos, YouTube Videos, Box.net backups, etc.) or your actual, physical stuff (files, folders, iPods, data apps) into the "canvas," and start making connections. Add the "sources" of your data first, followed by all the points that will receive it. Right-click on any item in your chain to configure it, whether that means pointing to specific folders or logging into your Flickr, Box.net, or Facebook accounts from pop-up windows. Here's a look at all the syncing tools you can play with in Conduit:
Advertisement
Once you've put a few of those items together, right-click on the "group" itself (the gray box surrounding the items) to change the syncing options. You can set up two-way sync between items that support it, a "slow sync" to free up your bandwidth, and a persistent "Always up to date" mode. You can also pre-set ways to deal with files already found, deleted on one side but not the other, and whether it should even bother looking at file creation dates to determine what's "new" (good for those of us who have made a few less-than-successful backup attempts).
Not every point on your data chain is fully two-way, unfortunately. I would've really liked to have created a Mega-Omni-RSS Feed for all my social networking updates; for now, I'll have to stick with Gina's Yahoo Pipes method. There are three basic data types in Conduit, distinguished by the little blue arrows on their icons:
Advertisement
One-way sources: You can only pull data from these items. Includes RSS feeds and music/playlist data from the Rhythmbox and Banshee music managers.
Advertisement
One-way syncs: You can drop data into these places. Backpack Notes, Facebook, and (disappointingly) Google Documents included.
Two-way items: The good stuff. Most web apps (Google Calendar & Contacts, Flickr, Box.net) support this, and if you're an Evolution user, your office gets a lot bigger.
Advertisement
The big drawback to Conduit, at the moment, is a lack of automatic, background synchronization. The GUI version can keep an icon in the system tray with a "Synchronize now" option, but the real work-around is Conduit's command line functionality. Enter this into a console:
conduit-client -h
You'll get a feel for the command line options you can plug into your preferred scheduling app, or you can just set Conduit to auto-start without showing its GUI.
Advertisement
Great uses for Conduit
Conduit is far from a finished product, but it already allows some pretty nifty and simple backup and synchronization hacks. Here's a few I was able to pull off fairly easily:
LSync Calendars, Contacts, and Notes with iPod/PDA
If a Linux system can detect and mount your iPod, Palm, or other data organizer, Conduit can sync up your calendars, contacts, and notes with it, wherever you have them stored—Google, Evolution, your Backpack notes, or even downloaded files. Simply plug in your device and hook up its separate calendar/contact/note items with your data.
Advertisement
Share once, publish across sites
Conduit works exceedingly smoothly with online photo sites, and its "Always up to date" feature means you can create a "Magic Folder"—drop a photo in it, and it gets picked up and sent out to all the sites you'd normally publish to.
Advertisement
YouTube/Podcast subscriptions made easy
Whatever you listen to your podcasts or watch videos with, Conduit can automatically grab the newest additions to a YouTube channel or podcast stream and drop them in a folder (or your Box.net space, your USB drive, iPod—you get the idea).
Simple folder sync/backup
The hardcore backup addicts will swear by using rsync to mirror files on any system, but Conduit makes what you're doing understandable and simple. Create a two-way sync to have any files on a USB drive auto-magically synced to a folder when plugged in. Back up and restore your files to a Box.net space, a web or FTP server, external hard drive, or anywhere else you can normally connect from your Linux system.
Advertisement
Your ideas
There's a lot of tools sitting in Conduit's left-hand pane, just waiting for you and your clever ideas to tweak into seriously cool uses. With the prevalence of RSS feeds generated from web apps, there are bound to be at least a few great work-arounds, useful filters, and other connections to be made.
Advertisement
So, let's hear it—What syncing ideas can you put into action with Conduit? What feature would you need to see installed for Total Data Awareness? Share it all in the comments—I'll update the post with some of the best sync chains as they roll in.
Kevin Purdy, associate editor at Lifehacker, sleeps easier when his data is neatly ordered and backed up. His weekly feature, Open Sourcery, appears Fridays on Lifehacker.Actor Alan Rickman Has Died; Portrayed Snape In 'Harry Potter' Films
Enlarge this image toggle caption Charles Sykes/Invision/AP Charles Sykes/Invision/AP
British actor Alan Rickman, a veteran of dozens of films, has died at age 69. Recently, Rickman was most well-known for portraying the complicated villain Severus Snape in the films based on J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books.
"Rickman had been suffering from cancer," The Guardian reports.
Rickman appeared in an array of blockbuster films during his prolific career, from 1988's Die Hard with Bruce Willis to 2003's Love Actually and the Harry Potter films.
"There are no words to express how shocked and devastated I am to hear of Alan Rickman's death," Rowling said on Twitter today. "He was a magnificent actor & a wonderful man."
Actor Helen Mirren, who met Rickman decades ago, told NPR's Ari Shapiro that she was intimidated by him — at first.
"He played these very reserved, sometimes cold, sometimes threatening characters on the screen, but the reality of the man was incredible warmth and humor and generosity and a wicked fun," she said.
Rickman brought intelligence and humanity to a wide spectrum of roles, judiciously deploying what seemed to be a bottomless supply of frowns and smirks that endeared him to his fans. But it was his deep, rich voice that set him apart.
"That incredible voice," Mirren said. "That he could play like a sort of wonderful instrument, like a cello or something. He played his voice — he could be the most subtle of actors and he could also be quite a big actor. He could do the grandiose performances as well."
While his voice became something of a trademark, Rickman once said that he endured much criticism for it in drama school. One voice teacher, as he recalled in 2007, told Rickman that he sounded as if his voice was "coming out of the back end of a drainpipe."
Explaining his own opinion of his voice, Rickman said, "Well, it's what I'm stuck with, so it's not like I can go and get another one. And also, I don't hear what anybody else hears. So it's always a bit of a shock, you know. And it never goes away."
While he might be famous for playing villains, Rickman once told NPR that those roles are "a very small part of whatever I've done. It's like two or three parts, and they just happened to have big publicity budgets."
Rickman also directed films and theatrical works, and he acted in plays from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra to Noel Coward's Private Lives.
A former member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Rickman spoke to NPR in 2011 about his stage work in the U.S.:
"I love working in New York theater.... It is very demanding, but it's good to be in a city where you feel that theater is actually part of the life of the city. You know, London is so sprawling, and you can sometimes forget that anybody else is on a stage anywhere else. But here, it's, you know, your friends and neighbors."
Three films from the 1990s help describe Rickman's range.
In 1991, he turned in a memorable performance as the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves -- a film whose legacy these days isn't helped by Kevin Costner's hair, but which was the second-most-popular film in theaters that year.
In 1995, he appeared in director Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility, playing Colonel Brandon opposite Kate Winslet's Marianne Dashwood.
And in 1999, he showed his willingness to camp it up on-screen, when he starred with Sigourney Weaver and Tim Allen in Galaxy Quest, a film that might best be described as a sci-fi romp.For over 90 years, astronomers have tried to determine the three-dimensional shape of a galaxy accurately, just by looking at it. It sounds like a simple premise — look at an object and determine its shape, right? Apparently not.
Determining the shape and dimensions of a galaxy is a task no astronomer has been successful at, and there is a simple reason for this. Galaxies are a constantly moving, complex system of planetary bodies. They are constantly rotating around their own axis and also hurtling through space in an effort to get away from each other because of the endlessly expanding universe.
Since the dawn of time, man has looked up at the stars and wondered about them, and since we found out that galaxies existed, we have been trying to figure out their shape.
Dr Caroline Foster and her team from the University of Sydney might have solved this seemingly trivial issue with an elegant solution. They have linked the shape of a galaxy to its spin and rotation speed.
"This is the first time we've been able to reliably measure how a galaxy's shape depends on any of its other properties — in this case, its rotation speed," said Dr Caroline, who led the team.
The study was published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Galaxies come in a plethora of shapes. They can be a spiral, a helix, a ball of stars or football shaped. Studying such a diverse, random assortment of bodies in our cosmos can be cumbersome.
"I guess it's the inaccessibility that drew me to this study," Dr Foster said in an article by the Sydney morning Herald.
The complexity of this arises from the fact that you cannot look at the entire galaxy, or even a cross section of it. All you see is it’s alignment with respect to its motion through space and around its own axis.
This problem was overcome by studying individual stars within a galaxy.
The images of the galaxies the researchers already had was combined with data from the Coonabarabran-based multi-object integral field spectrograph known simply as SAMI, a device that can be used to measure the movement of stars within a galaxy.
Tracking stars within a galaxy, which wasn’t possible until the spectrograph was invented, gave the researchers the answers they needed.
The different directions in which stars move within a galaxy, when observed over time can help you find a pattern and where in the galaxy the star is placed. When you study enough stars from the same galaxy, you start uncovering the actual shape of the galaxy.
Simple physics dictates that in a galaxy that spins, one side moves towards the observer and one moves away. Finding out the direction of the stars movement will tell you if the star is travelling towards or away from you, and help establish the direction of rotation of the galaxy.
The speed at which each galaxy spins is determined by correlating the speeds of the individual stars and the direction of their motion.
"And among spiral galaxies, which have disks of stars, the faster-spinning ones have more circular disks," said team member Professor Scott Croom of the University of Sydney in a report by phys.org.
They also found out those galaxies that rotate very slowly or do not rotate at all, formed a wider range of shapes. They spread out more |
, it’s going to be a reel of parts on tape, although other ICs can be supplied in tubes. Small Batch Assembly can handle most of that, provided you meet their specs. According to the datasheet, we have an 8 pin Small Outpine package (8SO). However, the datasheet doesn’t contain any reel information. It does say, “The package drawing(s) in this data sheet may not reflect the most current specifications. For the latest package outline information go to www.maxim-ic.com/packages”, though, so a quick trip over to the Maxim homepage pulls up a link directly showing all the reel data you could want.
Turns out, our part is going to be fed to the pick-and-place with the sprockets on the top and Pin 1 in Quadrant 1. This is how we want to create the part in the module editor – using that orientation. Because of this, when we start doing layout and start rotating it left and right to figure out how to place it, we’re rotating from a standardized 0° orientation. This can be potentially different for each part. There is no “Pin 1” really for the battery holder, so you absolutely have to look it up to see how it’s oriented on the reel.
Harwin Battery Holder Tape Drawing Actual Battery Holders In Tape KiCad Pad and Paste Properties for the Harwin Battery Holder
Secondly, you have to think through whether you want solder to exist on the pads you’re creating for your custom parts. For example, with the 555 IC, we need to have solder stenciled onto each of the copper pads for our chip. However, for the battery holder, it’s designed so that the negative pole of the battery just presses directly to bare copper on the PCB – no solder should be put there. The way we take care of this is to check the list of “technical layers” associated with each pad, in the Pad Properties, for our component. If the pad should receive solder, then F.Paste should be checked. If the pad should remain clear, F.Paste should be unchecked. A checked box means the pad will be exposed through the solder paste stencil, and consequently squeegeed with solder goo during assembly. KiCad is smart enough that all PTH connections should have the F.Paste check mark cleared by default as well. If you have some strangely intricate part that is a mix of many of these, you’ll be able to better catch mistakes when we double check our gerbers later. I find going through screen after screen of metadata very tiring on my eyes and I can get lost in the details very quickly.
Small Batch Assembly suggests allowing the ground pad of the battery holder to remain exposed through the solder paste stencil, that way a small amount of solder will build up on it and allow a far more reliable mechanical connection with the battery. For production boards this is excellent advice. I am only leaving it bare here because I wanted to demonstrate a part having different paste layer properties applied to it’s pads. They also wanted to caution against putting any unmasked vias in the area where the negative body of the battery will be in physical contact with the board, to prevent short circuits.
Thirdly, when creating the footprints for your fids, this is a good spec to follow: round, surface mount pad,.020″. Under “Local Clearance and Settings” in the pad properties, set a Net Pad Clearance and Solder Mask Clearance of.040″ each. This will ensure that both the copper layer and the solder mask are kept far away from the visualization dot. Also just double check the technical layers are correctly specified: F.Mask layer checked / F.Paste layer unchecked.
Finally, I hate to say it, but you cannot rely on the supplied footprints in the KiCad libraries to be correctly oriented. They are generic footprints and packaging may differ from one manufacturer to another. Our 555 component is a prime example. The packaging drawing on Maxim’s website shows Pin 1 in Quadrant 1, but the S08E footprint within KiCad has Pin 1 in Quadrant 3. When the pick-and-place arm went to place the piece, it would be rotated 90° off. The important thing to have here is consistency. It’s very easy to go through and use a spreadsheet application to modify EVERY rotation spec, but one or two errors here and there would prove very difficult to deal with.
As an aside, this might be the most brilliant thing any engineer, draftsman or technical writer can ever put on any document, short of “Don’t Panic” in large friendly letters…
Once you’ve finished creating all the necessary footprints, you can finish up in CvPCB by assigning the footprints where they go. After you’re done, go back into EESchema and click on Edit then Import Footprint Selection to pull all the associations back into your component metadata fields. When it asks “Do you want to force all the footprint fields visibility” I always select No, but if you select Yes, then prepare for a TON of cruft to be blasted into your schematic. If you have four or five components it’s not bad at all, but even with the small amount we have in here, it can really make it cluttered.
Before Importing Footprint Properties After Importing Footprint Properties
Layout and Routing Considerations
Provided you created all your parts correctly in the module editor you should be able to twist and twiddle your parts all over your board to your hearts content, and each rotation will dutifully be recorded for you by KiCad in the background.
From Small Batch Assembly: On the topic of rotation: my workflow asks for rotations, but there is no need to sweat this; in future updates to my system, I will ease-up on my demands for rotations. At the end of the day, I make the final check on polarity and rotation based on multiple cues – only one of them is the customer’s rotation definition. If there is an ambiguity, I ask.
When you get to placing your fiducials, you want to place them in the corners of your board, as far apart from each other as possible. Ideally, you want to have a “master” fid, FID1, and then the other two sharing only the X or the Y axis with the master. I place FID1 in the bottom left corner, FID2 upper left and FID3 bottom right. FID 1 and 2 share a common Y-axis value, and FID 1 and 3 share a common X-axis value. Because we set the Net Pad and Solder Mask clearance properties, you should see no copper pour near your fids when you “Fill or Refill”. Also, it should prevent you from routing traces in that area as well.
Once you have your fids placed correctly, grab the “Origin Point” tool and click in the dead center of FID1. This isn’t strictly necessary, as all locations are relative to each other, but when I pull up the placement file later, I find it easier to see points in relation to the fiducial – meaning the distances in this case should be 1.5″ or less, rather than the distances you’ll get based on KiCad’s arbitrary origin point which is located somewhere outside the orbit of Neptune.
From Small Batch Assembly: That is a good party-line. The reality is I can deal with boards with no fiducials, but I wouldn’t want to have to build even 25 of them as it requires a manual step per-board. Final guidance is that I just need two fids in opposite corners of the board. The bare copper dot can be as small as.5mm w/ a 1mm guard area.
Generating and Proofing Gerbers
After you’re done with all the layout and routing, it’s time to spit out some gerbers, but before we do that, another global customization needs to be applied, this time in PCBNew. By default, the size of the solder paste stencil cutout will be the same as the solder mask cutout, which is bad. You want just a hairs-width smaller size on your stencil cutout over the pad to allow for little mis-alignments along the way and to ensure that you get solder paste only on copper pad. There is an extensive document published by the IPC that covers the topic of Solder Paste Stencils in minute detail, and for the mere cost of $41 you can purchase a non-printable copy of it for your review. Let me boil it all down for you: just launch PCBNew, select Dimensions from the menu and Pads Mask Clearance – set your solder paste clearance to -.003″. I grabbed that value from the Texas Instruments footnotes that appear in every datasheet they have for surface mount packaging components. For example, check out page 20 of the 74HC595 Datasheet. The truth is that this spec might be different from chip to chip, particularly as you get down into the small pitch parts like TSSOP. If you’re to the point of sending your boards to assembly houses for manufacture, I suspect you’ve been reviewing datasheets and footprint documentation all along the way. Along with pin pitch and package width, now you just have to remember to look for solder paste stencil details as well and incorporate that into your design by modifying the clearances for the pads in the Module Editor.
After setting our solder paste clearance, we’re ready to generate Gerbers. Click File then Plot and make sure all the appropriate layers are selected. I believe the Paste layers are unchecked by default so verify those. You also want to check “Use auxiliary axis as origin” before clicking “Plot”.
Now that we have the gerbers, we need to proof them, and for that we could use GerbView, which comes with KiCad, but do yourself a favor and download Gerbv instead. When you’ve pulled the gerbers into your viewer of choice, have a look around and check for this sort of stuff…
Anything that’s supposed to be a copper pad, is a copper pad.
Anything that’s a copper pad, is exposed through the solder mask.
Anything that’s a copper pad and is supposed to receive solder, is exposed in the Paste layer.
Anything that’s NOT supposed to receive solder is NOT exposed in the Paste layer.
Anything that should appear on the paste stencil is smaller than the solder mask relief that surrounds it.
The other stuff you look for in gerbers, like bad silk screen placement, unnecessary text, bad copper pours, etc
When I generated the gerbers for this, it turns out I originally had forgotten to disable the paste layer for the GND pad of the battery holder. Consequently, it was there in the gerbers. It was fairly easy to just right click on the pad in PCBNew, select “Edit Pad” and uncheck F.Paste as a technical layer.
Fiducial Placement on PCB F.Cu Layer Fiducial Layout Overview Setting Supplemental Origin Point
Your Design is the BOM
You should also check that the fiducials are clear and clean – they should appear as a single dot of copper floating in a sea of exposed FR4.
We have very pretty gerbers now but this is useless if we can’t tell the pick-n-place machine where to put it and how to rotate it for a successful placement. We do this by providing Small Batch Assembly with the BOM for our design. Unfortunately it’s not as simple as one click and done, we have to export the BOM, export the placement file, combine them, and then edit them to match the headers required by SBA. However, because we spent all that time earlier loading all metadata into our schematic, all we really have to do now is a little cutting and pasting.
To generate the BOM, go back into EESchema and click on the BOM button (up by the netlist and CvPCB buttons). Select your Output format as “List for spreadsheet import (by ref)” so that we group everything by reference designator, ie: R1, R2, R3, C1, C2, etc. Select the comma as your Field separator so we create a CSV file and add to the list your Component Location, footprint and datasheet fields and check “All existing user fields.” Click OK to generate the BOM, and note where it saved the file (should be in the same location as the rest of the project files).
Now create the placement file by going back to PCBNew clicking on File then Fabrication Outputs and selecting Modules Positions (.pos) File. With Units: inches and Files: One file per side all that’s really left is the Footprints selection, which I don’t really understand. In the module properties page, there is a setting called “Attributes”, with the settings of Normal, Normal+Insert and Virtual. If your module is set to Normal or Virtual, then it will not appear in the placement.pos file. If it’s set to Normal+Insert it will be included. Apparently, the “insert” only means “put it in the placement file” (check the KiCad manual, section 12.11 I think).
For more information on KiCad BOM Management, click here: KiCad BOM Management Part 1
With the BOM and the Placement file created, you need to combine them so that you have a single CSV file that matches the headers specified on the SBA Column Name And Extended File Definitions spec.
Here is a sample of the raw BOM output…
Here is a sample of the raw.POS output…
Here is it all swizzled together, using corrected headers…
I’ve included the final few headers as required by the Small Batch Assembly specifications and the information on those can be found through the link above.
Using these two files, you would be able to use the instant quote system at Small Batch Assembly and have them solder your components for you!
I’d like to thank Bob Coggeshall of Small Batch Assembly for the time he took to read through this documentation and provide his feedback!
Click here for the files associated with this post at the Rheingold Heavy GitHub repo.
Part 2 will focus on PCB panelization…The filmmakers behind new historical epic 'The Promise,' starring Oscar Isaac and Christian Bale, charge that Turkish interests tried to counter their film by creating a competing movie.
The two films — released just over a month apart — look remarkably similar. Both promise sweeping love stories, both boast Hollywood talent, and both are set against the massacre of Armenians in Turkey during and after World War I, a gruesome period of history that led to the creation of one of the dictionary’s most horrific terms, genocide, coined by Raphael Lemkin in the wake of World War II.
But the similarities between The Ottoman Lieutenant, which opened March 20, and The Promise, which arrives in theaters Friday, may be more than just coincidence. In fact, the filmmakers behind The Promise charge that The Ottoman Lieutenant may be part of Turkish efforts to deny that the Armenian Genocide took place.
The Promise, starring Oscar Isaac and Christian Bale and directed by Hotel Rwanda’s Terry George, is the more high-profile of the two features, having received a major marketing push in recent weeks. The project, which Open Road is distributing, was a longtime dream of the late billionaire and MGM owner Kirk Kerkorian, who personally financed the movie’s massive $100 million budget.
The Ottoman Lieutenant stars Josh Hartnett alongside rising actress Hera Hilmar, features a cameo from Ben Kingsley and was directed by Joseph Rubin, best known for such films as 1987’s The Stepfather and 1991’s Sleeping With the Enemy. Released on March 10 by New York-based Paladin, the film played 216 theaters where it collected less than $150,000 in its first weekend.
The trailers for both films appear to follow the same strategy: Both kick off in dreamy fashion in the sprawling continent-straddling and minaret-studded metropolis of Constantinople (now Istanbul), both offering plenty of iconic Turkish imagery, both taking a violent turn with the outbreak of war and both offering a sizable degree of melodrama along the way.
But, as the reviews have made clear, there is one major difference between the two films.
Whereas The Promise lays the blame for the Armenian Genocide, the systematic extermination of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians, squarely at the feet of the Ottoman government — a fact almost unanimously acknowledged by historians — The Ottoman Lieutenant offers a more revisionist viewpoint. While the film acknowledges that massacres took place, it blames rogue groups of war-ravaged soldiers, presenting the mass killings as unfortunate consequences of the hostilities and not something ordered from up top (in fact, the film's dashing protagonist, a Turkish soldier, ultimately puts his life on the line to save a group of Armenian villagers).
That revisionist interpretation is also the official position of the Turkish government, which has, for the past 100 years, vehemently denied that any such genocide took place. And so the creators of The Promise believe that The Ottoman Lieutenant was produced not only in an attempt to blunt some of the impact of their film, but they also suspect and are alleging that there may be links between the film and the hard-line government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who on April 16 won a controversial referendum granting him expanded powers. The key figures in the making of The Ottoman Lieutenant did not respond to THR’s requests for comment.
George, speaking with THR, cited the "remarkable" similarity in the style of the two films, right down to their publicity materials. Promise producer Eric Esralien echoed that observation, noting The Ottoman Lieutenant’s title treatment “looked exactly the same as ours.” He called the rival film “another alternative fact-type smokescreen” that tries to “confuse people.” Added George, “It’s not hard to see the motivation. Clearly, they had to have gotten wind of us making this film.”
Mike Medavoy, another of The Promise's producers, took it a step further at the film's New York premiere earlier this week, alleging that Bilal Erdogan, the 35-year-old son of the Turkish president, had a hand in financing The Ottoman Lieutenant. “What’s interesting to me is that they felt they needed to make this counter-political argument,” said Medavoy.
To explain The Ottoman Lieutenant’s possible connection to the Turkish government, Carla Garapedian, an associate producer on The Promise who works for the nonprofit Armenian Film Foundation, first points to a discovery by an organization called Project Save, a Massachusetts-based archive of old Armenian photos. Contacted by The Ottoman Lieutenant’s producers asking to license some images, the curator made some inquiries. "He found that the production was Turkish-financed," says Garapedian. Project Save ultimately declined to license any photos to The Ottoman Lieutenant.
Bilal Erdogan is believed to have business ties outside the film industry with Yusuf Esenkal, the founder of Eastern Sunrise Film and also a producer of The Ottoman Lieutenant. Esenkal also is a producer of Filinta, a Turkish soap opera (described by one source as “like a crude Ottoman Downton Abbey”) that aired between 2014 and 2016 and believed to be one of the most expensive series on local TV. President Erdogan and his wife are known to have visited the Filinta set, congratulating the entire production team.
Esenkal’s work often seems to downplay some of the most notorious periods of bloodshed in Turkish history. The producer's small-screen follow-up to Filinta, also produced by Eastern Sunrise Film (or ES Film as it is sometimes called) is another extravagant period series, Payitaht Abdulhamid, a biopic of Abdulhamid II, the last sultan of Turkey, which began airing in February. Historians outside of Turkey sometimes refer to Abdulhamid as the “Red Sultan,” a nickname he earned due to the well-documented massacres of hundreds of thousands of Armenians that took place during his rule in the late 19th century, a precursor to the eventual genocide that started in 1915. But in the TV show Abdulhamid is depicted as a noble leader forced to do what he must to protect the Ottoman Empire.
It’s not clear what role Esenkal may have played in shaping The Ottoman Lieutenant. He didn’t respond to THR’s queries, nor did others in the creative team, including the U.S.-based producer Stephen Brown (U.S. Marshals, The Devil’s Advocate). Reps for director Rubin explained that he had a “nondisparagement clause” in his contract and wasn’t doing any press for the film.
The only person who did respond to THR was Ron Bareham, the film’s line producer, who said he wasn’t convinced The Ottoman Lieutenant was produced because of The Promise. “There was talk about [The Promise] when we were filming, but this film was started years before,” he says. “ As far as I know, the gestation period was six to eight years.” U.K.-based Bareham, who was brought on at the last moment to replace a previous line producer who left the weekend before production was to have started, admitted that he was mostly unaware of the history — and financing — behind The Ottoman Lieutenant.
George does acknowledge that “[The Ottoman Lieutenant] started shooting, from what I’ve read, before us.”
But there was definitely jockeying for release dates between the two films.
Initially, when it looked as if The Promise would be getting a December 2016 release, it was announced that The Ottoman Lieutenant would be given an Oscar-qualifying run that same month. When it was then officially announced that The Promise would be released April 21, The Ottoman Lieutenant’s U.S. launch was pushed to March 10. The jostling has led to claims from several online commentators that producers have simply been trying to “confuse” U.S. cinemagoers. The Ottoman Lieutenant’s domestic distributor, Paladin Pictures, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
If The Ottoman Lieutenant was, in fact, a Turkish government-funded piece of cinematic propaganda designed to counter The Promise, it didn’t have much impact at the box office, where it grossed less than $250,000 in its U.S. run.
The Promise is opening in more than 2,000 locations in an attempt reach more hearts and minds, but it, too, appears to be heading into a box-office wall, with tracking predicting an opening weekend of around $4 million. (The producers of The Promise say that profits from the film will go to charity).
But while the existence of two dueling movies might suggest a debate still exists over whether the Armenian Genocide took place, Bale, attending The Promise’s New York premiere, put it simply. “There’s no debate. I really hope this helps, not to fuel more hostilities and accusations, but it does seem to me with the research and knowledge. there really is no question about this happening and it being a genocide.”
Ashley Lee contributed to this reportOnce again, I will just let the headlines and excerpts tell the story:
Trump Is Testing The Norms of Objectivity in Journalism
“If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him? Because if you believe all of those things, you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century, if not longer, and approach it in a way you’ve never approached anything in your career. If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, nonopinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable. But the question that everyone is grappling with is: Do normal standards apply? And if they don’t, what should take their place? …”
The Hillary Clinton email story is out of control
“JUDGING BY the amount of time NBC’s Matt Lauer spent pressing Hillary Clinton on her emails during Wednesday’s national security presidential forum, one would think that her homebrew server was one of the most important issues facing the country this election. It is not. There are a thousand other substantive issues — from China’s aggressive moves in the South China Sea to National Security Agency intelligence-gathering to military spending — that would have revealed more about what the candidates know and how they would govern. Instead, these did not even get mentioned in the first of 5½ precious prime-time hours the two candidates will share before Election Day, while emails took up a third of Ms. Clinton’s time. … Ms. Clinton is hardly blameless. She treated the public’s interest in sound record-keeping cavalierly. A small amount of classified material also moved across her private server. But it was not obviously marked as such, and there is still no evidence that national security was harmed. Ms. Clinton has also admitted that using the personal server was a mistake. The story has vastly exceeded the boundaries of the facts. Imagine how history would judge today’s Americans if, looking back at this election, the record showed that voters empowered a dangerous man because of.?.?. a minor email scandal. There is no equivalence between Ms. Clinton’s wrongs and Mr. Trump’s manifest unfitness for office.”
A few points:
1.) We’ve always believed the #LyingPress isn’t objective or neutral. It exists to manipulate facts, push propaganda, and spin narratives in order to control discourse and public opinion. By controlling and molding public opinion, it holds the keys to power in liberal democracies.
2.) The #LyingPress would prefer to operate behind a veil of journalistic objectivity and neutrality, but Trump has drawn them out from behind the curtain and exposed them.
3.) This isn’t unlike what happened in the Soviet Union. There was a moment when the propaganda came to be seen as propaganda, not as common sense or the conventional wisdom, and the hacks the pushing it seen as hacks. No one really believed the media and its ideals or slogans anymore.
4.) The media was losing its aura of neutrality and objectivity before Trump, but he has dramatically accelerated their delegitimization. In liberal democracies, the #LyingPress sets the ground rules of public discourse – norms like “anti-racism,” political correctness – but Trump has bulldozed those norms.
5.) If Trump won the election, the #LyingPress wouldn’t be able to restrain itself. It would have a come apart. He’s a racist. He’s a fascist. He’s a Nazi, und so weiter. Ordinary people would become so accustomed to being called these things by the media that the various -isms would lose their sting. What’s more, the people who really are those things wouldn’t look nearly as “extreme” as they do now. Instead, they would begin to look cool and edgy, which is the moment we are entering now.
The Case for Trump
Hillary Clinton
Wall Street Shuns Donald Trump – Hillary Clinton is receiving virtually all donations from the big banks and financial services industry. She is the candidate of Wall Street, the billionaire class, the top 1 percent, and the Davos globalist crowd.
Hillary’s Health – Hillary Clinton is a sick old woman whose health isn’t being scrutinized by the #LyingPress.
Where Is Hillary? – Hillary Clinton spent all of August holding court with “the billionaire class” including a $100,000 a plate lamb dinner fundraiser with the Rothschilds.
Hillary’s Scandals – The Clinton Foundation and the ongoing email scandals have exposed Hillary Clinton as a corrupt liar.
Hillary’s Alt-Right Speech – For the first time in memory, a leading presidential candidate has labeled and attacked us as the real enemy.
Serbia – Hillary Clinton orchestrated a war against at European country in the name of protecting the human rights of Muslims. For that reason alone, she must never become president. She is a threat to Europe.
Donald Trump
This Is Our Best Shot – The stars aligned this year when a rogue billionaire toppled the conservative establishment. We might not get a better shot.
Neocons Enter The Mirror Universe – Donald Trump has singlehandedly driven the neocons out of the Republican Party. He has succeeded where Ron Paul failed.
Issues
Immigration – There is a night-and-day difference between Trump and Hillary on immigration. Trump is also surrounded and advised by all the people who have credibility on the issue.
Hillary’s America Would Be Pottersville – Over the course of several decades, Hillary Clinton has consistently been a neo-liberal, free-trading globalist, whereas Donald Trump has been a skeptic of free-trade.
Movement
Communication – Trump’s campaign is red-pilling conservatives. He is turning them into Alt-Lite populists and nationalists. He is vastly expanding our base and recruiting pool.
Killing #TruConservatism – Trump poses a mortal threat to the #TruCons who control and police the American Right. For that reason alone, Trump needs to win to kill off that bloodsucking parasite.
Hillary’s Signal Boost – Hillary’s Alt-Right Speech was a massive signal boost that dramatically expanded our numbers. We want to be portrayed as the real opposition. If Trump wins, this frame will continue to swell our ranks.
Leadership – Trump is leading White America in the right direction across a range of issues. If Hillary wins, it will only generate more anger and alienation, which is not necessarily channeled into anything constructive.
Organizing – Under a President Trump, it will be easier for us to organize people who already agree with us, which is more important than generating more raw anger and resentment we are unable to capitalize on.
Visibility, Eroding Taboos, Coming Out – Trump has made our cause more visible. His campaign has massively eroded the reigning taboos. He is making it easier for us to operate in the real world.
Fear and Apathy – The movement – call it White Nationalist, Southern Nationalist, Alt-Right, populist, etc. – has been held back mainly by fear and apathy for decades, not any lack of raw anger and alienation. We have legions of angry and alienated people marginalized on the internet, but they are checked by their own fear, so they don’t organize and push for change. They don’t think they can win. Giving these people a victory will go a much longer way than making them marginally more pissed off.
European Spring – A Trump victory in November will remove the threat of Hillary attacking our counterparts in Europe. It will also galvanize the European populist-nationalist parties and could precipitate a snowballing of victories.Japanese mobile game developer Cygames known for their hit digital collectible card game Shadowverse, has announced that it will sponsor legendary players of E-sports fame Daigo “The Beast” Umehara, Darryl “Snake Eyez” Lewis and Eduardo “PR Balrog” Perez. The group will adopt their name from Umehara’s famous moniker: Cygames Beast.
Here’s what these fighters had to say about their new sponsorship:
Daigo “The Beast” Umehara:
“I feel great to be able to start the new CPT season with a new partner joining my existing great support team of Red Bull, Twitch, and HyperX. I am honored to be a part of Cygames, one of the greatest mobile game makers in Japan. I believe this new partnership will not only help further US community growth, but it will also bridge the gap between the US and Japanese esports scenes. It’s very exciting for me to be reunited with Street Fighters from around the globe, discover and meet new and young faces throughout the CPT 2017 season. It is my desire to visit the countries I have never been to and meet the community members there. No one can predict what is to happen in the end, but my goal is always to showcase my gameplay. To put up an exciting game is my job. I am only going to work hard to do that.”
Eduardo “PR Balrog” Perez:
“I feel very proud and honored to be representing Cygames throughout this year, and I’m extremely grateful that they believe in me. My goal going into Capcom Pro Tour this year–aside from trying my best to win–is to take some time and try and grow the community further, since fighting games are getting popular, I want to be able to teach not only by streaming, but by creating content on other platforms and spreading our awesome game.“
Darryl “Snake Eyez” Lewis:
“I think it’s an amazing opportunity to partner up with Cygames. Seeing new companies emerge in the fighting game community is always an eye-opener to how big our scene is getting. I started playing Street Fighter back when none of this even came across my mind, so it’s crazy seeing all the opportunities available to us now. Capcom Pro Tour is getting bigger every year, and I plan on participating in as many tournaments as I can. I plan on becoming stronger both mentally and technically, and to ultimately (of course) win Capcom Cup 2017. I also want to take part in projects that will bring more people into Street Fighter, so our community could grow even bigger.” Cygames will act as a co-sponsor to Snake Eyez (shared with Red Bull) and to Umehara (shared with Red Bull, Twitch, and HyperX). SourceMove aside, Barbie. The National Retail Federation says Anna and Elsa from Disney's "Frozen" are the new must-haves this holiday season.
According to the NRA, 20 percent of parents shopping for toys will be picking up one, or both, of the royal sisters, My San Antonio reports. As for Barbie, less than 17 percent of the 6,593 consumers polled by will choose the iconic doll.
This may make the sisters the top contenders, as the Toy Industry Association revealed the 83 finalists for the 2015 Toy of the Year Awards on Sunday. Finalists were selected from more than 600 nominees submitted for consideration by 159 companies, Sport Act reports.
Despite the spike in "Frozen" merchandise, Barbie continues to hold still the single biggest doll brand that parents want to buy, with the "Frozen" dolls spread among several characters, Examiner reports.
As for the remainder of sales, a grouping of other "generic dolls" make up 10.7 percent of sales for 2014, Examiner continues to report. Trailing behind the top-sellers, Monster High Dolls received 5.2 percent. The American Girl dolls saw just a mere 3.8 percent.
Barbie's outlook isn't promising, as worldwide gross sales for the doll were down 21 percent last quarter for Mattel, My San Antonio says.
The winners, including the overall "Toy of the Year" and the "People's Choice" awards, will be announced at the TOTY Awards ceremony held on Feb. 13, 2015, Sport Act adds.This week’s Podcast Question of the Week concerns that juggernaut of a game that just got released:
Do you let your kids play Mature-rated games?
Everyone in the world is playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Hey, we are too! But the ESRB suggests that this game is a no-no for kids under 17. With constant gunfire, characters chattering out curse words, and buckets of blood, we’re not so sure we even want kids in the same house while this game is being played. But there’s always a couple parents that don’t mind digital violence. So – do you let your kids play M-rated games? Just some? Just one? Do you screen the games first through rentals?
We want to know! Leave your answer in the comments here and we’ll read some of your answers on our podcast, Sunday, 11/13.Three models, three different scenarios. Left: the European model simulates a very strong storm off the Delmarva coast Monday morning with very heavy rain in the central and northern mid-Atlantic - with a projected landfall near Cape May later that day. Right, top: The GFS model turns the storm into the Gulf of Maine Tuesday night with a projected landfall near Portland later that night. Right, bottom: the Canadian model shows the storm making landfall near Boston Wednesday morning. (Stormvistawxmodels.com and MeteoCenter, Canada)
The majority of models now take Sandy from its current position just west of Santiago de Cuba in southern Cuba before curving the storm towards either the mid-Atlantic or Northeast coast. Models disagree on where the storm will recurve and make landfall: simulations vary from the mid-Atlantic to Maine. There remains a chance, though diminishing, the storm will slide harmlessly out to sea.
GFS forecast ensemble members all simulate Sandy recurving towards the East Coast. (NOAA)
Making matters worse, the storm will coincide with a full moon Monday night, meaning elevated tides above normal levels. Astronomically high tides have played a key role in historic coastal flooding events along the East Coast, such as the Ash Wednesday storm of March, 1962.
View Photo Gallery: Jamaicans hunkered down as Hurricane Sandy soaked their Caribbean island with steady rain Wednesday.
Inland areas in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast, from Richmond to Washington, D.C. to New York City to Boston, may also deal with significant storm impacts. Heavy rains are possible along with punishing winds. But the track is key in determining exactly where and we cannot say which areas, if any, will experience these conditions.
As a hurricane transitions into a mid-latitude weather system, the storm’s core tends to unwind. This means the most extreme winds around the storm’s center diminish some, but very strong winds spread out over a larger distance, affecting a much broader region. In other words, sustained winds above tropical storm force (39 mph) will be possible for locations well-displaced from the storm’s center, meaning a high power outage risk.
Severe inland flooding is another possibility. But again, it’s impossible to pinpoint if/where this will occur. Recall that the inland flooding - as opposed to wind or storm surge - was the greatest cause of death and economic damage during hurricane Irene in 2011 bringing torrents to upstate New York and Vermont.
GFS snowfall simulation for storm (Weatherbell.com)
Snow is much less likely at lower elevations as the storm wraps around some mild air from the tropics. However, it cannot be ruled out briefly towards the tail end of the storm as tropical air departs and cold air wins out.
Why is the storm unlikely to go out to sea?
Simulation of blocking flow in atmosphere (Penn State)
As NOAA’s Hydrometeorological Prediction Center writes:
“THERE IS INCREASING CONSENSUS AMONG THE GUIDANCE FROM THE VARIOUS MODELING CENTERS... THE ENTIRE ATLANTIC BASIN SEEMS DESTINED TO BECOME DOMINATED BY BLOCKY HIGHS AND LOWS, WITH DECREASING WIGGLE ROOM FOR EVEN LARGE FEATURES LIKE SANDY. ”
Round-up of voices/opinions about this storm
Jeff Masters, wunderground: “Sandy: a potential billion-dollar storm for the mid-Atlantic and New England”
Dr. Greg Forbes, the Weather Channel: “A worst-case scenario of Hurricane Sandy or some hybrid (mixed with a cold front and jet stream system coming toward it) could bring a widespread destructive windstorm to |
do. Meanwhile, those working towards removing President Trump from office before a thousand days has passed in his present term seem to have the upper hand over the shrinking number of those loyal to him and his 21st century vision of what the US needs in order to retain its geopolitical primacy well into the Indo-Pacific century in the face of the challenge posed by the “China Firsters” working under PRC President Xi Jinping.
OPERATION 1,000 DAYS
According to the analysts, the effort is to set up either a “Bipartisan” Congressional Commission (that would from the Republican side be loaded with known critics of Trump) or a Special Prosecutor to probe the linkages between the Trump administration and the Kremlin. The Clinton machine is confident that either body would ensure that the circus of daily allegations continues into the next two years, in the course of which they expect that the White House would actually be thrown into chaos. The expectation is that the operation to reduce President Trump’s stay in the White House to a thousand days or less is proceeding successfully, in fact at a faster pace than originally conceived. Clearly, President Trump needs to break free of the web of insinuations and charges thrown daily at him, if he is to escape the fate of Richard Milhous Nixon in his very first term. The analysts spoken to, who belong to what they claim is the silent majority within sensitive agencies of the US Government, back President Trump and his drive for fresh policies. They are looking to the US President to “show the same courage and grit in office” that he so often displayed during the 2016 Presidential campaign, rather than “get sandbagged by the Beltway coterie determined to protect their privileges from being obliterated” by the new sheriff in town. However, with every day that passes, such a fightback is becoming more difficult. What sustains them in their confidence is that Donald Trump seems to have mastered not only the Art of the Deal but the Science of the Miracle, as shown by his ascent to the office he now holds.A woman has been sentenced to life in prison for shooting her husband dead – after her husband’s pet parrot kept repeating, ‘Don’t shoot! Don’t f***ing shoot!’ in his voice.
Homeless killer doused in water by rail staff said his friend 'deserved to die'
Glenna Durham, 49, spent months in hospital recovering from a gunshot wound to her head after shooting her husband Martin five times – then turning the gun on herself.
Durham, of Sand Lake, Sand Lake learned her sentence on Monday after a jury found her guilty of first-degree murder and a felony firearm charge last month.
There were no witnesses to what happened on May 12 last year – except the grey parrot.
To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video
Since that day, he has been repeating, ‘Don’t f***ing shoot! ‘Don’t f***ing shoot’!’
Glenna Durham with husband Martin (Picture: Handout)
Martin Duram’s ex-wife, Christina Keller, has said that after the slaying, the pet parrot, Bud, repeated “don’t (expletive) shoot” in Martin Duram’s voice. Keller took ownership of the bird after Martin Duram’s death.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Glenna Duram’s attorney plans to appeal.
They allegedly had a row about gambling debts and unpaid bills before Glenna seized the gun and blasted her husband before shooting herself in the head.
During the hearing, neighbour Connie Ream said she was the one to find the couple, after hearing gunshots.
Child killer Jon Venables begs for his life not to be identified
At first she thought Martin was hunting, but when she checked on them saw two bodies motionless on the floor.
Another witness said the house looked ‘ransacked’ with things scattered everywhere.
But police r found a note at their home to their three children reading: ‘Please forgive me [you’re] one of the best things I ever did — Love mom.’Four Reasons Not to Trust the TPP to Save Endangered Animals
As opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) mounts in the halls of Congress and court of public opinion, the Obama administration is searching for new arguments, however tenuous, to sell the controversial deal. One of the latest TPP sales pitches from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) and other TPP proponents is that the deal would help protect endangered wildlife like rhinos and elephants.
Such promises about the supposed environmental benefits of trade pacts are not new. Time and again, we have been told that unpopular trade deals would reduce environmental degradation in trade partner countries. And time and again, as explained below, these promises have proven empty.
Luckily, we have other policy tools that can and should be used immediately to help save endangered species from extinction. Here are four reasons that we should use those tools rather than relying on the TPP:
1. TPP-like deals have repeatedly failed to live up to promises of environmental protection.
Twenty-two years ago President Bill Clinton proclaimed the environmental side agreement of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as a “force for social progress,” claiming it would lead to “better preservation of the environment.” Instead, NAFTA facilitated the expansion of fossil-fuel-heavy agribusiness in the United States, incentivized a boom in environmentally destructive mining in Mexico, undermined the ability to regulate carbon-intensive tar sands in Canada, and empowered multinational firms to demand taxpayer compensation for environmental protections in all three countries.
The legacy of using empty environmental promises to sell trade deals didn’t stop with NAFTA. In 2007 USTR promised the U.S. - Peru trade deal would “promote legal trade in timber products.” The promise was based on the deal’s detailed set of rules on forests that, unlike NAFTA’s unenforceable environmental side agreement, were legally binding. Indeed, the pact required Peru “to combat trade associated with illegal logging” and specified a litany of reforms that Peru had to take to fulfill this requirement.
But after more than six years of the U.S. - Peru trade deal, widespread illegal logging remains unchecked in Peru’s Amazon rain forest. A 2014 study in Scientific Reports found that about 70 percent of Peru’s supervised logging concessions are being used for illegal logging. The World Bank, meanwhile, estimates that eight out of ten logs exported by Peru have been cut illegally.
For years, U.S. environmental groups have called on USTR to use the rules in the trade deal to counter Peru’s extensive illegal logging. In 2012, the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) and the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) formally petitioned USTR to take action under the deal to verify the legality of timber shipments from two Peruvian companies that were notorious for exporting illegally-cut logs to the United States. EIA’s head of Peru programs stated at the time, “It is the responsibility of the US Government to make sure that the US is not an accomplice in illegal logging activities.”
But USTR took no such action. To date, Peru has faced no formal challenges, much less penalties, under the trade pact, despite ample evidence that Peru has violated the pact’s rules by illegally cutting Amazonian trees and exporting them to unwitting U.S. consumers. In June 2015, EIA concluded, “Not only has no one been held accountable for past violations, but the U.S. is turning a blind eye to ongoing trade in timber that should be considered at high risk of illegality.”
Even more, just last year Peru explicitly rolled back an array of environmental protections in order to attract foreign investment – a clear violation of the supposedly enforceable terms of the U.S. - Peru trade pact. Sierra Club, EIA, CIEL and other leading U.S. environmental groups once again called on USTR to use the U.S. - Peru deal to reverse this weakening of environmental protections. Yet, once again USTR has failed to take action.
The consistent track record of non-enforcement of environmental provisions of trade pacts hardly inspires trust in the all-too-familiar assertion that the latest trade deal – the TPP – would help protect wildlife. This promise is particularly doubtful given that…
2. The TPP’s environmental terms are expected to be weaker than the unenforced provisions of the Peru trade deal.
A recent statement by U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman indicates that the TPP, like the U.S. - Peru trade deal, would commit signatory governments to “combat” illegal trade in endangered animals. The Sierra Club and many other U.S. environmental groups repeatedly called for stronger language to “prohibit” the trade, transshipment or sale of products taken or traded in violation of national laws or applicable foreign laws that protect wildlife. However, the final text is expected to stick with the weaker provision.
Worse still, in a step backwards from the Peru trade deal, the TPP is not expected to spell out specific legal reforms and enforcement measures that TPP countries like Vietnam and Malaysia must undertake to “combat” illegal wildlife trade. This omission could open a large loophole for illegal trade in products like elephant tusks and rhino horns to continue. This is particularly concerning given that surging demand for rhino horns in Vietnam is helping to drive a spike in rhino poaching in South Africa.
Even with the U.S. - Peru pact’s stronger provisions against illegal logging, repeated efforts to push the U.S. government to use the trade deal to halt Peru’s widespread illegal timber trade have fallen on deaf ears. If the Peru deal’s stronger environmental enforcement terms have failed to halt illegal trade in timber in Peru, why should we expect the TPP’s weaker provisions to be more successful in halting illegal trade in rhino horns in Vietnam?
3. The TPP could exacerbate threats to endangered species by incentivizing wider destruction of their habitats.
Beyond failing to protect endangered wildlife like elephants and rhinos, the TPP could actually contribute to the loss of their habitats, in part by expanding demand for destructive cash crops like oil palm (used to produce edible palm oil, cosmetics, detergents and other products). Studies have documented how oil palm plantations in TPP member Malaysia – the world’s second largest palm oil producer – have contributed to the disappearance of habitats for endangered species.
Indeed, the Sumatran rhino was just declared extinct in Malaysia, due in part to habitat loss driven by the expansion of oil palm plantations. And 14 rare pygmy elephants were recently found dead in Malaysia after apparent poisoning from pesticides used on oil palm plantations.
The TPP is likely to encourage greater oil palm expansion in TPP countries like Malaysia by increasing demand for exports of palm oil. The TPP is widely expected to significantly reduce or eliminate most agricultural tariffs – that ostensibly includes the palm oil tariffs currently imposed by major palm oil importing TPP countries like Vietnam and Japan. If those tariffs would drop, palm oil exports – and thus, oil palm production – would be expected to rise in TPP countries like Malaysia. Expanding oil palm plantations would spell shrinking habitats for endangered animals, heightening the risk that they could face the same fate as Malaysia’s extinct rhinos.
In addition, the TPP would expand NAFTA rules that empower multinational corporations to go before private trade tribunals to challenge government policies that protect endangered species. This threat is not hypothetical – just a few months ago, a NAFTA tribunal ruled that Canada’s rejection of a controversial open-pit mining project violated NAFTA’s foreign investor protections despite the fact that a Canadian environmental review panel found that the project could have threatened the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale.
4. We have alternative tools to reduce illegal wildlife trade – ones that have proven more effective and less risky than trade deals.
To protect endangered species like elephants and rhinos, we do not need to rely on another unenforceable trade deal that may, in fact, pose threats to their habitats. Other more effective tools exist to reduce illegal wildlife trade – ones that are free of the TPP’s threats to the environment.
For example, all TPP member nations are among the 181 signatories to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which places restrictions on trade in products from endangered species, including rhinos and elephants. While enforcement of CITES has been a challenge in some countries, the U.S. government has successfully used CITES in concert with a U.S. law called the Pelly Amendment to compel Taiwan to meaningfully reduce illegal trade in rhino horns. The Pelly Amendment authorizes the U.S. president to indefinitely ban the importation of “any products” from a country if U.S. agencies find the government to be in violation of CITES by allowing prohibited wildlife trade. EIA, the Animal Welfare Institute and the International Fund for Animal Welfare have formally petitioned the U.S. government to use the Pelly Amendment to push Vietnam to curtail its illegal rhino trade.
And the Obama administration already has committed to using dozens of policy tools beyond the TPP as part of a recently-unveiled National Strategy for Combating Wildlife Trafficking, which seeks to achieve such goals as “a near‐total U.S. ban on elephant ivory and rhino horn trade.” These tools include strengthening existing U.S. laws such as the Endangered Species Act, increasing the number of U.S. agents stationed abroad to investigate illegal wildlife trade, and working more closely with the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) to dismantle illegal wildlife trade networks.
Additionally, the United States can fully enforce the Lacey Act, a law that prohibits imports, sales and purchases of illegally-sourced plants and wildlife. This landmark law has been used for decades to crack down on trade in illegal wildlife products.
Such tools hold greater potential than the TPP to reduce illegal wildlife trade, while avoiding the TPP’s threats to critical habitats and environmental protections. We cannot afford another unenforceable trade deal that not only fails to reduce the threats endangered species face, but risks exacerbating them. To protect endangered animals, we need tools that actually work, which includes more effectively using the ones we already have.Joe Arpaio vs The United States of America
Joseph Michael Arpaio was elected as the Republican Party candidate for Sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, in 1992. Over the next 24 years, Arpaio would do much to establish and then cement his self-styled image as “America’s Toughest Sheriff.” His reign, one simultaneously of incompetence, cruelty and astounding corruption, would finally end upon his ejection from office in November 2016, although a multitude of federal court orders and civil rights cases would continue to haunt Arpaio until late August 2017, when he would be granted an official pardon by President Donald Trump.
Announcing his decision on Twitter, the President wrote, “I am pleased to inform you that I have just granted a full Pardon to 85-year-old American patriot Sheriff Joe Arpaio. He kept Arizona safe!” The White House also released a statement reading, “Throughout his time as sheriff, Arpaio continued his life’s work of protecting the public from the scourges of crime and illegal immigration,” while the former Sheriff labeled his conviction “a political witch hunt by holdovers in the Obama justice department.”
Many have documented the crimes of so-called “Sheriff Joe,” so much so that I feel little need in repeating the gruesome details here, although a brief summary might prove helpful. In short, throughout his lengthy tenure, Joe Arpaio transformed America’s fourth most populous county into a racist police state. Those suspected of being illegal immigrants were thrown, alongside nonviolent drug offenders, into an outdoor jail where temperatures regularly exceeded 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and which Arpaio, speaking to supporters at a local Italian-American club, proudly described as a “Concentration camp.” [1]
Well over a hundred people died in Arpaio’s jails and prisons, often without explanation. In many other cases, in ways one would deem unthinkable in a developed nation subscribed to basic human rights laws. An inmate suffering from stomach pains (who was pulled over and arrested after driving his bike on the wrong side of the road) was given the wrong medication and died in his cell, screaming from pain, while guards stood idly by. A pregnant woman lost her child after being forced to give birth in those very cells. A paraplegic man was beaten up and had his neck broken. A military veteran suffering from schizophrenia was also beaten to death after refusing an order to take off his shoes. It is worth pointing out that most of those who perished under Arpaio’s watch were innocent (not that it should matter) as well as the majority of those he otherwise locked up. Under Arpaio, the suicide rate in Maricopa County jails reached 24%. [2]
For over 20 years, over one million of the county’s Latino residents endured under a system of institutionalized racial profiling. The co-founders of a local newspaper critical of Arpaio’s reign of terror found themselves taken from their homes in the middle of the night, before being falsely charged with violating the secrecy of a grand jury (which, it later turned out, never actually convened). The police chief of Mesa, who openly criticized Arpaio’s actions, similarly found his city hall and public library raided in the night, under the guise of searching for undocumented workers (a few cleaning ladies were arrested in the process, all of whom were later found to possess the appropriate documentation).
Realising that he had accumulated his fair share of opponents, Arpaio proceeded to launch a so-called “War on political corruption.” Judges, county supervisors, administrators and political opponents found themselves facing bogus criminal charges, all of which were thrown out due to lack of evidence and eventually ended in costly lawsuits. Meanwhile, the judge who ruled that Arpaio had engaged in racial profiling found that the latter had hired a PI to investigate his wife. After asking the Justice Department to investigate claims of racial profiling, Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon was himself targeted by Arpaio’s deputies, who demanded copies of his emails, phone logs, and appointment calendars. Other figures who crossed Arpaio and consecutively found themselves the targets of criminal investigation included Dan Saban, his Democratic Party opponent in 2008, Terry Goddard, Arizona’s Attorney General, as well as ACLU legal director Daniel Pochoda. [3] In 1999, as he was running for re-election, Arpaio staged an assassination plot against himself as a way of generating media coverage. A teenager by the name of James Saville narrowly escaped spending 20 years in jail as a result of this publicity stunt.
Meanwhile, as “America’s Toughest Sheriff” was busy waging war on his political opponents, not to mention Maricopa County’s entire Latino population, violent crime rose substantially. In a particularly damning episode, Arpaio’s Sheriff’s Office failed to investigate over 400 reported sex crimes, including a case where a disabled 13-year-old was repeatedly raped by her uncle for over four years, all while the crucial evidence which would later condemn him was filed away by county detectives. Turns out, being tough on crime is rather difficult if most of your resources are dedicated to terrorizing innocent residents and political opponents, and while tens of millions of taxpayer money is wasted on settling lawsuits ($70 million has been paid out to date in racial profiling cases alone, with the total adding up to around $130 million). [4] [5]
How He Got Away With It
“Clever tyrants are never punished” – Voltaire
Joe Arpaio is many things. A criminal, a gangster and a spectacularly corrupt politician whose exploits would be much more at home in 1990s Russia as opposed to modern day Arizona, USA. The manner of his crimes, for which Arpaio will never spend a single day in prison, is now a matter of public record. We can certainly fume at the sheer scale of injustice on display here, but perhaps our time would be more productively spent examining how “Sheriff Joe” managed to get away with what he did for as long as he did. Because while Joe Arpaio is certainly all the things above, he is hardly a stupid man. In short, the way I see it, Arpaio managed to survive so long in power, and then to escape justice, primarily as a result of two factors. First, a successful managing of (relatively) small coalition politics and, second, a very deliberate choice of wider political allies.
What does it take to become the Sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona? The simple answer is – the most votes in a “first past the post” style election taking place every four years. Historically, this has been a two horse race between the Republican and Democratic Party candidate, who are selected internally through closed primaries. As an example, let’s use the 2012 race, when Arpaio narrowly defeated Democrat Paul Penzone, the man who would later unseat him in 2016.
The population of Maricopa County is a little over 4,200,000, roughly 1,817,000 of whom were registered to vote in the 2012 election, or 43%. As the Maricopa County Sheriff Election happens to coincide with the US Presidential Election, turnout is high. In 2012, 1,342,221 voted either for Arpaio, his Democratic, or his Independent opponent, making it a 73% turnout, with Arpaio picking up 679,967 votes, or 50.7%. Therefore, to be re-elected as Sheriff of Maricopa County, Arpaio needed the support of roughly 680,000 out of a total population of 4,200,000, or 16%. In selectorate theory, that 16% is what we would describe as Joe Arpaio’s “Winning coalition,” the people whose support he requires in order to retain his post, and therefore potentially terrorize the other 84% of Maricopa County residents. [6]
As far as most Democracies go, that is not an uncommon figure. In that same year, Barack Obama won his re-election bid against Mitt Romney with roughly 66 million votes out of a total US population of around 320 million, making his winning coalition amount to 20% of the population, or 51% of that year’s electorate. That said, due to the Electoral College, it is theoretically possible to win the US Presidency with much, much less.
Regardless, when considering that 16% figure, we can easily make the following assumptions. The Latino residents of Maricopa County, who make up roughly 30% of its population (and many of whom are not US citizens and therefore not eligible to vote), can be safely ignored. The same goes for 12% who are registered Democrats, and (like the overwhelming majority of US Latino’s) not likely to ever vote Republican anyway. Speaking of which, the number of registered Republicans in Maricopa County prior to the 2012 election was just over 685,000, which you might recall is almost exactly the number of votes picked up by Arpaio during his successful re-election. To elaborate, in order to retain his post, Joe Arpaio needed to maintain the support of the roughly 16% of Maricopa County residents who already happened to be Republican Party supporters. In this process, the needs and, frankly, rights of just about everybody else mattered very little.
The fact that politicians of all stripes use the state’s treasure to disproportionately benefit their own supporters is merely political reality. It’s why countries where farmers don’t make up an important voting block don’t tend to spend much on farming subsidies, or why the UK constituencies which, over the last Parliament, received the least assistance from the Conservative led government were all Labour Party strongholds. However, what happened in Arizona’s Maricopa County from 1992-2016 is somewhat different, as Joe Arpaio exceeded normal political convention and, instead of simply denying rewards to those who would not vote for him, embarked upon a strategy which amounted to pleasing his supporters through the other group’s oppression.
Arpaio’s appeal to traditional Republican voters was simple – he was “America’s Toughest Sheriff,” a man who did not play nice with criminals and who would do anything to combat illegal immigration. As such, Arpaio’s brutish and outright unconstitutional policies were the source of his appeal. At a time when many on the right are wary of the “Political Correctness” that is supposedly infecting America, “Sheriff Joe” was someone who could be relied on to act tough while telling all those liberals in Washington to fuck themselves. Ultimately, this serves as a perfect example of why encouraging widespread ethnic and/or racial prejudice is so dangerous, because there might just come along a politician who would exploit it for his own end. This is how Joe Arpaio managed to remain as Sheriff of Maricopa County for 24 long years.
However, once the law finally caught up with Arpaio, who then found himself charged with criminal contempt of court, it was no longer up to a few hundred thousand Republicans in Maricopa County to save him. Instead, salvation came in the form of the Republican President and his own wider support base.
For years, as a well known anti-immigrant tough-guy, Arpaio constituted a major port of call for those Republican Presidential candidates who wanted to portray themselves as ultra-serious about “Patriotism” and “Law and order.” During the 2012 Republican Party Primary, Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain all courted him for an endorsement. In 2016, Arpaio played his cards correctly and declared his support for Donald Trump, an ally he had already made back when both men were prominent figures in the so-called “Birther” movement, which alleged that Barack Obama was not born an American citizen. During the 2016 race, Arpaio joined Trump on the campaign trail in Arizona, a traditional Republican stronghold which was proving to be a much tighter race than usual (Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by a mere 3.5% in the state).
There is much that is similar between “Sheriff Joe” and the current US President. Both men made their political careers by appealing to the worst instincts of the Republican Party base. Both men are terrific gangsters. Arpaio’s tenure is littered with the aforementioned intimidation of his political opponents, while Trump’s entire business career was spent dealing with New York’s real estate mob. Both are, or perhaps in the case of Arpaio, were, similarly aspiring autocrats, the kind who label dissent as an unpatriotic tendency, and who have less than a healthy relationship with America’s free press. As any good autocrat, Donald Trump remembers the cronies who helped him along the way, and the fact that most of his own supporters view Arpaio in a very positive light must have made his decision to pardon “Sheriff Joe” all that much easier.
What Can We Do About It?
(And by “It” I mean – A situation whereby individuals like Joe Arpaio are able to attain elected office and terrorize millions of Americans)
First and foremost – vote, and mobilize others to follow suit. When Joe Arpaio was finally ejected from his post in last year’s election, his total vote count amounted to 665,581, meaning that he only lost 14,386 voters from his successful reelection in 2012. The vast majority of Arpaio’s supporters who elected him time and time again did not abandon him. Instead, what made the difference was a 14% increase in voter turnout, which overwhelmingly benefited Arpaio’s Democratic challenger.
Secondly, the institutions which enabled and those that eventually halted “Sheriff Joe’s” reign must be repaired and protected respectively. The sheer scale of Arpaio’s exploits would have been impossible were it not for the hundred’s of Maricopa County policemen and prison officials who either went along with his illegal policies or outright cherished in them. Circumstances differ, but whether in Phoenix, Ferguson or Baltimore, efforts to increase police accountability must be supported.
In a similar vein, Arpaio’s tenure would have no doubt been even more horrific were it not for the journalists, judges, and attorneys who refused to be intimidated. History is full of instances when institutions designed to protect citizens either fell apart or are subverted by the forces of tyranny.
One man who was likely paying close attention to Trump’s decision is David Clarke, Sheriff of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin. Like Arpaio, Clarke’s tenure has become surrounded with accusations of cruelty and abuse of power. His prisons have similarly become a source of horror stories. Of pregnant women being handcuffed and shackled for upwards of 21 hours, while in labor, or men dying of dehydration. Like Arpaio, Clarke is a fervent supporter of the President, with regular appearances on Fox, not to mention a speech at last year’s GOP convention in Cleveland. Trump’s pardoning of Joe Arpaio, in itself an act of gross injustice, is furthermore a message to individuals like Clark that they can get away with almost anything.
A Quick Note on “Patriotism”
What even is “Patriotism,” anyway? As far as the modern political lexicon is concerned, it’s a word which seems to possess as much meaning as “Political Correctness” or “Social Justice Warrior,” by which I mean – almost none at all.
Perhaps a good place to start would be by listing the things which “Patriotism” is not. “Patriotism” is not intentionally breaking the law of the land in order to marginalize and discriminate against an entire demographic of Americans. “Patriotism” is not sending young men, and after a while their sons, to die in a war for the sake of your approval ratings and the pockets of multi billion dollar defense contractors. “Patriotism” is not colluding with a foreign warmongering kleptocracy while it is actively seeking to undermine American and European democracy. “Patriotism” is not seeking to justify the actions of those marching with the flag of a rebellion which sought to destroy the United States, and those of a racist, genocidal, regime which the United States helped defeat. As for what “Patriotism” is, well, I’m open to suggestions.Car And Driver Magazine via YouTube Tesla's stock is down 12.5% after hours, to $154.73, after the company reported Q3 adjusted earnings of $0.12 per share.
Analysts polled by Bloomberg were looking for the company to report adjusted earnings of $0.09 per share.
On a Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) basis, Tesla reported a loss of $0.32 per share. This was worse than expectations for a loss of $0.25 per share.
The company also reported Q3 non-GAAP revenue of $603 million, and GAAP revenue of $431 million. Analysts were looking for revenue of $554.33 million.
But the key thing to watch with Tesla is vehicle sales.
Tesla delivered 5,500 Model S vehicles and is now producing 550 cars per week. Over 1,000 cars were delivered to European customers.
This was ahead of their own expectations for 5,000 Model S deliveries, but lower than what some Wall Street analysts were expecting.
The company delivered 5,150 Model S vehicles in the second quarter.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently admitted that he thinks the stock is overvalued. But by setting these benchmarks and beating them, the company is building credibility.
Tesla also began taking reservations for the Model S in China and expects to begin making deliveries in Q1 2014.
Gross margin increased to 22% on a non-GAAP basis, excluding ZEV credits and 24% on a GAAP basis.
In the fourth quarter, Tesla expects to deliver slightly under 6,000 Model S vehicles. They raised their 2013 worldwide deliveries to 21,500 vehicles.
The shareholder letter also mentioned that "Tesla is pioneering a new approach to vehicle servicing that we believe will revolutionize the customer experience." No details were however revealed.
Tesla recently opened its Supercharger Corridor that extends along the West Coast. These chargers work much faster than the typical EV charger and Tesla has been careful about their placement too. Both factors had previously been obstacles to consumers hesitant to make the switch.
"Customers cite the ability to supercharge as one of the top 5 reasons they choose a Tesla," Musk and CFO Deepak Ahuja pointed out in the shareholder letter. Tesla is now expanding its Supercharging network to Scandinavia and Europe.
The stock was up 1% to $176.85 today. It is up over 400% year-to-date.Hmmm
The Mega Man comic series from Archie is probably my favorite comic out right now. It manages to give us a splash of nostalgia while incorporating some interesting storylines, and of course, it helped birth two Sonic collaborations, which is like a childhood dream come true. I've collected every issue to date (it's on issue 50 right now), but sadly, it looks like the future of the series is in question.
While it has not been canceled, ComicBook.com reports that the series is going on indefinite hiatus after issue #55. Archie editor Vincent Lovallo has confirmed that it is not necessarily permanent, and not Capcom's decision, but their own. In short, it's no secret that the Sonic comics have been much more fruitful for Archie as a whole. I've asked Archie directly about expanding to a new Mega Man X subseries multiple times, and the answer always seems to imply that there isn't a demand for it -- meanwhile, Sonic got his third Archie comic series this year with Sonic Boom.
Well, I don't know what to make of this. I mean, for all intents and purposes it sounds temporary, but you never know, and in any case Mega Man will be powering down for a while. I was happy with the way things were going with the Mega Man series, since Archie was doing what Capcom couldn't -- keeping the spirit alive.
EXCLUSIVE: Archie Action's Mega Man #53 Solicitation Reveals The End of the Series [ComicBook.com]
You are logged out. Login | Sign upDear Reader, As you can imagine, more people are reading The Jerusalem Post than ever before. Nevertheless, traditional business models are no longer sustainable and high-quality publications, like ours, are being forced to look for new ways to keep going. Unlike many other news organizations, we have not put up a paywall. We want to keep our journalism open and accessible and be able to keep providing you with news and analysis from the frontlines of Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World.
Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit initiated an initial probe into alleged campaign fund-raising violations by Zionist Union leader Isaac Herzog, Mandelblit’s office confirmed on Wednesday.
Herzog joined Shas chairman Arye Deri, who was revealed overnight to be the subject of an investigation whose circumstances are still under a gag order. The police probe of Herzog has been going on for months but was revealed on Wednesday.
The allegations about Herzog focus on the November 2013 Labor leadership primary, in which he defeated incumbent party chairwoman Shelly Yacimovich. Police are checking whether Herzog used nonprofit organizations to fund campaign spending that went unreported.Politicians and activists have been questioned by investigators, who are looking into whether companies spent large sums to try to help Herzog defeat Yacimovich.Herzog said the investigation was “an attempt at political character assassination” by the Likud and “frustrated Labor activists” who no longer support him. He vowed to cooperate with law enforcement authorities.“I am sure the probe will prove once and for all that the allegations are delusional,” he said. “I will cooperate fully with whomever necessary in order to get to the bottom of this matter as soon as possible.”Yacimovich made a point of not responding to the press, but MK Erel Margalit, who is considering challenging Herzog for the Labor leadership, gave him his full support and warned that Labor’s political opponents had reached a new low.The Likud Youth organization called for opening a full-blown investigation of Herzog, noting that he remained silent when he was questioned in a similar probe in 1999 when he helped Ehud Barak win the premiership from current prime minister and Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu.“A man like this is unfit to head the opposition in Israel, so he should suspend himself until the truth comes to light,” the organization said.Zionist Union/Labor Party MK Miki Rosenthal said Herzog and Deri must be treated equally and properly investigated. He said he hoped both men emerge unscathed but if an indictment is issued against either of them, he would need to resign.Like Herzog, Deri faced criminal investigations before. But unlike the opposition leader, who was never convicted, Deri was convicted of bribery and fraud, and served two years in prison of his three-year sentence.Deri said at a security guard convention at Jerusalem’s Ramada Hotel that he was surprised by the investigation.He said he had asked Mandelblit to remove a court-imposed gag order and reveal his name.“I and everyone connected to me is prepared to answer any questions and help,” Deri said. “I told [Mandelblit] I had one request: to expedite the probe and put his foot on the gas to remove doubts, so I can continue to work.”A police spokesman said the gag order “was partially lifted on Wednesday, allowing the publication of the fact that the attorney-general has approved a probe of Arye Deri, but that at the moment no official criminal investigation has been opened against him.”Channel 10 repeated allegations that surfaced in October made about Deri and his family owning too much expensive real estate for him and his extended family to have been able to afford legally. The latest allegations have slightly more specificity in terms of mentioning possible tax violations, but there is still little concrete information being disclosed.Channel 2 revealed a tape of in individual involved in the Deri scandal saying that it could end his political career.“He could end up returning to jail because of the nonsense he did,” the source said.Deri’s associates said he knows he is under a magnifying glass, and that he is confident he will emerge in one piece. He received a vote of confidence on Wednesday from Shas Council of Torah Sages head Rabbi Shalom Cohen.“We overcame Pharaoh and we overcame Haman,” Deri’s wife, Yaffa, said.Ben Hartman, Yonah Jeremy Bob and Ariel Zilber contributed to this report.
Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>>The selection of prosperity gospel preacher Paula White as one of the clergy saying prayers at Friday's presidential inauguration has ignited some controversy.
Evangelical critics cite her flamboyant exaltation of material riches and her alleged rejection of Christianity's traditional understanding of the Trinity. White, who's a friend and neighbor to President-elect Donald Trump Donald John TrumpREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails Trump urges North Korea to denuclearize ahead of summit Venezuela's Maduro says he fears 'bad' people around Trump MORE, insists she affirms Christian orthodoxy as defined in the Nicene Creed.
ADVERTISEMENT
Inaugural prayers have become one of the rites of American civil religion. And the extent to which Christian orthodoxy or specificity should be expected from them and their delivering clergy is |
S3 minds that are supposed to maximize the well-being of S0 and S1 minds. Due to the resistance of other power blocks it fails to gain a lot of territorry for itself. It only acquires a few asteroids and remains a virtual community in the rest of the solar system. Later on, it participates in the colonization of other solar systems.
2058
A planetary weather control system is established on Earth.
All blocks other than the Harmonic Consensus agree on the Gaia Initiative. It involves cyborgizing all sentient beings in what will be termed nature 1.5 (the part of nature that is not nature 2.0), so that their suffering is slightly ameliorated and their minds are uploaded and stored when they are about to die. However, the uploaded minds will only be initialized if someone volunteers as godfather to care for that being. The Gaia Initiative is executed by a new class S4 artilect called Gaia.
2059
A new kind of construction technology is developed. So-called dispensers use matter beams that they project towards desired locations at which the matter is rearranged into all kinds of desired objects. They are less precise, less energy efficient, and slower than replicators.
2060s
Due to the large increase of S1 population within the Universal Coalition and the Integrated Republic, S1 minds slowly become the dominant factions. Those S1 factions become increasingly discontented with AICON and its intrusive regulations which are mainly based on the paranoia of S0 minds. So, they propose an alternative method of managing security affairs: Via the Codex of Respect. Minds of higher tiers are required to adhere to the rules of the Codex which basically state that they need to respect minds of lower tiers and aren’t allowed to threaten them in any way. This suggestion is met with mistrust. The safety regulations of the Codex are seen as too weak – the only consequence of infringement of the Codex are so-called “Serious Debates” about ethics. The Unversal Coalition and the Integrated Republic are threatened with embargos and even military intervention should they actually abandon AICON regulations. The world is polarized by the question whether these threats are justified or not. These threats are often seen as sign of moral inferiority. Simulations might show whether the Codex is effective enough to guarantee the security of S0 beings, but realistic simulations of sentient beings are ethically problematic.
2060
Now that uploads can run a million times faster than realtime, the priority in research shifts towards improving the energy efficiency of the computing substrates on which they run.
2061
Hedonic enhancement technologies allow states of bliss many million times more intense than anything unaugmented sentient beings can experience.
2062
The Gaia Initiative joins the Nature 2.0 Initiative. This marks the end of involuntary suffering.
2063
Qualia transformation technology allows so-called actors to play suffering sentient beings in realistic simulations without actually suffering. This innovation allows for the realistic simulation of different scenarios to test the reliability of the Codex. It also causes a lot of philosophical confusion.
2064
The Universal Declaration of Sentient Rights is extended to also protect sentient beings only living in simulations.
2065
The SGC is finally extended to a length of 100000 kilometers.
2066
The History Reconstruction Project is initiated. It aims at reconstructing the history of Earth as truthfully as possible. Of course, this will be used to reconstruct persons who have already died before there were any mind backups. For this project a part of the mantle of Earth is turned into computing substrate. Many religious leaders protest against this effort to “play god”. But by now the old religions have lost a lot of their power, so their protests can’t stop the project.
is initiated. It aims at reconstructing the history of Earth as truthfully as possible. Of course, this will be used to reconstruct persons who have already died before there were any mind backups. For this project a part of the mantle of Earth is turned into computing substrate. Many religious leaders protest against this effort to “play god”. But by now the old religions have lost a lot of their power, so their protests can’t stop the project. Replicator technology is highly advanced now. It can produce large goods within seconds and with subatomic precision.
2067
Nuclear descent technology is developed. As opposed to high energy nuclear matter stabilization it creates super degenerate nuclear matter, so called descent matter, which has a lower net energy than normal matter. Thus the nuclear descent process yields a net energy gain. It’s actually much larger than the energy gain from nuclear fusion.
is developed. As opposed to high energy nuclear matter stabilization it creates super degenerate nuclear matter, so called descent matter, which has a lower net energy than normal matter. Thus the nuclear descent process yields a net energy gain. It’s actually much larger than the energy gain from nuclear fusion. A broad consensus that the Codex would be sufficient to guarantee safety for S0 minds emerges. As threats against the Harmonoc Consensus and the Universal Coalition subside, both blocks abandon the AICON regulations.
The Anima Mundi grows and develops further into what is known as a class S5 mind.
2068
The energy infrastructure around the sun now collects 1ppm of its whole energy output. A large part of this massive amount of energy is used to propell a new generation of starseeds which colonize star systems up to 100 light years away and reach speeds of up to 90% of the speed of light.
The Integrated Republic, the Repocratic Alliance, and the Anima Alliance also abandon AICON regulations.
Freedom from AICON regulations enables a group of hive minds to form a new coalition: The Liquid Coalition. Within the Liquid Coalition political influence is roughly proportional to the number of (qu)bits of a sub entity making political demands. Decision making within that new coalition can be compared to decision making within the human brain. Previously, the AICON regulations for hive minds enforced less natural ways of mental and political organization.
2069
The Communist Republic finally abandons AICON regulations. Now, AICON’s power is confined to the Baseline Coalition.
The first visitors from the new colony in the Alpha Centauri system arrive back in the solar system via gamma ray data transmission.
2070s
The 2070s are shaped by the advent of advanced femtotechnology. Its blessings enable the dawn of a new golden era, as it enables the effective colonization of the sun and other extreme regions of the solar systems. Those regions become centers of a new high culture. Nevertheless, all regions benefit from the energy abundance made possible by nuclear descent energy. Politically, the differences between the different power blocks become less important, as the Codex becomes the basis for a universal framework of mutual benevolence. As S1+ minds enjoy greater freedoms they are less eager to serve S0 minds, but still remain greatly helpful. All of these trends culminate in the founding of the Phoenix Federation which will regulate the relations between the different power blocks.
2070
Elaborate construction methods are required to build useful stuff out of descent matter. It’s now possible to create computers out of descent matter which are more powerful than computers made with regular matter.
Phase 1 of the History Reconstruction Project has been completed. History has been reconstructed back to 1870 and those humans who died after that year have been restored.
2071
Ships can be built from descent matter. They are able to withstand the extreme conditions in the photosphere of the sun. Many realize that this is a good opportunity to actually colonize the photosphere of the sun with stations built from descent matter.
2072
New starseeds are made from descent matter. They reach speeds up to 99% of the speed of light and are used for a new wave of colonization of many star systems within a radius of 500 lightyears.
2073
The polar regions of the sun become centers of the new Stellarian culture. A new power block emerges from these centers: The Iridescent Republic, guided by the S5 mind Iris.
2074Lamar Odom had a rough night on Monday. According to TMZ Sports, he was removed from a Delta Air Lines flight bound for New York City after he reportedly showed up for the flight drunk and proceeded to throw up several times before eventually being escorted off the airplane by flight attendants. At one point, Odom reportedly used several of his fellow passengers' heads to stay balanced as he made his way down the plane's aisle, and while Delta Air Lines did not comment on the alleged incident, TMZ Sports reported that the flight eventually departed for NYC without him.
Lamar Odom -- Strip Club Turn Up After First Class Puking (PHOTOS + VIDEO) https://t.co/xmqydWfqCz — TMZ (@TMZ) July 13, 2016
Odom did eventually make it to NYC after catching a flight on Tuesday, though, and shortly after he arrived in the Big Apple, he made his way to the CityScapes Gentlemen's Club in Queens. TMZ Sports reports Odom arrived at the strip club—which is the same strip club where Knicks guard Cleanthony Early was shot back in December—at around 3:15 a.m. While at the club, he reportedly hung out in a VIP area with three other men, several women, and security guards, and according to a source who spoke with TMZ Sports, he was not drinking at all. He took this photo before leaving:
POST CONTINUES BELOW
After all of the media attention Odom's appearance at the club generated, CityScapes also posted this on Wednesday afternoon:
But Odom has done more than just hang out at a strip club since arriving in NYC. He hails from Queens, so he was also spotted taking photos with kids in a Queens neighborhood earlier in the day on Tuesday. As you can see in this video, he was wearing the same clothes he wore to the strip club later:
#CatchTheTea Lamar Odom was in Queens yesterday 👀👀 spillinthetea.com #lamarodom #queensny A video posted by #IAm A Tru Lady (@suchalady85_) on Jul 13, 2016 at 6:04am PDT
It's unclear what Odom is doing in NYC other than just visiting or where else he's going to show up. But after falling out of the public eye for the most part over the last few months, it's clear that all (paparazzi) eyes are back on him again.Force India protege Jehan Daruvala emerged victorious in a chaotic, wet final Toyota Racing Series race at Ruapuna to claim the 2016 Lady Wigram Trophy.
Despite rain hitting the track at the start, the drivers kicked off on slicks and pole-sitter Lando Norris put on dominant pace, beating the field by more than a second each lap.
As the track got more wet, several drivers pitted to switch to rain tyres and were immediately quicker by five seconds on average.
Although they had the advantage in terms of pace, the gambling group’s chances of a victory were not certain given the spectacular driving of Norris.
The Briton’s chances of succeeding without pitting were destroyed when the safety car appeared on track though, forcing more drivers to pit, however, five contestants including Norris opted to stay out.
The action resumed for the final five laps and Jehan Daruvala, driving on wets, quickly jumped into first place with Ferdinand Habsburg and Artem Markelov also getting past Norris before the race came to a halt once again.
The red flag was brought out and, with two laps left, the officials opted not to restart.
As a result, Daruvala clinched the victory with Habsburg and Markelov both securing their second podiums of the weekend.
Norris and fellow M2 teammate Guan Yu Zhou, also on slicks until the end, survived in fourth and fifth respectively followed by Brendon Leitch.
Canadian duo Devlin DeFrancesco and Kami Laliberte were seventh and eighth, while Bruno Baptista and Nicolas Dapero made it home in the top ten as well.
Pedro Piquet, who was first to pit and led the chasing group at the safety car restart, dropped down to end up 16th.
EDIT: Norris was handed a 30-second penalty for unsafely rejoining the track, which drops him ninth.OriginOil and DOE to Develop Direct Conversion of Algae into Renewable Crude Oil
January 13th, 2012 by Glenn Meyers
OriginOil, a developer of a technology platform to extract oil from algae, reports that it plans to co-develop an integrated system with the DOE’s INL for direct conversion of raw algae into a renewable crude oil that can be used by existing petroleum refineries.
“We believe this is a major breakthrough for OriginOil and a major step forward for the algae industry,” said Riggs Eckelberry, OriginOil CEO, in a press announcement. This is particularly good news for algae enthusiasts who have seen lots of potential for algae as a renewable energy source but little action in terms of business development.
Eckelberry points out that OriginOil already leads the industry with its chemical-free, low-energy, continuous high-flow harvesting system.
“From there it’s a natural step to helping algae growers make a direct crude oil replacement right on site, giving them direct access to the existing world market for transportation fuels, including jet fuel. That’s an instant upgrade from what is now a niche market, to the immediate 86 million barrel per day global crude oil market.”
OriginOil’s planned Biocrude System will integrate its own harvesting system with biomass processing technology being developed under the recently-announced research agreement with INL for the conversion of raw algae into barrels of renewable crude oil.
In operation since 1949, INL is an applied engineering national laboratory providing support to the DOE on energy research and national defense.
Source: Business Wire | Photo: OriginOilSafari West employees worked to save preserve's 1,000 animals as their homes burned
Guests check out a giraffe from a truck at Safari West in Santa Rosa, Calif., on Wednesday, April 6, 2015. Guests check out a giraffe from a truck at Safari West in Santa Rosa, Calif., on Wednesday, April 6, 2015. Photo: Preston Gannaway, GRAIN/Special To The Chronicle Photo: Preston Gannaway, GRAIN/Special To The Chronicle Image 1 of / 82 Caption Close Safari West employees worked to save preserve's 1,000 animals as their homes burned 1 / 82 Back to Gallery
This story is developing and will continue to be updated.
More than 1,000 animals on the Safari West wildlife preserve were safe from imminent danger as of Wednesday, though the Santa Rosa park remained at risk with wildfires that were continuing to burn across Wine Country.
Flames had licked the perimeter of the 400-acre preserve and luxury campground on Porter Creek Road, said Safari West spokesperson Jared Paddock, but the animals, including giraffes, cheetahs and rhinoceroses, were safe within their enclosures Wednesday evening and not being evacuated.
Paddock could not specify the extent of the damage, but noted the preserve required some repairs. Minor spot fires had erupted on the grounds over the past three days as the Tubbs Fire, considered the most dangerous blaze currently burning in Wine Country, carved its 28,000-acre path of destruction from Calistoga to Santa Rosa. Fire crews and staff members were on site battling the flames and tending to the animals, Paddock said.
SEE ALSO: Thousands more evacuated as Wine Country blazes spread and death toll hits 21
Just a half-mile east of the preserve, the home of Safari West's 77-year-old owner, Peter Lang, did not meet with such a happy fate. His 200-acre compound was destroyed in the blaze, Paddock said, while Lang stayed with his animals, putting out minor blazes and shuffling animals to and from enclosures.
Lang, who opened Safari West with his wife, Nancy, in 1993, told the Press Democrat that staying on with his giraffes, rhinoceroses and hundreds of other African animals, "wasn't even a decision."
"I have a thousand souls I'm responsible for," he said.
HORSE RESCUE: Owner won't leave her 72 horses behind, even as fires close in
At least eight other Safari West staff members also lost their homes in the fire, said Paddock, many of whom came to the preserve Wednesday to assist the Langs. Though the area remains under evacuation, Paddock said several other staff members were trying to reach the park to help.
Guests and employees, some of whom packed birds and tortoises in their cars, had evacuated the preserve on Sunday, Paddock said.
A skeleton crew of veterinarians and staff were allowed to return Monday afternoon to assess the damage and tend to the animals, and nearby zoos remained on alert to assist in evacuations as needed, said Erin Harrison, an Oakland Zoo spokesperson.
Since Monday, misinformation has swirled regarding the status of Safari West and its hundreds of animals, with some reporting on social media that giraffes were let loose from their cages and running freely among the fire-blazed hills of Santa Rosa.
CONTAINMENT UPDATE: What fires are burning?
Safari West debunked such rumors, including implications that the park needed water and temporary animal shelters, on its Facebook page.
"At this particular time, we are well taken care of, but many of our friends and neighbors are not," said a Wednesday statement, urging people to donate to others within the community.
Reservations through the end of the month have been suspended at Safari West while the animals rest, Paddock said, and as the Tubbs Fire continues to burn near the preserve.
Read Michelle Robertson’s latest stories and send her news tips at mrobertson@sfchronicle.com.If you’ve seen my videos or photos before, you already know I like to paint my nails. What you might not know is that it’s UV gel nail polish-- a different chemical formulation that’s more durable, flexible, and lasts much longer than the air-dry stuff.
And it doesn’t just look nice, it lets you do more stuff with your nails-- open cans, pick at electronics, do the dishes-- I like to call it “structural” nail polish. Without it, my long and useful nails would split and break under the pressures of everyday makin’ stuff.
But gel polish has to be cured in a UV lamp, which is something usually only nail salons have, or, like me, you buy one on Amazon and it takes up as much space as a large toaster oven and has to be plugged into the wall.
Doing your own gel manicure is easy if you have the right tools, dare I say even easier than standard polish because the different viscosity smooths out its own inconsistencies and once it’s cured, it’s completely dry.
Adafruit’s UV LEDs, PowerBoost 500c, and 2500mAh battery make it easy to whip up your own manicure lamp at home, and Noe even designed a 3D printed enclosure for putting it all together. You will need:In the years following my baptism as a teenager, I had a lot to learn in order to pass for a Roman Catholic follower of Christ—prayers, motions, habits of mind. I had to cultivate friendships with saints, acquire rosaries and read Flannery O’Connor. I had to figure out what to say when people asked why I believed in God. But it wasn’t long before I noticed that merely being Catholic would be insufficient. One has to be a particular kind of Catholic.
As much as my newfound co-religionists were Catholic, I discovered, they were also Irish Catholic or Mexican Catholic or Italian Catholic or some mix of those, along with various allegiances to Vatican II or the Latin Mass. Partisans of each subcategory derived a substantial sense of what it meant to be Catholic from the strategies that their immigrant forebears had adopted to gain a foothold in the American middle class. Sometimes these inheritances struck me as treasures I could share, sometimes as closed doors I would never be able to open.
Advertisement
I had no such Catholic inheritance to draw from. Half my family is Jewish, and the other half has been proudly Protestant for centuries. Sometimes I felt angry. Like Jesus before the money changers’ carefully laid tables, I wanted to rattle all the self-satisfied, inaccessible Catholic traditions out of the pure and holy church I was trying to join. “Your church is not the church!” I wanted to say. Then I got rattled myself.
I took my first trip to Central America a few months after my baptism. The first stop in Guatemala was a city with an old colonial chapel at the top of a hill. One morning, alone, I climbed the long, cracked stairs to reach it and, inside, sat in a pew to rehearse some prayer I had recently memorized. Indigenous families came and went, and I tried not to let them distract me, but they did.
That’s when I noticed that they were not just lighting candles and crossing themselves. One or two at a time, they would go behind the ancient altar and come out the other side. Finally I stood up and walked over to that altar, then slowly made my way behind it. There I saw: The whole backside of the altar was covered in wax and chicken feathers.
This church, I realized, was at least two different churches at once. I had been trying to pray in the colonial one, with the prayers, motions and habits of mind I had been learning back home. But there was also an indigenous church there, with another set of prayers, motions and habits of mind entirely—yet somehow the same building, the same God, the same universal church.
Perhaps the convert’s chronic discomfort makes it easier for me to see the false comforts people wrap around their Catholicism. There are those who denounce “cafeteria Catholicism” while coddling their own narrow subset of Catholic tradition, much of it borrowed from the American evangelicalism around them. There are the cradle Catholics who have decided they know the church well enough to reject it—on the basis, usually, of only what they gleaned in adolescence from some poor priest too overworked to take their good, hard questions seriously. There are the innovators who demand that their billion fellow Catholics immediately adopt the well-meaning social experiments that happen to be underway in their corners of the world. The church is so, so much bigger than any of these.
Yet we need our little churches. I don’t think I could really call my faith my own until I found the mentorship of a band of marginal, war-resisting Manhattan Jesuits. With our shared, narrow commitments and living room Masses, we could go deep. But on Sundays I went to my neighborhood cathedral, whose pastor offered the opening prayer at Donald J. Trump’s convention. There I would pray and mingle and make friends with souls from all over the world—never entirely easily. That unease disclosed the miracle in God’s unhesitating embrace of us all.
For those who feel lost in the church, frustrated by it and tempted to leave, the best advice my experience can offer is this: Find a tribe, a band, a micro-church, however small it needs to be to feel like home—then challenge it relentlessly and habitually in the mystery of the universal whole.By now, you know Brian Beckman given how many times he's been featured on Channel 9 and, well, just how amazing he is. Brian is an astrophysicist and software architect currently working on a technology we can't talk about...yet...Stay tuned for that. Dr. Beckman is the perfect choice for a new lecture in the C9 Lectures series. This is a single lecture, but there will be more interesting conversations to come on this deep and beautiful topic (in some sense, this is all about symmetry).In the Rx interview with Brian and Erik Meijer, a short discussion on covariance and contravariance took place as a tangential topic (which often happens in real conversations - and we love that!). The concepts of co/contravariance can confuse and confound. Also, they are not just related to programming.Here, Dr. Beckman teaches us about covariance and contravariance in physics. Are these universal properties? Do they apply to the mathematics of physics (from quantum mechanics to black holes) in the same basic way they do for general purpose programming with objects and lists, for example?Tune in. This is a deep dive lecture and quite mathematical. Don't be scared. As usual, Brian explains complex things in a readily understandable fashion for mere mortals. If you have no experience with math and physics, this may be a bit challenging, but certainly not entirely over your head.Enjoy.: You should download the supporting document and slides (you should download the MathType fonts here ). This will help you learn faster!Republicans’ long-awaited tax bill, unveiled on Thursday, targets key renewable energy tax credits that have helped make clean energy a crucial high-wage job-creating sector in the United States.
The measure would slash the wind Production Tax Credit (PTC) by over a third, weaken the solar tax credit, and eliminate the $7,500 credit for the purchase of electric vehicles. The solar and wind credits were part of a major bipartisan deal reached in December 2015, in which the credits were extended for several years while being reduced or phased out over time.
“This proposal reneges on the tax reform deal that was already agreed to, and would impose a retroactive tax hike on an entire industry,” said American Wind Energy Association CEO Tom Kiernan in a statement. “The House proposal would pull the rug out from under 100,000 U.S. wind workers and 500 American factories, including some of the fastest growing jobs in the country.”
President Donald Trump called the tax bill, which he asserted will be enacted before years end, a “big, beautiful Christmas gift.” It is definitely a gift to the richest one percent of Americans, who get most of the tax cut. And it’s a big tax cut for the most powerful multinational corporations — as well as wealthy foreign investors.
Advertisement
But for the average American, it is a big lump of coal. Ninety-five percent of taxpayers would barely see their average after-tax incomes increase, as ThinkProgress’ Rebekah Entralgo has reported.
As for longer-term impacts, the plan would cut billions of dollars in incentives for the biggest new source of sustainable high-wage employment in the world: clean energy. And many of those jobs in red states.
In contrast, China will be investing $360 billion in renewable generation alone by 2020, which Beijing calculates will employ more than 13 million people. And while we are cutting back support for electric cars, China, India, and much of Europe are planning to ban non-electric cars in the next decade or two, even as they ramp up investment.
Based on their trickle-down theory, the GOP calls its plan the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.” But unless you’re among the wealthiest few, you won’t be seeing a tax cut — nor will you be seeing millions of high-wage clean energy jobs opening up.
Advertisement
You will be seeing and breathing more dirty air, though, since the tax cut would amplify the administration’s pro-pollution, pro-coal policies by undermining two of coal’s biggest competitors, solar and wind.
Merry Christmas.- According to Dave Meltzer on Wrestling Observer Radio last night, it appears likely that New Japan Pro Wrestling will attempt to utilize some Ring of Honor talents during the G1 Climax Tournament this summer. Several extra dates have been added to the tour over previous years.
Meltzer said that Matt Taven, Michael Bennett and Adam Cole were all likely to be used, with Bobby Fish and Kyle O'Reilly not expected for the tournament. Taven and Bennett, collectively known as Kingdom, won the IWGP Tag Team Championship earlier this month.
- Ring of Honor talent Jay Lethal reached a milestone earlier this month as well, as he passed the one year mark since winning the Ring of Honor World Television Championship. Lethal shattered the previous record, held by Matt Taven at 287 days. He's also defended the title 26 times, more than double the previous record.
- A reminder for fans of New Japan Pro Wrestling on AXS, the first portion of season 1 concluded last Friday. AXS extended the first season for an additional 12 episodes, which will return on May 22 with matches from the "Best of the Super Juniors XXI" tournament.Much should be done to guarantee that there is no barriers between urban and rural areas. It is becoming increasingly difficult for students from rural areas to receive a high-quality education. I've noticed that there are fewer rural students in universities compared with 20 years ago. What's more, rural college students have to come face to face with the gloomy prospects after graduation, with lack of transparency or the use of guanxi is particularly evident in competition for jobs at monopoly industries.
Netizen [icwu]
Employee Stock Participation Plan (ESPP) Plan: The plan calls for the enterprise to issue Special Preferred Shares (SPS) to an employee organized and sponsored ESPP Trust Fund as a means of incentive to employees and also as a means to raise 'low cost' funds. ESPP Trust Fund in turn gets its funding (to purchase SPS) from third party institutions (such as commercial banks,funds and finance companies and/or governments etc.) with the purchased SPS as colleterals, which fundings should be low cost (below normal commercial costs and subsidized by the government if needed). SPS: These are non-voting preferred shares carrying a market-based fixed dividend rate (or alternatively a lower fixed dividend rate plus a variable dividend rate pegged to the enterprise's earnings performance) and also carrying a perpetual PUT Option pegged to the enterprise's VAT (at the time of issuance or the enterprise's current VAT). The dividends will be cumulative (i.e. their payment can be postponed but will be paid eventually). Benefits: 1. The issuing enterprise gets flexible low cost fundings without diluting its equity investors, which is more flexible and cost-effective than funding through bonds or common equities and also gets added loyal and incentivized employees at the same time; 2. The employees get participation in the enterprise's performace and also get a added meaningful bonus to their retirement funds; 3. The government gets a harmonious'sharing' enterprise and economic environment, better enterprise governance (with added supervision by employees) and added comsumption dynamics (helped by the added wealth effect of richer emloyees).A Microsoft executive has revealed that the company is seeking to expand its headcount in China by more than 20 percent over the next year by hiring 1,000 staff in the country, as noted by Reuters.
Ralph Haupter, CEO of Greater China for Microsoft, said the new hires will join research and development, sales, marketing and services teams. Haupter came on as head of the region in April during a management shuffle.
Microsoft already employs 4,500 workers in China, but an influx of 1,000 new faces would represent a big push for the software giant. Much of the growth could come from an under-construction cloud computing center in Shanghai that could house as many as 600 employees when it is finished.
R&D spending in China, which currently amounts to $500 million per year, will also go up 15 percent during the same period, Reuters reported Microsoft’s chairman of Asia Pacific R&D as saying.
The company has for years struggled against rampant software piracy in the country, but it still views the market as an opportunity. Global CEO Steve Ballmer said in May that he is “super excited” about China’s growth, while noting that weak intellectual property protection has made it hard for software companies to make money. One estimate from the Business Software Alliance claimed China had a legal software market of $3 billion last year and an illegal one nearly three times the size.
Microsoft isn’t just sitting idle, though, as it has taken steps to fight piracy. At the start of this year, Microsoft sued Gome, one of China’s biggest electronics distributors, for selling illegal copies of its software.
The upcoming launch of Windows 8, Windows 8 Phone and the Surface tablet should give Microsoft some momentum, and China is undoubtedly part of the equation. The company has already begun promoting Windows 8 to China with a localized Xbox Live website.
Image: TNW
Read next: Jumpshare launches to meet your quick file sharing needsThat colleague was conservative Rep. Daryl Metcalfe, who interrupted Bradford mid-sentence with a personal bit of information.
"Look, I'm a heterosexual. I have a wife, I love my wife, I don't like men - as you might. But stop touching me all the time," Metcalfe told Bradford, who then began laughing.
Several other members of the committee, which Metcalfe chairs, giggled and smirked.
"Keep your hands to yourself," said Metcalfe, a Republican from Butler County. "If you want to touch somebody, you have people on your side of the aisle who might like it.
"I don't."
Bradford, a Democrat, appeared to be stunned by the comments.
"OK, chairman, chairman," he said, widely grinning as committee members laughed.
One member appeared to conceal her face from the camera with her hand. "We're officially off the rails.... My intent was just to beg for your permission for about 30 seconds."
"Then beg, don't touch," responded Metcalfe, who is serving his 10th term in office. Bradford continued to laugh.
"I don't know where we go from here, really," Bradford said.
Bradford is married to a woman and has four children, according to his online biography.
Neither Bradford nor Metcalfe could be immediately reached for comment.
Pennsylvania's first openly gay legislator, Rep. Brian Sims, sits on the state government committee and turned to Facebook to express his outrage toward Metcalfe, whom he called the Pennsylvania House Republican Caucus's "head bigot."
"PA State Representative Daryl Metcalfe disrupted a State Government Committee meeting this morning - about a land use bill! - to loudly declare his heterosexuality!" wrote Sims, a Democrat. "You can't make this stuff up! The most homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, xenophobic member of our government is using legislative time, and tax payer dollars, to interrupt a meeting to announce his sexual orientation."
In the wake of Metcalfe's comments, the Pennsylvania Democratic Party called for his resignation.
"Enough is enough. Daryl Metcalfe is a walking, talking embarrassment to Pennsylvanians and doesn't deserve the honor of serving in public office," said spokesman Brandon Cwalina in a statement.
In an interview with Triblive.com, Bradford said Metcalfe's comments were "unpleasant and awkward and appalling."
"In this day and age, that's really inappropriate," he said.
When asked by Triblive.com if he meant to suggest that Bradford is gay, Metcalfe said he did not know.
"I don't know what [Bradford's sexuality] is," he said. "But I know from him touching me all the time that he indicates he likes to touch men."
When informed of Metcalfe's response, Bradford told Triblive.com he often tries to calm Metcalfe down during contentious committee meetings and smooth disagreements between Metcalfe and other members.
"I speak with my hands," Bradford said. "I've tried to calm him down."
Metcalfe has repeatedly spoken out against homosexuality. In 2013, he invoked a House rule to stop Sims from speaking about the Supreme Court's same-sex marriage rulings.
"For me to allow [Sims] to say things that I believe are open rebellion against God are for me to participate in his open rebellion," Metcalfe told the Associated Press at the time.
He also led the charge to impeach then-Attorney General Kathleen Kane, who he said created a "constitutional crisis" by refusing to defend the state's same-sex marriage ban, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
When the Supreme Court recognized same-sex marriages across the country in 2015, Metcalfe said the justices displayed "judicial tyranny," according to PennLive.
"It shows what tyrants they are when they think that they can place themselves above God's law, above natural law, and above the will of the American people as we've seen it expressed in state after state after state," Metcalfe said.New iPhone or old? Old of course. But the new one probably won’t look much different.
The new iPhone looks pretty much like the old iPhone. Sure, it’s a bit taller, allowing for a display that has one extra row of icons on the Home screen. And instead of the glass that you find on the back of today’s iPhone, the new model’s posterior is composed mainly of some kind of metal—either stainless steel or aluminum that has been polished and, in the case of the black version, treated by a chemical process to turn it a dark, matte gray. (On the white model, the metal on the back looks untreated.) The other difference is the dock connector—instead of the inch-wide plug that Apple has placed on almost every iPod, iPhone, and iPad since 2003, the new iPhone will inaugurate a new, tiny plug that we’ll presumably find on all of Apple’s other devices, too. Finally, and strangely, the headphone jack is now on the bottom of the phone, rather than the top.
But that’s it. When CEO Tim Cook announces the next iPhone sometime next month, industrial designers and Apple obsessives are going to scrutinize all of the changes, but I bet ordinary users won’t look twice. The iPhone’s design touchstones—the Home button, the wide top and bottom bezel surrounding the screen, the just-perfect width—are all there on the new model. The volume buttons and the mute switch are also unchanged. If you were to give the new phone to folks who don’t follow the tech industry closely, your respondents would recognize the thing as an iPhone—not the “new iPhone,” not the “iPhone 5,” not the best iPhone yet, but just the iPhone.
And that, I think, explains why we know all this stuff about the new iPhone in the first place. Over the last few months, 9To5Mac.com, iLabFactory and other blogs that follow Apple obsessively have posted a string of images of parts from the new phone. Not only have we seen top, bottom, and side views of the iPhone, but we’ve also seen several pictures of its components—the motherboard, the battery, the dock connector—and even some videos, too.
Such leaks are highly unusual. The tech press usually gets one or two pictures of unannounced Apple products, but it’s rare—other than when a prototype goes missing in a bar—to see so many photos that give up so many details of a new gadget. In an appearance at the D10 conference in May, Cook told the crowd that Apple would “double down on secrecy on products.” On Twitter, I’ve seen some speculation that the leaked pictures are part of an elaborate conspiracy to trick the tech press—that Apple may have created and planted decoy iPhone parts in the |
OUR WONDERFUL FELLOW FANS WHO HAVE BEEN PART OF ALL THE AMAZING MEMORIES WE'VE MADE IN VANCOUVER WITH THE OFFICIAL STARGATE SG-1/ATLANTIS/SGU
CONVENTIONS. A SPECIAL HEARTFELT SHOUT-OUT TO MGM AND BRIDGE STUDIOS AND THE AMAZING WRITERS, PRODUCERS, ACTORS, SPECIAL EFFECTS FOLKS, PROP AND COSTUME DESIGNERS AND ALL THE TEAMS IN FRONT AND BEHIND THE CAMERAS OF THE AWESOME STARGATE TV AND DVD FRANCHISE. Thank you for letting us be a part of the adventure and letting us make history with our set visits! WE HOPE YOU HAD AS MUCH FUN AS WE DID AND WE LOOK
FORWARD TO SEEING YOU SOON Your friends at Creation Entertainment Back To Top Creation assumes no responsibility for typographical errors or inaccurate information provided by convention venues. All dates, venues and guests are considered tentative and subject to change. Check back frequently for updates. NOTE: ALL TICKETS ARE NON-REFUNDABLE AND NON-EXCHANGEABLE. ABSOLUTELY NO AUDIO OR VIDEOTAPING ALLOWED AT ANY CONVENTION. Still photography is for personal use only - public dissemination and commercial use strictly prohibited. By attending Creation events you agree to allow your image to be used on our website and in news documentaries or stories, either filmed by Creation Entertainment or other entities. All ticket prices are subject to change, please order as early as possible.'You're dying b****!' Court releases the chilling audio recording of two teen burglars being murdered by homeowner, 65, who set a trap for them in his basement
Minnesota court releases tapes recorded by killer Byron Smith, 65, of the moments he killed the two teens who tried to rob him on Thanksgiving 2012
Byron Smith, a 65-year-old retiree who once set up security in American embassies for the U.S. State Department, shot Nick Brady, 17, and Haile Kifer, 18
The recordings capture the shocking moment Smith taunts Kifer just before he shoots her, saying, 'You're dying, b****'
Prosecutors key evidence was an audio recording that captured the killings in chilling detail, including Smith's taunts as the teens died
On Tuesday jurors convicted Byron Smith, 65, and a judge sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the killings
Smith never denied shooting the teens, but told police he had feared for his life
A window shatters.
The sound of footsteps is followed by sharp cracks of gunshots, a teenager's groans and a fall. Minutes later, there are more bangs and screams from another teen before she, too, was silenced by a central Minnesota homeowner who was convicted of plotting the whole thing.
A day after Byron Smith was found guilty of premeditated murder, jurors said the audio of the Thanksgiving Day 2012 killings of two unarmed teens - a recording that the 65-year-old switched on before the break-in occurred - was key in his conviction.
The recording captured the sounds of Smith shooting Brady as he came down the stairs. Brady groans after the first and second shots, but is silent after a third shot, and Smith can be heard saying, 'You're dead.'
Scroll Down to Listen: WARNING GRAPHIC AND DISTURBING CONTENT
Guilty: Byron Smith on Tuesday in Little Falls, Minnesota on the day the jury took only about three hours to reject his claim of self-defense. He was immediately sentenced to life without parole
Prosecutors say Smith put Brady's body on a tarp and dragged it into another room, then sat down and reloaded his weapon.
Rejected defense: Byron Smith walks into the courtroom to hear the verdict in his murder trial
Kifer whispers, 'Nick?' A shot is fired, and Kifer screams 'oh my God'. Smith apologizes as his gun jams, then fires at Kifer four more times and says: 'You're dying, b***h'.
A sixth and final shot - Smith described it as a 'finishing shot' to investigators - was heard soon after.
'That was the most damning piece of evidence in my mind,' Wes Hatlestad, one of 12 jurors, said Wednesday.
'That audio recording of the actual killings and the audio recording of Mr. Smith's interview immediately after his arrest... pretty much convinced me that we were dealing with a deranged individual.'
Smith shot 17-year-old Nick Brady and 18-year-old Haile Kifer as they descended the stairs into his basement, where prosecutors say Smith was waiting.
Jurors convicted Byron Smith, 65, and a judge sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole for killing at his home in rural Little Falls, Minnesota, on Thanksgiving Day in November 2012.
Listen Here:
Shot: In this undated photo released by Morrison County Attorney's Office, the basement of Minnesota homeowner Byron Smith where Smith shot and killed two teenagers during a break-in is seen
On a day most Americans spend gathering with family and friends, Smith had turned on an audio recorder and sat down with a novel alone in a basement chair wedged between bookcases with a rifle at his side and a handgun on his hip
The case helped fuel a national debate about how far a person can go to protect himself from bodily harm and his home. It also divided Little Falls, a town of about 8,300 located 100 miles north of Minneapolis.
Smith never denied shooting the teens, but told police he had feared for his life.
Prosecutors say Smith had moved his truck to make it look like no one was home, then sat in a chair at the bottom of his stairs with a book, energy bars, a bottle of water and two guns. He also set up a hand-held recorder on a bookshelf.
Kifer's aunt, Laurie Skipper, read a statement from her niece's parents: 'Byron Smith made a conscious choice to shoot and kill our beautiful daughter Haile. The feelings of helplessness are overwhelming.'
Prosecutors said Smith's plan was set in motion on the morning of the killings, after Smith saw a neighbor whom he believed responsible for prior burglaries.
Prosecutors say Smith moved his truck to make it look like no one was home, and then settled into a basement chair with a book, energy bars, a bottle of water and two guns.
Lost life: Cousins Haile Kifer, 18 (left), and Nick Brady, 17 (right), were shot dead on Thanksgiving Day 2012 after breaking into Smith's home in Little Falls, Minnesota
Hunted: Smith claimed he killed the teens in self-defense, but prosecutors proved that he staked out in the basement of his home - waiting for burglars
On a day most Americans spend gathering with family and friends, Smith had turned on an audio recorder and sat down with a novel alone in a basement chair wedged between bookcases with a rifle at his side and a handgun on his hip.
Smith also set up a hand-held recorder on a bookshelf, which captured audio of the shootings, and had installed a surveillance system that recorded images of Brady trying to enter the house.
Defense attorneys said Smith was afraid after prior break-ins and was hiding from intruders, whom he feared were armed. Smith had previously installed video surveillance, and defense attorney Steve Meshbesher said Wednesday that Smith set up the audio recording as another means of protection.
'He was afraid that he might be killed,' Meshbesher said. 'He did it in case he was shot and killed in his house, and the police would have some evidence to use, and the family would be able to find the perpetrators.'
Meshbesher said jurors should have heard the whole recording, not just the portion selected by prosecutors. He said Smith plans to appeal.
Ted Sampsell-Jones, a criminal law professor at William Mitchell College of Law, said the audio recording was devastating to the defense, noting that Smith's taunts to the victims don't show a man in a panic.
'It was very powerful, and it makes it very clear that... he didn't do this because he had to. He did it because he wanted to. And that is not what self-defense is about,' Sampsell-Jones said.
Vermin: Audio recordings played in the trial revealed Smith calling the teens'vermin' after shooting them dead in his basement. Pictured above leaving court on Tuesday
Time lapse: After killing the teens, he hid them in his house and waited a full day before telling a neighbor to call 911 about the break-in. Pictured above in court on Tuesday
Fighting: Smith's lawyer said they would be appealing the case. pictured above on Tuesday
Hatlestad said he felt early on in the trial that the killings were planned.
He said the fact that Smith moved his truck from his home was significant, and he was struck that Smith positioned himself at the bottom of the stairs in 'a little hidey hole,' with a tarp ready.
He said jurors went through each charge point by point, 'and reasonably quickly came to the conclusion that we thought it was in fact premeditated,' Hatlestad said.
He said jurors talked about the 'deer stand' that Smith set up to wait for the teens, and he also compared the set up to a'shooting gallery' - a carnival game where a shooter waits for an object to march into view.
The two cousins were active in athletics at two local high schools. They were also linked to a burglary the day before they were shot and killed, though the judge excluded evidence about their histories from the trial as irrelevant
The teens' killings stirred debate around the state and in Little Falls - a Mississippi River city of 8,000 about 100 miles northwest of Minneapolis - about how far a homeowner can go in responding to a threat.
Minnesota law allows deadly force to prevent a felony from taking place in one's home or dwelling, but one's actions must be considered reasonable under the circumstances.
Hatlestad said jurors gave careful consideration to the self-defense and defense-of-dwelling claims. He said the jurors supported Minnesota's laws, but found that Smith's actions didn't meet the requirements to justify the teens' killings.Body
Starting Monday, June 5, Sound Transit is putting more three-car light rail trains into weekday service to meet increasing demand and prepare for expected peak summer crowds.
Link carried an average of 71,300 riders on weekdays in April, a 17 percent increase over 2016. April was the first full month to compare year-over-year ridership since new Link stations on Capitol Hill and at the University of Washington opened in March, 2016.
Based on past performance, ridership is expected to continue climbing this summer during the peak Seattle tourist season. So we're boosting weekday capacity to meet growing demand.
Here's how.
We'll start the day at 5 a.m. with 12 three-car trains and add seven more two-car trains during peak hours. (Currently we start the day with 12 two-car trains and add seven three-car trains during peak hours.) Around 6:30 p.m. the three-car trains will start coming offline for daily maintenance and cleaning so they're ready for service the next weekday. The seven two-car trains will stay online until service stops at 1 a.m. for overnight station and tunnel maintenance.
We will be able to adjust evening train sizes and deploy additional trains as needed to accommodate special events like evening Sounders FC or Mariners games.
Balancing efficient service to meet rising demand
It's a tricky balancing act to meet booming rush-hour demands without running more service than needed during off-peak hours and incurring higher maintenance costs from additional wear and tear. Just like other busy rail systems around the world, we size our fleet and service levels to carry at least as many people standing as seated during the busiest times.
However, by monitoring trip-level ridership during the past few months, we have seen heavy train loads stretching beyond traditional rush hours with some rush-hour trips nearing maximum capacity. The latter case is especially true when there is any sort of delay in the congested Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel that causes missed train trips. When that happens, it can take several follow-up trains to clear rush-hour platforms.
Add to these considerations that summertime has traditionally been our busiest time for riding Link when we see steady demand throughout the day, not just during rush hours. We also see this phenomenon on many Fridays year round for whatever reason. Everybody leaving work early? Travelers headed to the airport? It's hard to pinpoint, but we know the riders are there.
So thank you for riding. Your demand has fueled the fastest-growing transit ridership in the nation's fastest growing big city. We're doing everything we can to make that ride a good one.
Back to The Platform »This week on the MMO Show. I’m going with a PVP theme, and it will be broken into three categories.
MMO/PVP leagues of their own
MMO/PVP Theme Park
MMO/PVP Be good or GTFO
I just wanted to shed a little light on these games. Majority if not all of them are very good solid games. And I want to also ask yourself. As an MMO gamer what do you really want? Because I think a lot of gamers don't really know. Some gamers ask say they want sandbox pvp. But when they get it, this is either ; to hard, to much, to sandbox, to themepark, you get the meaning here. I don't think a sweet spot exists. Once upon a time we did have a PVP/MMO called Fury. It flamed out because again everyone got what they wanted. But really couldn't handle what they wanted. It's sort of happening again with Darkfall. We will see if that game can do what Fury didn't.
MMO/PVP leagues of their own
Tera= http://tera.enmasse.com/
Darkfall= http://www.darkfallonline.com/
Aion Online= http://na.aiononline.com/en/
Guild Wars 2= https://www.guildwars2.com/en/
Age of Wushu= http://www.ageofwushu.com/
MMO/PVP Theme Park
World of Warcraft= http://us.battle.net/wow/en/
Rift= http://www.riftgame.com/en/
Black Gold Online= http://bg.snailgame.com/
Scarlet Blade= http://scarletblade.aeriagames.com/
Star Wars: The Old Republic= http://www.swtor.com/
Swordsman Online= https://www.arcgames.com/en/splash/swordsman
MMO/PVP Be good or GTFO
Dragon Nest= http://dragonnest.nexon.net/
Vindictus= http://vindictus.nexon.net/landing/
C9= http://c9.webzen.com/main
Transformers Universe= https://www.transformersuniverse.com/
========================================================================
Bonus PVP Video Das Tal Get a good look it might be goodPatna: The Bodhi tree in Bodh Gaya, under which Lord Buddha is believed to have attained enlightenment, is healthy once again.
"The Bodhi tree is fully healthy now," said Subhash Nautiyal, one of the two scientists from the Dehradun-based Forest Research Institute (FRI).
Nautiyal said he and his colleague Nirmal Sudhir Kumar removed concrete slabs around the base of the Bodhi tree to resurrect it in a way, after there were fears that it would die out.
"It will help the tree to receive water and nutrition in its roots," he said.
Nautiyal, a plant physiologist, along with plant pathologist Kumar were roped in to examine the tree, Bodh Gaya Temple Management Committee member secretary Nangzey Dorje said on Wednesday.
A few dry branches of the tree will be pruned on Wednesday keeping in mind the safety of pilgrims and tourists.
The temple had sought the help of FRI in 2007 after the Bodhi tree was affected with a milibug disease.
It was in Bodh Gaya, about 100 km from here, that Lord Buddha attained enlightenment over 2,500 years ago. The 1,500-year-old temple stands behind the sacred tree.
IANS
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.**Warning: The details and video in the player below are graphic**
ATLANTA, Ga. — A Georgia man lost one of his legs last week when he reportedly shot at a lawn mower that was filled with explosives.
The whole incident was caught on video.
WXIA reports that a 911 caller said David Pressley, 32, was shooting at a mixture of ammonium nitrate and aluminum powder and had “possibly blown his legs off from the explosion.”
Video shows the man continuously shooting at the lawn mower. He gets a little closer, and on his last shot, the lawn mower blows up.
The man is heard yelling, “I blew my leg off.”
After it happened, the man’s friends helped him to the roadway, where they were met by safety crews.
He’s now recovering in the hospital.
Read more here.Copyright by WPRI - All rights reserved
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) -- Two protesters who tried to block an entrance to the TD Bank on Westminster Street in Providence Thursday morning were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.
The demonstrators were protesting the Dakota Access Oil Pipeline. They claim TD Bank is one of the main lenders of the project.
TD Bank released a statement Thursday in response:
"TD supports responsible energy development. We employ due diligence in our lending and investing activities relating to energy production. We also work with our customers, community and environment groups, and energy clients to better understand key issues of concern, and to promote informed dialogue.
"Our oil and gas sector lending represents less than 1% of our total lending portfolio."
Police confirmed Laura Borth, 24, of Weymouth, Mass., and Steve Davis, 30, of Rockport, Mass., were charged with disorderly conduct.
The group claiming to have organized the protest told Eyewitness News they are in solidarity with a North Dakota Native American tribe affected by the pipeline construction project, which the tribe says threatens sacred sites and the Missouri River.One of the many questions our community returns to is on the subject of servers. Today we are very happy to announce that Funcom has partnered with Pingperfect on Conan Exiles. In addition to providing the servers hosted by Funcom they will also have private servers available for players to rent. You can reserve yours ready for the game’s launch by going to Pingperfect.com now
Pingperfect is a specialist supplier of game server hardware and web hosting services, with a proven international track record. They employ a dedicated team of gamers, programmers and network technicians to monitor and maintain game servers and host a wide range of servers across the globe for many of the most popular games on the market using the latest network technology.
“As a company, we have a few core values, the most important of which include; keeping up to date with the latest hardware to host our game servers on, making sure that at no time any of our dedicated servers are overloaded and to provide the best customer support we possibly can. It is these core values that help ensure all our game servers run as efficiently as possible,” says Pingperfect technical director James Lyon.
For the launch of Early Access we are aiming for a total online player count of up to 70 players per server, with hopes to increase this as the game grows leading up to full release.
“With Conan Exiles it’s not just a supplier customer relationship, it’s a partnership. It’s about working together to serve Funcom’s customers’ needs and delivering fast, reliable game servers and outstanding customer support,” says James.
Official servers and communities
We’ve decided to include three types of official servers to accommodate both preferences: PvP servers, PvE servers and PvP Blitz servers. These settings will only apply to official servers. Admins are free to choose whatever settings they want on unofficial servers.
The regular official PvP and PvE servers will not be wiped. The PvP Blitz servers will provide an accelerated experience, but will reset after 30 days. This ensures that players on PvP Blitz servers will be able to experience everything Conan Exiles has to offer before their progression is reset.
PvP Blitz servers will be tagged in the server description so you can easily differentiate them from the regular PvP and PvE servers.
We want to offer players a wide variety of servers for different kinds of communities, which is why we’ve made community filters to help players find the community they want to play with. The communities are:
Purist
Relaxed
Hard core
Roleplaying
Experimental
Private servers
Private servers are where players can modify and alter the gameplay experience to their own specifications, adjusting various settings to their liking.
Setting up a private server is incredibly easy. A copy of Conan Exiles purchased through Steam comes packaged with a dedicated server tool. Once the game exists in your library you can install a private server on any machine from Steam. Head to your Steam library, go to the tools menu and find Conan Exiles. From there you can install your private Conan Exiles server and set it up. You can find an example of some of the server settings in the image below.
The server settings are available to server admins from inside the game via the options > Server Settings GUI. From here you can enable PvP gameplay, turn the sandstorm on and off, and choose what players lose when they die. Things like the day/night cycle, player health and stamina, resource yield, experience growth and resource spawn rate.
Everything can be adjusted and implemented on the fly, without the need for a server restart to activate the changes you’ve made. Just hit apply and the world around you and your player will adjust immediately.
The admin panel
As a server admin you will also have access to a full featured admin panel. From here you can spawn in any item found in the game, from crafting resources to weapons, armor and clothing. Building pieces will also be available to you at the touch of a button, and if you want to you can instantly give your character all the crafting recipes found in the game.
Server admins can also spawn in all NPCs, both humans and creatures. In addition to this it’s possible to increase your character’s movement speed, turn them invisible, remove hunger and thirst, teleport and quickly level up. This is perfect for roleplay servers where admins craft scenarios and design special challenges for their players.
Mods
Conan Exiles will feature full mod support on PC. This is planned to be available from the start of Early Access. Mod developers will be able to download a custom Unreal Engine editor, letting them create a whole host of modifications to the game. Everything from changing aspects of gameplay to adding new monsters and items to the game can be done with the modding tools. A mod management tool which connects to the Steam Workshop allows players to easily load in the mods they want to play with. More information on the mod system and tools will be revealed soon.The Guardian has a new story on the spying scandal which, like many, many other stories on this topic, quotes someone bloviating about the ‘shocked, shocked’ bit in Casablanca. However, the body of the article makes it clear that the really interesting story isn’t one about allies spying on each other. It’s one about how spying agencies within allied countries work together across borders to loosen national controls on what they can or cannot do.
The Guardian’s documents show how Britain’s NSA-equivalent, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), has been particularly enthusiastic in pushing for laxer controls in allied countries. The GCHQ helped the German intelligence services push for reform of ‘very restrictive … legislation’ on surveillance in Germany. It claims partial credit for the Swedish intelligence service’s success in pushing for a highly controversial law that allowed the intelligence services to tap into fiber optic cables. The GCHQ also gave Dutch intelligence legal advice on how best to push for changes in legislation.
Controversies between countries often obscure important relations across them. In this case, they obscure how intelligence agencies and homeland security/interior ministries can act as a tacit cross-national coalition, working together to weaken laws that limit the gathering of data. Since spying agencies share this data (and often turn to each other when they need particular analytic tools), they have a common interest in weakening laws across national jurisdictions. Everyone is focusing on disputes between countries over how to manage intelligence. They aren’t paying much attention to the issues that the Guardian story highlights – how intelligence services can work together across borders to weaken laws that aren’t in their interest.
As Abraham Newman and I have written about other transatlantic security issues, where we show how the last decade has seen the cementing of new cross-national alliances between security-focused actors aimed at weakening existing privacy laws. These coalitions don’t get very much attention – pundits and journalists prefer to focus on the big, splashy transatlantic fights and disputes, rather than the patient forging of new bureaucratic relationships in international forums that don’t get much public attention. Yet it’s the quiet politics of the gradual weakening of restraints and slow accretion of bureaucratic power that has the more important political consequences.A/N: I still don't know, really, how this got to be as popular as it was. I guess the need to read about a fluffy crack ship was as great as my desire to write one. This takes place approximately a year and a half after the end of A Thorny Tangled Triangle.
Days of Yule
Chapter 4: A Thorny Tangled Family
"Time?" Pyrrha called out frantically as she stretched up onto her tiptoes, balancing with all the grace of a skilled Huntress.
"Relax, fluffy fox," Blake smiled warmly from behind her. "We have plenty of time still."
"And even if we didn't," Ruby added from where she sprawled on the floor, "you know it's not gonna matter any! This is family!"
"I know, I know," the leggy redhead sighed as she fastened the end of the garland to the corner of the living room. "I'm just excited, this is the first holiday together we will have as a family, after traveling to Atlas last year, and then with guests…"
Smirking, Blake stepped forward, holding the box of decorations off to the side as she wrapped a reassuring arm around her Mate's waist and nuzzled her cheek into her back. She didn't say anything, just let a happy rumble vibrate through her chest and into the anxious woman while sending calming waves of love through their bond.
"You're right," Pyrrha sighed, leaning into the embrace while remaining mindful of the growing bump in the Cat Faunus' belly. "I'm being foolish."
"Not foolish," Blake quietly disagreed. "But perhaps a bit wasteful of your energy."
"Need to save up that energy!" Ruby chirped. She was on her back, now, allowing a gleeful toddler to climb up onto her chest.
"Yes, I suppose it might be a bit exhausting having visitors in our small space…" Pyrrha mused.
"Nope, for tonight!" The brunette giggled, the sound eliciting a joyful burble of noise from the small redheaded girl currently claiming space atop Mount Ruby. Her furry red ears twitched and turned as she kept track of all of her mothers' locations at all times.
"Tonight…? Ohhh…." Pyrrha's face blushed brightly as she recalled what her lovers had in store for her that evening.
"And, even now, we can still make you blush," Blake laughed softly as she released her hold.
Ruby's giggles turned into a rather naughty snicker, one which managed to entrance their daughter further. "Yep, still got it."
Pyrrha shook her head ruefully as she stepped back to verify that she'd hung the garland across evenly. "What you are, little rose, is incorrigible."
"No arguments here!"
"Mmm."
Garnet's head perked up before she wriggled herself into a sitting position, heedless of her position in between the brunette's breasts. She let out a soft mewl that was directed at the raven-haired woman.
"Already?" Blake asked incredulously.
Her redheaded Mate grinned. "It's been an hour, love."
"Don't worry, kitty cat, I'll take her," Ruby chuckled. With one swift motion, she rolled to her feet, clutching the toddler around the waist so that she ended upside-down, downy hair just brushing the floor. Garnet let out a peal of laughter at her newfound position.
"Ruby, do be careful," Pyrrha admonished. "If she has to pee, that is not the best position for her…"
"Yeah, we don't need another incident," Ruby agreed, flipping her back over so that she was now carrying her in a more traditional manner. "No more accidents, right, little gem?"
Garnet let out a happy mewl of agreement, contentedly wrapping her arms around Ruby's neck as she was toted over towards the bathroom.
"I still find it remarkable," Pyrrha murmured as she pulled a handful of cheery-looking silver bells from the box Blake carried. "The fact that she's already potty-trained before her second birthday."
A knock sounded at the door, prompting the raven-haired woman to carefully place the box down on an endtable before making her way over. "Faunus cubs are not fond of diapers," she returned with a smile. Her expression widened as she opened the door to reveal another two members of their extended family. "Yang, Weiss! Welcome!"
"Heya, kitten," her blonde partner grinned, wrapping her up in a careful hug. "So this is the new place, huh?"
"Indeed," Pyrrha smiled warmly as she strode over to switch off with her Mate. She bent over to give an awkward but nonetheless happy embrace to the very pregnant woman.
"How are you doing?" she inquired courteously.
"Eh, not too bad so far," the blonde shrugged. She glanced sideways at her wife, who was cooing over Blake's baby bump, now far more evident than the last time they'd gotten together. "Weiss keeps pampering me," Yang admitted in a whisper. "It's gettin' a little, y'know… smothering."
"Yang, you should sit," the platinum-haired woman in question ordered, taking her wife by the elbow and leading her over towards the couch. Yang rolled her eyes humorously but complied readily enough, slipping her shoes off to rub at her swollen ankles.
Weiss hovered over the blonde anxiously for a moment. "Do you need anything? Tea, perhaps?" She whirled around towards her hosts, who were each attempting to restrain their humorous expressions. "Do you have any decaf tea? The doctor said-"
"Wow, look at you, Weiss," her partner called out gleefully, toddler carried alongside once more. Garnet let out a cheery call as she spotted two more of her favorite people. "You're being all domesticated and motherly."
"I'm not… Ruby Rose, you of all people should understand the delicacy of this stage," Weiss retorted with a stamp of her foot. "In the last trimester, we need to ensure that-"
"Emergency niece distraction!" the brunette sang out, thrusting Garnet into Weiss' arms.
"I'm not… I don't…" The platinum-haired woman's face softened quickly until she was grinning at the girl in her arms now. Garnet was purring loudly, reaching up with tiny hands to try and catch the wisps of white hair that had escaped their ponytail holder as her silver eyes shone with wonder. "Well hello, there, Garnet. Are you happy to see your Aunt Weiss? Yes, you are, aren't you, you beautiful little girl, you…"
"Works every time," Blake laughed, returning to her box. "Did we want to even bother with the rest of these?"
"Nah, not if you want my opinion," Yang drawled, leaning back and stretching her arms over her head. "The place looks great, you guys. Pretty much the same layout as your old place, though, right? Just a lil' roomier?"
"Yep!" Ruby flopped down onto the couch next to her sister, giving her a side-armed hug. "Three bedrooms now, and the kitchen's a bit bigger. Plus the dining area is a bit more defined, y'know? Lets us use a bigger table."
"Oh, yeah, that's new, right?"
"Yes, Blake has a friend within the movement who is a carpenter," Pyrrha interjected as she curled up on the floor in front of her brunette lover. "Made it all by hand, we have enough chairs for eight."
"Nice!" Yang cheered before sobering. "So, um, I got some bad news, dad called me on the way in…"
"Ugh, lemme guess," Ruby answered with a roll of her expressive silver eyes. "He can't make it? Last-minute hunting gig?"
"Yeah, pretty much…"
"He's such a coward, can't even tell me himself…"
"Well, you get those puppy-dog eyes and he can't handle the guilt."
"There are few who can resist the puppy-dog eyes," Blake agreed. She sat beside the brunette, feet tucked up under her, to lean into Ruby's side. "It's a powerful weapon."
"Indeed," Pyrrha giggled. "A force carefully used for fear of disrupting the very fabric of space."
"Oh, stop," Ruby snickered. "I'm not all that bad."
At that, she was met by several incredulous snorts of derision, including from her daughter.
"No comments from the peanut gallery!" the brunette called out merrily, blowing a raspberry at the redheaded toddler. Garnet broke out into giggles, snuggling further into Weiss' arms.
The platinum-blonde sashayed over towards the seated women, swinging her niece gently. "So does she still not talk?" Weiss asked curiously.
"She talks," Blake disagreed. "Just not the verbal communication that Humans expect."
"It's been really cool, kinda like learning a new skill," Ruby chimed in. "But once you figure out what all the nonverbals mean, and the gestures and stuff, it's easy."
"And we're in no rush," Pyrrha stated firmly. "Faunus children are not like Human children, and should not be treated as such. Once she's older and feels like it, she can communicate with us in other fashions."
Yang glanced across the top of her sister's head to see Blake settling back with a wide, happy smile on her face. "I think you did real good here, kitten," the blonde stated softly. "Couldn't ask for better mothers."
The Cat Faunus shot her a surprised but pleased grin. "Don't I know it," she answered happily.
"So, then," Pyrrha murmured, her eyes half-lidded as she leaned back. Ruby had begun to play with her long, flowing red hair, twisting it around into intricate patterns. "If Tai is not showing, who else did we invite that accepted?"
"Ah heh heh." Both Ruby and Yang let out identical awkward chuckles as they rubbed the backs of their necks. Though Weiss simply rolled her eyes, muttering about how obvious it was that they were siblings, both Blake and Pyrrha sat up, eyeing them warily.
"You're not very good at playing this off," Ruby mumbled to the blonde.
"Me? What about you?"
"I can't keep anything from them, they know everything I'm feeling!"
"And what I'm feeling right now, little rose," Blake stated ominously, "is a tremendous amount of guilt. What did you do?"
"Okay, now, to be fair," Yang began hurriedly. "We didn't think he'd accept the invite."
"He's even worse than dad about attending family stuff!" Ruby agreed vehemently.
"And yeah, it's been forever since we actually had any time together with him…"
"Well, there was dad's birthday last year."
"Oh, yeah, didn't he show up late to the restaurant?"
"Yep, and then got into a fight when he ogled that guy's wife…"
"Yeah," the blonde sighed. "Good times."
"Wait," Pyrrha interjected, her visage displaying far more calm than her bond was conveying. "Do you mean to tell us…"
"...You invited your Uncle Qrow?" Blake finished worriedly.
"Well, um…" Ruby ducked her head. "Yes?" she finally squeaked.
Blake and Pyrrha shared a level look.
"I'll go make sure any alcohol is well hidden."
"And I'll go hide the kitchen knives."
"Perhaps we should clothe Garnet in something non-flammable?"
"Mmm."
"You guys," Ruby scoffed. "He's not that bad. Besides, he loves all of us! Nothing's gonna happen!"
"Well, now that you've jinxed us all," Weiss smirked, handing her bundle over towards her wife. "I need to use the restroom. You know, before it gets demolished."
"Buncha comedians," Yang grumbled, though she chuckled at the look on her niece's face as she rested on the large bulge of her unborn baby. "Heya, Gigi, what d'ya think about this, then?"
Garnet mewled softly, shifting about until she could press one of her Faunus ears to Yang's belly.
"Last time I saw her that entranced, we introduced her to grapes," Pyrrha smiled.
Blake laughed lightly, reaching across her brunette lover to run her fingers through their daughter's hair, giving the base of her ears a small scritch. "I can't wait for when I'm at this point so that she can feel her sister."
"Oh, yeah?" Yang commented. "You sure it's gonna be a girl?"
"Pretty much guaranteed," her sibling replied. "Just the way the science works, I guess."
"Things are always a little nebulous when Dust is involved," Blake added. "But yes, from the tests run so far, it's a girl. Do you know about yours, yet?"
"Nope," Yang replied cheerfully. "We want it to be a surprise."
"You… You do?" Ruby stared at her sister in shock, before switching it over towards her partner once she re-entered the room. "You really don't need to know if it's a boy or a girl?"
"No, we decided it wasn't necessary," Weiss replied primly.
"Seriously? You, the queen of control?"
"We will both love our child no matter what," Weiss defended, though her composure was beginning to crack.
"Weiss, every birthday you try to guess what your presents are before they're open."
"This is different."
"And it's impossible to try and plan a surprise party for you."
"I simply do not like the unexpected when it comes to… to…" The platinum-haired woman let out a small, anguished cry. "Okay, so it's killing me, alright? I'm dying to know ahead of time, but we agreed |
ershaw doesn’t have to hit this mark to go down as a legend and the greatest pitcher of this generation. That said, it’s time to go.
(Update: As of 12 PM ET, Maddon is going with Quintana in Game 1. Quintana isn’t close to Kershaw in playoff experience, but went 5.2 scoreless IP against the Nats. Not bad at all.)
Okay. Enough about Kershaw (for now): here are the M-SABR picks for the series.
Game 1 – CHC: TBD HOU: Kershaw (18-4, 2.31)
Game 2 – CHC: TBD HOU: Hill, R (12-8, 3.32)
Game 3 – LAD: Darvish (10-12, 3.86) CHC: TBD
Game 4 – LAD: Wood, A (16-3, 2.72) CHC: TBD
Consensus Pick: Dodgers in 6
Update: Corey Seager is out for the series as of 1:30 PM ET. Despite this, we are rolling with our pick.
As a whole, M-SABR was pretty deadset on the Astros taking the ALCS. In our sample of 15 members, 14 picked Houston. This time, we’re about 60/40. Half of us have the Dodgers in 6, 10% of us have the Dodgers in 7, and 40% of us have the Cubs in 7. One thing is clear: we are not expecting a short series with this one.
Let’s begin with the Dodgers. The Dodgers are absolutely stacked. First, Kershaw/Hill/Darvish/Wood is an absolutely nasty postseason rotation (assuming Kershaw gets his playoff woes under control). Next, you have the ridiculous Dodgers lineup. Justin Turner, Corey Seager, Chris Taylor, Cody Bellinger, and Yasiel Puig were all phenomenal this year. That’s right: Chris Taylor and Yasiel Puig are on that list, a duo that combined for 8.5 rWAR this season. There isn’t a clear easy out in the Dodgers lineup. The bullpen is solid and filled with mediocre/failed starters and other players that the Dodgers traded for (Maeda, Morrow, Cingrani, and Watson all fall into this category). Kenley Jansen and Tony Watson are a very solid back-end, however, and Jansen is absolutely electric most of the time. There aren’t really holes on this team.
After reading about the Dodgers, it’s hard to see any team winning a game against them, no? Well, that’s where the reigning world champion Chicago Cubs come in. The Cubs don’t quite match up to the Dodgers, but they’re experienced. The lineup is very good. Rizzo, Zobrist, and Bryant are no strangers to postseason heroics, and there aren’t many easy outs elsewhere. The rotation this year… struggled. Kyle Hendricks is the ace, and he had one brilliant start and one mediocre start in the NLDS. Lester struggled this regular season, posting a 0.8 rWAR, but he showed up for Game 2 of the NLDS. Quintana, too, wasn’t his usual self this season, but he pitched a strong Game 3. Arrieta struggled in Game 4 but posted a 2.28 ERA in the second half of the season (despite being rough in his limited September/October action with a 6.10 ERA in 3 GS). The rotation of Hendricks/Lester/Quintana/Arrieta wasn’t great in the regular season, but hey, they made it, and they managed to escape a close series against a great Nationals team. The bullpen features Wade Davis, Carl Edwards, Brian Duensing, and Justin Wilson, but Justin Wilson has been bad with the Cubs (5.09 ERA in 23 games), and Wade Davis really just carries the bullpen. Overall, as this write-up suggests, the Cubs are very good, but the Dodgers are pretty clearly a superior team… on paper.
Now. Dodgers in 6. If they are so much better, why in 6? Because of consistency. The general club consensus is that the Dodgers are the superior team, but aren’t consistent enough to finish this efficiently. Many of our members who chose the Cubs point toward Kershaw’s playoff failures and the Cubs’ playoff experience, and that’s the biggest argument for the Cubs. John Lester has a 2.57 career postseason ERA in 143.1 IP. Lester is an extremely proven postseason ace. Arrieta has a 3.33 postseason ERA in 46 IP, and Hendricks a 2.60 postseason ERA in 45 IP. The Dodgers never get it done in the playoffs. They’re just like the Nationals, except they can win the Divisional Series. The playoffs are a toss-up, sure, Moneyball taught us that. If they’re purely a toss-up, though, why do the Dodgers and Nationals keep blowing it every year?
Wait.
Wait a minute.
It sounds like we’re taking the Cubs, doesn’t it? The Cubs are a team built for the postseason, and the Dodgers never manage to get it done. Well, we’re putting our foot down. I’m putting my foot down. I’ve done preseason predictions every season since 2012, and every year, I’ve been tempted to choose a Verlander vs. Kershaw World Series. We’re three Astros wins and four Dodgers wins away from it finally happening. And it’s going to happen. The Dodgers are the better team, they have home-field advantage, and they have the best postseason rotation remaining in the playoffs (again, on paper).
Dodgers in 6.
Series MVP:
Once more, we could not come to a consensus as a club. Here are some of our picks.
Clayton Kershaw (my pick): He’s due. He’s the best pitcher in baseball, and he will eclipse 100 innings of postseason experience this series. We’re going to see him eclipse that mark in style.
Justin Turner: “Turner currently has a postseason batting average of.462, along with a postseason OPS of 1.225. He will continue to smack the ball against a struggling Cubs rotation and a tired bullpen.”
Javier Baez: “Javy Baez is one of those players who shines the brightest when the lights are on. In the WBC, he made flashy plays and hit big home runs. Baez will hit 3 HRs and make huge defensive plays throughout the series to bring the Cubs back to the World Series.” (Note: In 101 postseason PA, Baez actually has a.257 OBP and.629 OPS. That doesn’t include the WBC, though.)
Categories: 2017 Playoff Predictions, ArticlesA few long-time Samsung fans weren’t too thrilled to learn that the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Note 5 will more than likely not come equipped with either a removable battery or a micro SD card slot. While this was to be expected (the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge both ditched these long coveted features), there were still those holding onto hope.
Well, a glimmer of light is now shinning through the darkness as a new report out of Taiwan claims the dual-SIM variant will also have a SIM tray that doubles as a micro SD card reader. This actually isn’t too uncommon in parts where dual SIM smartphones are prevalent and while it would make sense for Samsung to do their customers a solid by offering this feature, there was no word on whether we’ll see this outside of China. Here in the US, we typically only get single SIM slots/trays. But you never know.
If nothing else, let this be a lesson to all that nothing is ever final until it’s official. We still got a good couple of days before Samsung unveils the Samsung Galaxy Note 5 and Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge Plus (maybe even another mystery device) during their Unpacked event on August 13th. Stay tuned.
[Sogi]One of the interesting decisions that a programmer must make at the start of a 3D project is figuring out what scale to work in, because the renderer doesn’t care. Perhaps you want to set things up so that nearby things are a unit away, and the stuff in the distance is 100,000 units away. Or nearby is 0.00001 and far is 0.0001. It’s up to you to pick a scale and to decide what the arbitrary units mean. Are you working in meters? Feet? Cubits? Fathoms? The effective range of an African swallow carrying a coconut? In Unreal Tournament, characters were around 160 units tall. (I think that the intent was for 128 units to = 1 meter.) In my day job, we work with a system where 1 unit = 1 meter.
While the renderer doesn’t care, it’s important to devise a system that makes sense to programmers and artists so that making content is as easy as possible. If you make something like 1 unit = 2.333 meters, then your artist making a 1.5 meter object is going to use a calculator all day and then spend their evenings plotting how they plan to conceal the body after they murder you. Perhaps 1 unit = 1 kilometer seems reasonable, but making furniture that’s 0.0005 tall is going to be really annoying.
In this program, I’ve decided to eschew using real-world measurements and adopt an arbitrary system of measurement where 1 unit = 1 window. A building that’s 20 units wide will have 20 windows across its face*. 1 unit will also equal 1 traffic lane, so a road 5 units wide will be 5 lanes. Is the typical building window really the same width as a traffic lane? I don’t know, but I’m betting it’s close enough to look believable from a vantage point over the city, which is how the place will be viewed.
* And by “window” I mean an 8×8 little square of pixels. I might have black lines in the space to make that square look like (say) two windows side-by-side, but it’s still a window as far as the program is concerned.
This scale will make it easy to track how I’m using land. I allocate space for my city: 1024 x 1024. According to Wikipedia, a U.S. traffic lane is 12 feet which works out to about 4 meters. So my city will be about 4 kilometers on a side, or ~16Km2 and have just over a million individual 4-meter plots that can be assigned as space for buildings or streets.
If you’re a non-programmer you’re probably wondering why we use odd values like 256 or 1,024 instead of nice, round values like 200 or 1,000. The reason for this is because our base 10 numbering system is bothersome and messy. At least for programming. (Arguably for everything else as well, although I’ll bet that assertion is flamebait in some circles.) One thing you end up doing all the time in programming is subdividing things. Searching, sorting, and grouping things usually involves taking whatever stuff you’ve got and cutting the group in half until it’s found, sorted, or organized. Let’s take a group of 1,000 things and repeatedly divide it in half and see how it goes: 1,000, 500, 250, 125, 62.5, 31.25, 15.625, 7.8125, 3.90625, 1.953125, 0.9765625 Now let’s try it with 1,024: 1024, 512, 256, 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1 But hey, we have the same number of numeric digits as we have fingers, and that’s pretty awesome, right?
So I take my city and mark areas of it as “streets”. The streets will be invisible in the final version, but I’m rendering them here as blue lines so I can see what I’m doing.
Now I place 20 big impressive skyscrapers in the middle area of the map. These are buildings with a large footprint and they range from 45 to 55 units tall. (And since units are windows, that’s how many stories tall they are.
Next I scatter around a few dozen smaller buildings. These are just as elaborate as the last batch, but these range from 25 to 35 stories tall.
And finally I fill in the remaining empty space with simple cube buildings.
4,752 buildings. The framerate is still shockingly high considering what I’m asking of the GPU. Still, I’m well under 100 FPS now and I’m betting this would be unacceptably choppy on low-end hardware. On the other hand, I have made no effort to optimize things yet. I don’t even know where the current bottleneck is. That will come in a later step, when I have a little more of the technology written.
I try turning off the dev background and the blue “roads” and seeing what it looks like. Disappointingly, the place looks a little… homogeneous:
Looking back to my reference pictures, I notice that each building seems to have its own color. This is either due to the color of the interior lights, the color of the interior stuff like walls and carpeting, or the tint of the windows. In any case, each building has a slightly different tint. I pick a narrow band of hues and apply them to each building:
It’s hard to see in this screenshot, but the overall effect is pretty striking. It adds another layer of randomness to the world, so that even if two adjacent buildings happen to be using the same texture, they’ll likely be different colors. COUNTERPOINT: Uh, in the middle of this screenshot are 3 buildings the same texture and color. Ugh.
I cruise around the city and take notes:
I notice some buildings don’t look quite right. Yellow, blue, and white lights look fine. Green and red hues look wrong. This suggests that the real source of the color is the type of light used in the building. I do see some greenish windows in the photos (albeit very pale) but they look wrong in my simplified little world.
The window distribution is just too uniform. As I pointed out last time, some buildings should have spaces of dark areas. Right now all buildings are unbroken grids of windows, and it just feels monotonous.
Related to the above: I think some protruding ledges, rooftop A/C units, and other clutter would help a lot, particularly if those items were simple black silhouettes against all of these white grids.
As some people have pointed out: The “mirroring” is quite noticeable in some places. The window pattern on the east side of every building will be an exact mirror image of the front, so that when you look at the northeast corner it’s like a Rorschach blot test. Same goes for the west and south walls. This is due to the cheap way I used to map textures onto walls. It was quick & dirty, and I thought it would be fine, but the mirroring is too obvious. How I think it needs to work is that I need to wrap a texture around a building, except that when I turn a corner I should step back exactly 1 window. This means the windows at the end of one wall will be identical to the column of windows that begins the next. Since those windows ostensibly look into the same room, their lighting pattern needs to match or it looks screwy.
I don’t like the rigid grid of streets. Some angled or curving streets would help a lot, but that would add huge complexity to the program. Right now the fact that streets run perfectly along an axis without obstruction simplifies many things. I think I’ll live with this problem for now rather than over-complicating things.
We’re probably 15 or so hours into this 30 hour adventure. Still on my to-do list:Slashing welfare is a recipe for crime
Posted
I've seen what happens when the poorest among us are backed into a corner. The sort of welfare cuts proposed in the Budget will create conditions conducive to criminal activity, writes Greg Barns.
The Abbott Government's first Budget is unashamedly designed to deliver social and economic change in Australia.
One of the consequences, however, is likely to be an increase in crime. Crimes such as theft, low level drug selling, driving without a licence, burglaries, robberies and family violence generally increase when the welfare rolls are slashed.
From July 1 individuals under the age of 30 will have to wait six months before they can access unemployment benefits. And young people will be kept on the Youth Allowance up until the age of 25.
Then there are co-payments for visits to the doctor, albeit capped at 10 visits in some cases.
As a lawyer who has acted for many people in the criminal justice and child welfare systems, anecdotally I can say that, as night follows day, the assertion about an increase in crime will be borne out.
Take a young man or woman who is sacked from their part-time casual job and who has no comfortable middle class family to support them. This individual is already likely to have debts, and may have to support a child or children.
They are likely to be behind on their rent. Forcing that person into a position where they go from earning say $250 a week for their casual job to nothing, literally overnight, is devastating.
The mental health pressure on an individual in that setting is enormous to say the least. That individual needs quick money - a small drug deal would be handy. And they are offered a day's work but have lost their licence previously. Why not hop in the car and take the risk?
This scenario is one that I have seen replicated over the years in Tasmania and Victoria. As is the fact that family violence increases when the financial pressure on individuals is unsustainable. Resorting to drink and drugs as antidotes can lead to domestic violence.
Last week I saw, for the umpteenth time, two young people dealt with by a court for stealing a tray of meat in one case and baby nappies in another. The background of these individuals was one of dire poverty, unemployment and a sheer lack of capacity to afford food for themselves.
One needs to be careful not to suggest what is often implied by those who support savage welfare cuts - that the poor are idle and disposed towards earning an easy dollar through criminal activity. That assertion is simply wrong.
The reality is more one of "there but the grace of God go I".
The data bears out the fact that the sort of welfare cuts proposed by the Abbott Government in relation to young people will create conditions conducive to criminal activity.
Swingeing welfare cuts made by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat government in the UK over the past three years has seen crime levels jump in some areas.
On November 10 last year Derbyshire's Police and Crime Commissioner Alan Charles told the BBC about a 3 per cent increase in crimes compared with the same period in 2012.
Mr Charles revealed that shoplifting, theft from vehicles and non-domestic burglaries have increased in areas where welfare cuts hit hardest.
"What we're finding now predominantly in areas of higher deprivation, with the benefit cuts that the government have inflicted on people who are not in work and are claiming benefits etc, crime is starting to go up," Charles said.
On October 29 last year another senior UK police officer drew attention to a possible link between welfare cuts and crime. Deputy Chief Constable David Zinzan told the Plymouth Herald that nationally "shoplifting has increased in 34 out of 43 forces" and that anecdotally, he is "being told we are seeing an increase in shoplifting, not of high value goods, but basic necessities - food, nappies and baby milk - that may or may not be linked to the reforms that have taken place."
A paper by UK researchers Will Jennings, Stephen Farrall and Shaun Bevan and published in 2012 in the International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice examined property crimes trends from 1961 to 2006.
The authors found that the surge in property crime in the UK in the 1980s to its high point between 1991-1995 was directly linked to policies that squeezed welfare recipients.
They note, rather presciently given the current Australian context:
"(as) government enacts fiscal or monetary policies designed to adjust macroeconomic outcomes, increasing or reducing national levels of unemployment, income inequality, inflation and economic growth, this impacts on the overall degree of law-breaking and victimisation in society."
Arguing that the Abbott Government's welfare changes are too harsh and will lead to an increase in certain types of crime as a consequence should not be taken to be an endorsement of long-term welfare dependency.
The latter is also linked with crime in a number of studies. But what is wrong with the announcements by Treasurer Joe Hockey is that no thought seems to have gone into the considerable social cost of suddenly shifting marginalised people into a situation where their already knife-edge financial and social setting is simply tipped over onto the dark side.
Greg Barns is a member of the Tasmanian Bar and a spokesperson for the Australian Lawyers Alliance. View his full profile here.
Topics: government-and-politics, budget, law-crime-and-justiceThis post contains affiliate links
Ever since my cactus died ( I’m not the greatest at remembering to water plants), I wanted to crochet myself a new one. I found a cute free cactus pattern last night that I just had to make!
I changed up the pattern a little bit by joining rounds and crocheting in the back loops only. Otherwise, everything is done just like the pattern. I used Red Heart Super Saver Yarn in the shades mushroom (for the dirt) and tea leaf (for the cactus). I used a 2.75mm hook and my cactus came out tinier than I expected.
Because the pattern for the tiny cactus flowers isn’t given, I came up with my own pattern! I used pink and yellow cotton embroidery thread and a 1.75 mm hook to make them.
Crochet Cactus Flower Pattern
Here are the abbreviations I use and what they mean:
sc = single crochet
mc= magic circle
sl st= slip stitch
st= stitch
ch= chain
hdc= half double crochet
dc= double crochet
Pattern:
row 1: 6 sc in mc, sl st to first st
row 2: In the first stitch ch 1, hdc, dc, hdc, sl st
ch 1, hdc, dc, hdc, sl st in each of the next 5 stitches
sl st to first ch, finish off
leave a long tail of thread so you can attach them
Once you’ve sewn on the flowers, find your cactus a home! I crocheted my own mini pot but a cactus would look cute in an old tea cup or a glass jar. let me know how you pot your cactus!
Advertisements
Like this: Like Loading...Mark Appel was drafted out of high school by the Tigers in the 15th round of the 2009 draft. However, due to his commitment to Stanford University, Appel didn’t sign, and instead went to pitch at college.
At Standford, Appel began as a relief pitcher, only receiving three starts his freshman year, where he posted a 5.92 ERA over 38 innings. Once he was made a full time starter again the next season, Appel excelled, lowering his ERA down to 3.02 for the year. In his junior year of college, after he went 10-2 with a 2.56 ERA, Appel was once again drafted, this time by the Pirates as the eighth overall pick. Many felt that Appel would begin his professional baseball career, but he decided to return to college to finish out his baseball career (and degree) at Stanford.
Despite some flak from people around the baseball world for returning to college, Appel showed just how good of a pitcher he is, improving to have his best season at Stanford; setting the all-time collective strikeout record, in which he went 10-4 with a 2.12 ERA. After such a successful final year, Appel was drafted yet again, for the third time, by the Astros as the first overall pick in the 2013 draft.
Beginning his professional baseball career with Low-A Tri-City, Appel made it up to Single-A Quad Cities in 2013, going a combined 3-1 with a 3.79 ERA. Due to the 106 innings Appel had already pitched in 2013 at Stanford, he was shut down after just 38 professional innings pitched, bringing his innings up to roughly 144 for the season.
Appel has an average, to slightly above average, fastball, ranging from the lower to mid nineties, but he can crank it up to upper nineties when needed. He also possesses a good slider and a work in progress changeup that many think will come along.
Heading into his first major league Spring Training, it’s been reported that Appel could, potentially, make the big leagues out of camp “if he is one of the best five pitchers out of Spring Training”. However, as many people feel, it will likely be later in 2014, or early 2015, when Houston — his hometown — gets its first glimpse of Appel. But no matter when that is, with all of the other top prospects in the Astros’ farm system, the future would appear to be bright for them as an organization moving forward, with Appel soon to be leading the way.
Mark Appel — top pitching prospect in the Astros’ organization — took the time recently to answer some of my questions:
1.) At what age did you first become interested in baseball? Who was your biggest baseball influence growing up?
I first became interested in baseball when I was very young. For as long as I can remember, I have been playing some version of the sport. Growing up, my parents, as well as certain coaches throughout the years, really influenced me and encouraged me to pursue my dream of playing baseball as a way to educate myself in college and professionally.
2.) Who was your favorite baseball player growing up? Why?
Nolan Ryan was one of the all-time great pitchers and the player I looked up to the most as far as what I wanted to be on the field. He was a fierce competitor who gave his all every single time he got the ball. He competed no matter the score, circumstance, or previous result. Win or lose, you knew he was going to go out and compete again the next time he got the ball.
3.) You were drafted by the Astros in the 1st round of the 2013 draft. What was that process like for you? Where were you when you first found out? Initial thoughts?
The draft process is very interesting. As someone who has gone through it three different times in three unique situations, I feel like I have seen it all. Someone expected to get drafted goes through “interviews”, both on and off the field. In my situation, I spoke with general managers and scouting directors, as well as the local area scouts. Answering their questions off the field is important for their evaluation process so they can have a good understanding of the type of person you are. But the factor that matters most is the results on the field — how good you are at playing baseball.
The Astros and I had a number of conversations leading up to the draft and on the day of the draft, as well as a few other teams. When the time came for the pick to be made, I felt peace in knowing that I would be exactly where God wanted me to be, whether it was Houston or another team. Bud Selig announced my name and my friends and family who came to visit California (I was preparing for graduation the following week) all celebrated! It was a surreal feeling, knowing that I would be able to have a chance to play in my hometown and the team I grew up rooting for was now the same organization I was a part of. God’s grace is too great.
4.) Before being the number one overall pick in 2013, you were drafted by the Tigers in 2009, and the Pirates, eighth overall, in 2012. What made you decide to attend college instead of going pro out of high school? Why did you decide to return for your senior year at Stanford in 2012 after the Pirates drafted you so high?
Like I said, I have been drafted three times and each were unique situations.
In high school the Tigers drafted me in the 15th round, even though I told all the area scouts I spoke with that I was planning on attending Stanford. Dreaming about being a pro baseball player, it was fun to entertain the thought of signing as a senior in high school, but I knew that Stanford was where I needed to be for my future, both in baseball and in life. Unsure if I was ready to play minor league baseball, I knew college would allow me to grow up, become a man, and still play baseball at a very high level.
In 2012 the Pirates drafted me with the 8th pick in the draft. The decision to return to school for my senior season was the toughest I have ever had to make. There are a number of factors that go into a decision of that magnitude: baseball development and career, education, regrets (I will explain this one later), desires, and money. Also, as a follower of Jesus, relationships with my coaches, teammates and fans, combined with being a part of what God is doing in this world, is very important to me.
For the baseball development, I did not see an advantage to either signing or returning to school. Development really comes down to how badly you want to get better as a player. I knew that I would be able to improve both at Stanford and in the Pirates’ organization. As far as education went, it was a no-brainer to return to school. Playing my senior year allowed me to finish my degree in Management Science and Engineering. As far as regrets go, when I made my decision, I did not want to have any regrets. I didn’t want to spend my idle time thinking about what it would have been like if I chose the other option. Going back to Stanford meant I would have a chance to play in Omaha (which we didn’t achieve), finish my degree before starting a professional career, and continue to be involved in campus ministries that I had been involved with the past three years.
Those are some things that I would have wondered about a lot if I had signed. When it came down to it, money out of the question, I wanted to go back to school, not for the lack of things signing professionally had to offer (which wasn’t much), but for the opportunities I had during my senior year at Stanford.
But, as everyone knows, money was involved. And it was a lot of money. There are two somewhat conflicting things going on with my situation. On one hand, I was offered a lot of money, and I mean a lot. And on the other hand, I wasn’t offered what I believed my value for my talents was in the draft market under the current rules. So do I stick to principle and go back to school, or do I chase the money and sign? It was a tough question to comprehend.
There are financial benefits to both options, as well as financial risks (well, maybe there were only risks for returning to school). If money was the most important thing to me, I would have signed 100 percent. I knew by returning to school, I would give up 3.8 million dollars. I also knew there were a few things that could go wrong: injury and underperformance were the two main risks. I also knew there were benefits: education, relationships, the opportunity to get better, and a potential financial gain. The thing most people don’t realize is that I had zero regrets. No matter the outcome of my senior season and the draft that followed, I would have been extremely happy with the decision.
As confirmation that I was exactly where God wanted me to be, within the first two weeks of being back at school four members from the Stanford baseball team had accepted Christ as their Lord and Savior through the team bible study! It was so cool to be a part of the work of the Holy Spirit!
5.) In your senior year of high school, you were a part time relief pitcher and didn’t become a full time starter again until your sophomore year of college. Having been both a starting and relief pitcher, which did you find more challenging?
Both relieving and starting have their challenges. I have much more experience as a starter, and at higher levels of competition, I have only started. Personally, I think the difference is the mentality and routine. A reliever needs to mentally prepare himself to pitch 1-2 innings every single night, in general. A starter must prepare mentally to pitch five or more innings once every five days. The two are difficult to compare. With that being said, I would say that starting has been more challenging for me, probably due to the difference in talent level between high school and college, but also because there is so much to learn as a starter. I feel like I learn something new every single day.
6.) Talk a little bit about life on the road: What’s the most difficult aspect of it? What do you do to pass the time?
Life on the road can be very difficult. There are many things that, as a Christian, I need to prepare for. Wherever you go, you will have decisions to make from the time you wake up to the time you go to bed that will affect both how you play and how your teammates see you — as a man of integrity or a hypocrite. From how I spend my time in the hotel room to where I go and what I do after the games, there will be temptations of various kinds; whether it is alcohol, drugs, etc. For me, reading is something that I enjoy doing, starting with the Bible, but also books for entertainment purposes. Reading engages the mind to learn and grow, especially when playing baseball every day can get repetitive and mundane at times.
Spending time with teammates is a great way to spend your free time. These are the guys that you hope to win a championship with, and in my opinion, the better the team knows and respects each other off the field the more we will play together as a unit. I also believe that building relationships is the first step to discipleship, what Jesus has called us to do as believers. Coming along side people and meeting them where they are, encouraging them and building them up, investing in their lives speaks a lot louder than just telling them about an alternative lifestyle through knowing Jesus that would be better for them. Actions always speak louder than words.
7.) The Astros haven’t been doing well lately, finishing with over 100 losses the past two seasons, but they have great talent down in their farm system. With players such as yourself, Carlos Correa and George Springer, among others, how do you see the team faring over the next few years?
Being a part of the Astros’ organization is an incredible blessing. Not only are they my hometown team, but I believe they are a team that will be good quickly and good for a long time. Buying in to the system now and getting to know all the players right now will build a foundation for the future of the organization at the big league level.
I believe that the Astros will be the most improved team this year, and will continue to improve year after year. As we develop and add new players to the major league team, the chances we win more and more games only increases.
8.) What do you feel went well in 2013? What are your goals for 2014?
My 2013 pro season was great. I’m not necessarily pleased with the end of year statistics as a whole, but I do believe I continued to improve and to learn about professional baseball and what to expect for my 2014 season.
This season my goals are simply to work as hard as I can every single day and allow God to take care of the rest. I am not going to worry about which level I start out at or when I make it to Houston this year (if at all). The great thing about being a disciple of Jesus is knowing that wherever I am in life, I have purpose and there is work to be done for the kingdom of God. Don’t get me wrong, I am going to work with all that I have in order to reach the big leagues, but while I’m working, I’m not going to worry, and I’ll have some fun!
9.) Favorite TV show? Favorite food?
Favorite TV show: Currently, ‘Parks and Recreation’. I can really identify with Ron Swanson. Favorite food: Steak.
10.) Lastly, what advice would you give to kids who are just starting out that dream of playing professional baseball one day?
My advice to kids hoping to play pro ball is to work hard in school, first and foremost. Secondly, have fun while you are playing. Don’t let the fun of the game be overshadowed by the worry and fear of not achieving the goals that you have for yourself. Baseball is a fun game, and I have seen too many players in college and pro ball not enjoy it because they want to be the best so badly that their desire for perfection has removed the joy they once had while playing the game. Don’t lose that childlike spirit.
——————————————————————————————————————————————
Big thanks to Mark Appel for taking the time to answer my questions.
You can follow him on Twitter: @MAppel26
AdvertisementsDuh, journalists’ brains may no work too good.
According to a study released Thursday by neuroscientist Dr. Tara Swart in association with the London Press Club, the highest functions of the human brain operate at a lower level in journalists than the average population.
Her research titled “Study Into The Mental Resilience of Journalists,” blames journalists’ cognitive shortcomings on dehydration caused by excessive alcohol consumption along with poor diet, including higher levels of sugar and caffeine.
Less than 5% of journalists drink enough — or any — water while 41% drank more than 18 alcoholic drinks per week.
The study measured “executive functioning” which, as Swart writes in her report, is “the ability of the brain to regulate emotions, suppress bias, switch between tasks, solve complex problems and think flexibly and creatively.”
She notes that some of the deficiencies may be a result of a high-pressure work environment that doesn’t allow time for mindfulness.
However, she found that journalists actually manage pressure better than many other fast-paced professions, like bankers and sales executives, because they feel a higher sense of purpose related to their work.The group pleaded guilty to trespass after they were arrested and charged after participating in the nonviolent sit-in in Subiaco on April 14.
The peaceful protest was the latest in a series of sit-ins to highlight the treatment of more than 1100 children in Australia's immigration detention centres.
Pastor Jarrod McKenna, of the Westcity Church |
Obama: “When they go low, we go high.” Great advice – a nightmare to follow. The first lady has found a way of doing it that avoids the elephant traps and the little snares.
She has a graceful humanity. She looks normal. Glamorous, but in a normal kind of way. She sounds like a normal person, she uses the language of normal people and she expresses normal hopes and fears. As a wife and a mother, an American, a black woman – all these parts that make her who she is – she has a fine capacity to say what millions of women and men have been thinking since the Trump tape first came to light last weekend.
Michelle Obama denounces Donald Trump's rhetoric: 'It has shaken me to my core' Read more
It was hardly a surprise to hear her speak so well. Her speech introducing Clinton as the Democrat nominee to the party’s convention in July revealed the exceptional talent that she has been nurturing over these past eight years. That was the speech where she reminded her listeners what could be done by collective effort. She talked of the “lash of bondage” and the “sting of servitude” and then described waking up every morning in the White House, “a house built by slaves” and watching her daughters, “two beautiful intelligent young black women” playing with their dogs: “and because of Hillary Clinton, my daughters, and all our sons and daughters, take for granted that a woman can be president of the United States”.
Last night she talked of women doing what women have always done “just trying to get through it … trying to pretend this doesn’t really bother us”. She ended: “This is not normal, this is not politics as usual … this has got to stop right now.”
When she speaks, Michelle Obama doesn’t stop being the wife of the president, but she transcends it. She becomes the personification of the best of her country. Perhaps there is something in the first lady status, in politics but not of it, that uniquely privileges the holder of the office. Who in Britain can make that nonpartisan appeal to ordinary human decency? Last night she spoke for everyone who thinks politics can be better than this.The early Muslim conquests (Arabic: الفتوحات الإسلامية, al-Futūḥāt al-Islāmiyya) also referred to as the Arab conquests[4] and early Islamic conquests[5] began with the Islamic prophet Muhammad in the 7th century. He established a new unified polity in the Arabian Peninsula which under the subsequent Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphates saw a century of rapid expansion.
The resulting empire stretched from the borders of China and the Indian subcontinent, across Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Europe (Sicily and the Iberian Peninsula to the Pyrenees). Edward Gibbon writes in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:
Under the last of the Umayyads, the Arabian empire extended two hundred days journey from east to west, from the confines of Tartary and India to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean... We should vainly seek the indissoluble union and easy obedience that pervaded the government of Augustus and the Antonines; but the progress of Islam diffused over this ample space a general resemblance of manners and opinions. The language and laws of the Quran were studied with equal devotion at Samarcand and Seville: the Moor and the Indian embraced as countrymen and brothers in the pilgrimage of Mecca; and the Arabian language was adopted as the popular idiom in all the provinces to the westward of the Tigris.
The Muslim conquests brought about the collapse of the Sassanid Empire and a great territorial loss for the Byzantine Empire. The reasons for the Muslim success are hard to reconstruct in hindsight, primarily because only fragmentary sources from the period have survived. Fred McGraw Donner suggests that formation of a state in the Arabian peninsula and ideological (i.e., religious) coherence and mobilization was a primary reason why the Muslim armies in the space of a hundred years were able to establish the largest pre-modern empire until that time. The estimates for the size of the Islamic Caliphate suggest it was more than thirteen million square kilometers (five million square miles).[6] Most historians agree as well that the Sassanid Persian and Byzantine Roman empires were militarily and economically exhausted from decades of fighting one another.[7]
It has been suggested that some Jews and Christians in the Sassanid Empire and Jews and Monophysites in Syria were dissatisfied and welcomed the Muslim forces, largely because of religious conflict in both empires.[8] It has also been suggested that later Syriac Christians reinterpreted the events of the conquest to serve a political or religious interest.[9] At other times, such as in the Battle of Firaz, Arab Christians allied themselves with the Persians and Byzantines against the invaders.[10][11] In the case of Byzantine Egypt, Palestine and Syria, these lands had been reclaimed from the Persians only a few years before.
Background [ edit ]
Arabia was a region that hosted a number of different cultures, some urban and others nomadic Bedouin. Arabian society was divided along tribal and clan lines with the most important divisions being between the "southern" and "northern" tribal associations. Both the Roman and Persian empires competed for influence in Arabia by sponsoring clients, and in turn Arabian tribes sought the patronage of the two rival empires to bolster their own ambitions. The Lakhmid kingdom which covered parts of what is now southern Iraq and northern Saudi Arabia was a client of Persia, and in 602 the Persians deposed the Lakhmids to take over the defense of the southern frontier themselves. This left the Persians exposed and over-extended, helping to set the stage for the collapse of Persia later that century. Southern Arabia, especially what is now Yemen, had for thousands of years been a wealthy region that had been a center of the spice trade. Yemen had been at the center of an international trading network linking Eurasia to Africa and Yemen had been visited by merchants from East Africa, Europe, the Middle East, India and even from as far away as China. In turn, the Yemeni were great sailors, travelling up the Red Sea to Egypt and across the Indian Ocean to India and down the east African coast. Inland, the valleys of Yemen had been cultivated by a system of irrigation that had been set back when the Marib Dam was destroyed by an earthquake in about 450 AD. Frankincense and myrrh had been greatly valued in the Mediterranean region, being used in religious ceremonies. However, the conversion of the Mediterranean world to Christianity had significantly reduced the demand for these commodities, causing a major economic slump in southern Arabia which helped to create the impression that Arabia was a backward region.
Little is known of the pre-Islamic religions of Arabia, but it is known that the Arabs worshiped a number of gods such as al-Lat, Manat, al-Uzza and Hubal, with the most important being Allah (God). There were also Jewish and Christian communities in Arabia and aspects of Arab religion reflected their influence. Pilgrimage was a major part of Arabian paganism, and one of the most important pilgrimage sites was Mecca, which housed the Kaaba, considered an especially holy place to visit. Mohammad, a merchant of Mecca, started to have visions in which he claimed that the Archangel Gabriel had told him that he was the last of the prophets continuing the work of Jesus Christ and the prophets of Tanakh. After coming into conflict with the elite of Mecca, Mohammad fled to the city of Yathrib, which was renamed Medina. At Yathrib, Mohammad founded the first Islamic state and by 630 conquered Mecca.
The prolonged and escalating Byzantine–Sassanid wars of the 6th and 7th centuries and the recurring outbreaks of bubonic plague (Plague of Justinian) left both empires exhausted and weakened in the face of the sudden emergence and expansion of the Arabs. The last of these wars ended with victory for the Byzantines: Emperor Heraclius regained all lost territories, and restored the True Cross to Jerusalem in 629.[18] The war against Zoroastrian Persia, whose people worshiped the fire god Ahura Mazda, had been portrayed by Heraclius as a holy war in defense of the Christian faith and the Wood of the Holy Cross, as splinters of wood said to be from the True Cross were known, had been used to inspire Christian fighting zeal. The idea of a holy war against the "fire worshipers", as the Christians called the Zoroastrians, had aroused much enthusiasm, leading to an all-out effort to defeat the Persians.
Nevertheless, neither empire was given any chance to recover, as within a few years they were overrun by the advances of the Arabs (newly united by Islam), which, according to Howard-Johnston, "can only be likened to a human tsunami".[20][21] According to George Liska, the "unnecessarily prolonged Byzantine–Persian conflict opened the way for Islam".[22]
In late 620s Muhammad had already managed to conquer and unify much of Arabia under Muslim rule, and it was under his leadership that the first Muslim-Byzantine skirmishes took place in response to Byzantine incursions. Just a few months after Heraclius and the Persian general Shahrbaraz agreed on terms for the withdrawal of Persian troops from occupied Byzantine eastern provinces in 629, Arab and Byzantine troops confronted each other at the Battle of Mu'tah as a result of Byzantine vassals murdering a Muslim emissary.[23] Muhammad died in 632 and was succeeded by Abu Bakr, the first Caliph with undisputed control of the entire Arab peninsula after the successful Ridda Wars, which resulted in the consolidation of a powerful Muslim state throughout the peninsula.[24]
Forces [ edit ]
Muslim [ edit ]
In Arabia, swords from India were greatly esteemed as being made of the finest steel, and were the favorite weapons of the Mujahideen. The Arab sword known as the sayfy closely resembled the Roman gladius. Swords and spears were the major weapons of the Muslims and armour was either mail or leather. In northern Arabia, Roman influence predominated, in eastern Arabia, Persian influence predominated and in Yemen, Indian influence was felt. As the caliphate spread, the Muslims were influenced by the peoples they conquered--the Turks in Central Asia, the Persians, and the Romans in Syria. The Bedouin tribes of Arabia favored archery, though, contrary to popular belief, Bedouin archers usually fought on foot instead of horseback. The Arabs usually fought defensive battles with their archers placed on both flanks. By the Umayyad period, the caliphate had a standing army, including the elite Ahl al-Sham ("people of Syria"), raised from the Arabs who settled in Syria. The caliphate was divided into a number of jund, or regional armies, stationed in the provinces being made of mostly Arab tribes who were paid monthly by the Diwan al-Jaysh (War Ministry).
Roman [ edit ]
The infantry of the Roman Army continued to be recruited from within the empire, but much of the cavalry were either recruited from "martial" peoples in the Balkans or in Asia Minor or alternatively were Germanic mercenaries. Most of the Roman troops in Syria were indigenae (local) and it seems that at the time of the Muslim conquest, the Roman forces in Syria were Arabs. In response to the loss of Syria, the Romans developed the phylarch system of using Armenian and Christian Arab auxiliaries living on the frontier to provide a "shield" to counter raiding by the Muslims into the empire. Overall, the Roman Army remained a small, but professional force of foederati. Unlike the foederati who were sent where they were needed, the stradioti lived in the frontier provinces. The most famous of these units was the Varangian Guard made up of Vikings.
Persian [ edit ]
During the last decades of the Sassanian empire, the frequent use of royal titles by Persian governors in Central Asia, especially in what is now Afghanistan, indicates a weakening of the power of the Shahinshah (King of Kings), suggesting the empire was already breaking down at the time of the Muslim conquest. Persian society was rigidly divided into castes with the nobility being of supposed "Aryan" descent, and this division of Persian society along caste lines was reflected in the military. The azatan aristocracy provided the cavalry, the paighan infantry came from the peasantry and most of the greater Persian nobility had slave soldiers, this last being based on the Persian example. Much of the Persian army consisted of tribal mercenaries recruited from the plains south of the Caspian Sea and from what is now Afghanistan. The Persian tactics were cavalry based with the Persian forces usually divided into a center, based upon a hill, and two wings of cavalry on either side.
Ethiopian [ edit ]
Little is known about the military forces of the Christian state of Ethiopia other than that they were divided into sarawit professional troops and the ehzab auxiliaries. The Ethiopians made much use of camels and elephants.
Berber [ edit ]
The Berber peoples of North Africa had often served as a federates (auxiliaries) to the Roman Army. The Berber forces were based around the horse and camel, but seemed to have hampered by a lack of weapons or protection with both Roman and Arab sources mentioning the Berbers lacked armour and helmets. The Berbers went to war with their entire communities and the presence of women and children both slowed down the Berber armies and tied down Berber tribesmen who tried to protect their families.
Turks [ edit ]
The British historian David Nicolle called the Turkish peoples of Central Asia the "most formidable foes" faced by the Muslims. The Jewish Turkish Khazar khanate, based in what is now southern Russia and Ukraine, had a powerful heavy cavalry. The Turkish heartland of Central Asia was divided into five khanates whose khans variously recognized the shahs of Iran or the emperors of China as their overlords. Turkish society was feudal with the khans only being pater primus among the aristocracy of dihquans who lived in castles in the countryside, with the rest of Turkish forces being divided into kadivar (farmers), khidmatgar (servants) and atbai (clients). The heavily armored Turkish cavalry were to play a great role in influencing subsequent Muslim tactics and weapons; the Turks, who were mostly Buddhists at the time of the Islamic conquest, were converted to Islam and, ironically, the Turks came to be regarded as the foremost Muslim warriors, to the extent of replacing the Arabs as the dominant peoples in the Dar-al-Islam (House of Islam).
Visigoths [ edit ]
During the migration period, the Germanic Visigoths had traveled from their homeland north of the Danube to settle in the Roman province of Hispania, creating a kingdom upon the wreckage of the Western Roman empire. The Visigothic state in Iberia was based around forces raised by the nobility whom the king could call out in the event of war. The king had his gardingi and fideles loyal to himself while the nobility had their bucellarii. The Visigoths favored cavalry with their favorite tactics being to repeatedly charge a foe combined with feigned retreats. The Muslim conquest of most of Iberia in less than a decade does suggest serious deficiencies with the Visigothic kingdom, though the limited sources make it difficult to discern the precise reasons for the collapse of the Visigoths.
Franks [ edit ]
Another Germanic people who founded a state upon the ruins of the Western Roman empire were the Franks who settled in Gaul, which came to be known afterwards as France. Like the Visigoths, the Frankish cavalry played a "significant part" in their wars. The Frankish kings expected all of their male subjects to perform three months of military service every year, and all serving under the king's banner were paid a regular salary. Those called up for service had to provide their own weapons and horses, which contributed to the "militarisation of Frankish society". At least part of the reason for the victories of Charles Martel was he could call up a force of experienced warriors when faced with Muslim raids.
Military campaigns [ edit ]
Conquest of the Levant: 634–641 [ edit ]
The province of Syria was the first to be wrested from Byzantine control. Arab-Muslim raids that followed the Ridda wars prompted the Byzantines to send a major expedition into southern Palestine, which was defeated by the Arab forces under command of Khalid ibn al-Walid at the Battle of Ajnadayn (634).[44] Ibn al-Walid, had converted to Islam around 627, becoming one of Mohammad's most successful generals. Ibn al-Walid had been fighting in Iraq against the Persians when he led his force on a trek across the deserts to Syria to attack the Romans from the rear. In the "Battle of the Mud" fought outside of Pella in the Jordan river valley in January 635 the Arabs won another victory. After a siege of six months the Arabs took Damascus, but Emperor Heraclius later retook it. At the battle of Yarmuk between 16–20 August 636, the Arabs were victorious, defeating Heraclius. Ibn al-Walid appears to have been the "real military leader" at Yarmuk "under the nominal command of others". Syria was ordered to be abandoned to the Muslims with Heraclius reportedly saying: "Peace be with you Syria; what a beautiful land you will be for your enemy". On the heels of their victory, the Arab armies took Damascus again in 636, with Baalbek, Homs, and Hama to follow soon afterwards.[44] However, other fortified towns continued to resist despite the rout of the imperial army and had to be conquered individually.[44] Jerusalem fell in 638, Caesarea in 640, while others held out until 641.[44]
After a two-year siege, the garrison of Jerusalem surrendered rather than starve to death; under the terms of the surrender Caliph Umar promised to tolerate the Christians of Jerusalem and not to turn churches into mosques. True to his word, the Caliph Umar allowed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to remain, with the caliph praying on a prayer rug outside of the church. The loss to the Muslims of Jerusalem, the holiest city to Christians, proved to be the source of much resentment in Christendom. The city of Caesarea Maritima continued to withstand the Muslim siege--as it could be supplied by sea--until it was taken by assault in 640.
In the mountains of Asia Minor, the Muslims enjoyed less success, with the Romans adopting the tactic of "shadowing warfare"--refusing to give battle to the Muslims, while the people retreated into castles and fortified towns when the Muslims invaded; instead, Roman forces ambushed Muslim raiders as they returned to Syria carrying plunder and people they had enslaved. In the frontier area where Anatolia met Syria, the Roman state evacuated the entire population and laid waste to the countryside, creating a "no-man's land" where any invading army would find no food. For decades afterwards, a guerrilla war was waged by Christians in the hilly countryside of north-western Syria supported by the Romans.[51] At the same time, the Romans began a policy of launching raids via sea on the coast of the caliphate with the aim of forcing the Muslims to keep at least some of their forces to defend their coastlines, thus limiting the number of troops available for an invasion of Anatolia.[51] Unlike Syria with its plains and deserts-which favored the offensive-the mountainous terrain of Anatolia favored the defensive and for centuries afterwards, the line between Christian and Muslim lands ran along the border between Anatolia and Syria.
Conquest of Egypt: 639–642 [ edit ]
The Byzantine province of Egypt held strategic importance for its grain production, naval yards, and as a base for further conquests in Africa.[44] The Muslim general 'Amr ibn al-'As began the conquest of the province on his own initiative in 639.[52] The majority of the Roman forces in Egypt were locally-raised Coptic forces, intended to serve more as a police force; since the vast majority of Egyptians lived in the Nile river valley, surrounded on both the eastern and western sides by desert, Egypt was felt to be a relatively secure province. In December 639, al-'As entered the Sinai with a large force and took Pelusium, on the edge of the Nile river valley, and then defeated a Roman counter-attack at Bibays. Contrary to expectations, the Arabs did not head for Alexandria, the capital of Egypt, but instead for a major fortress known as Babylon located at what is now Cairo. Al-'As was planning to divide the Nile river valley in two. The Arab forces won a major victory at the Battle of Heliopolis (640), but they found it difficult to advance further because major cities in the Nile Delta were protected by water and because al-'As lacked the machinery to break down city fortifications.[55] The Arabs laid siege to Babylon, and its starving garrison surrendered on 9 April 641. Nevertheless, the province was scarcely urbanized and the defenders lost hope of receiving reinforcements from Constantinople when the emperor Heraclius died in 641.[56] Afterwards, the Arabs turned north into the Nile delta and laid siege to Alexandria. The last major center to fall into Arab hands was Alexandria, which capitulated in September 642.[57] According to Hugh Kennedy, "Of all the early Muslim conquests, that of Egypt was the swiftest and most complete. [...] Seldom in history can so massive a political change have happened so swiftly and been so long lasting."[58] In 644, the Arabs suffered a major defeat by the Caspian Sea when an invading Muslim army was almost wiped out by the cavalry of the Khazar Khanate, and, seeing a chance to take back Egypt, the Romans launched an amphibious attack which took back Alexandria for a short period of time. Though most of Egypt is desert, the Nile river valley has some of the most productive and fertile farmland in the entire world, which had made Egypt the "granary" of the Roman empire. Control of Egypt meant that the caliphate could weather droughts without the fear of famine, laying the basis for the future prosperity of the caliphate.
The War at Sea [ edit ]
The Roman empire had traditionally dominated the Mediterranean and the Black Sea with major naval bases at Constantinople, Acre, Alexandria and Carthage. In 652, the Arabs won their first victory at sea off Alexandria, which was followed by the temporary Muslim conquest of Cyprus. As Yemen had been a center of maritime trade, Yemeni sailors were brought to Alexandria to start building an Islamic fleet for the Mediterranean. The Muslim fleet was based in Alexandria and used Acre, Tyre and Beirut as its forward bases. The core of the fleet's sailors were Yemeni, but the shipwrights who built the ships were Iranian and Iraqi. In the "Battle of the Masts" off Cape Chelidonia in Anatolia in 655, the Muslims defeated the Roman fleet in a series of boarding actions. As a result, the Romans began a major expansion of their navy, which was matched by the Arabs, leading to a naval arms race. From the early 8th century onward, the Muslim fleet would launch annual raids on the coastline on the Roman empire in Anatolia and Greece.
As part of the arms race, both sides sought new technology to improve their warships. The Muslim warships had a larger forecastle, which was used to mount a stone-throwing engine. The Romans invented "Greek fire", an incendiary weapon that led the Muslims to cover their ships with water-soaked cotton. A major problem for the Muslim fleet was the shortage of timber, which led the Muslims to seek qualitative instead of quantitative superiority by building bigger warships. To save money, the Muslim shipwrights switched from the hull-first method of building ships to the frame-first method.
Conquest of Mesopotamia and Persia: 633–651 [ edit ]
Sasanian weaponry, 7th century
After an Arab incursion into Sasanian territories, the energetic shah (king) Yazdgerd III, who had just ascended the Persian throne, raised an army to resist the conquerors.[61] Many of the marzbans refused to come out to help the shahinshah.[62] However, the Persians suffered a devastating defeat at the Battle of al-Qadisiyyah in 636.[61] Little is known about the Battle of al-Qadisiyyah other than it lasted for several days by the banks of the river Euphrates in what is now Iraq and ended with the Persian force being annihilated.[63] Abolishing the Lakhmid Arab buffer state had forced the Persians to take over the desert defense themselves, leaving them overextended.[62]
As a result of al-Qadisiyyah, the Arab-Muslims gained control over the whole of Iraq, including Ctesiphon, the capital city of the Sassanids.[61] The Persians lacked sufficient forces to make use of the Zagros mountains to stop the Arabs, having lost the prime of their army at al-Qadisiyyah.[63] The Persian forces withdrew over the Zagros mountains and the Arab army pursued them across the Iranian plateau, where the fate of the Sasanian empire was sealed at the Battle of Nahavand (642).[61] The crushing Muslim victory at Nahavand is known in the Muslim world as the "Victory of Victories".[62]
After Nahavand, the Persian state collapsed with Yezdegird fleeing further east and various marzbans bending their knees in submission to the Arabs.[63] As the conquerors slowly covered the vast distances of Iran punctuated by hostile towns and fortresses, Yazdgerd III retreated, finally taking refuge in Khorasan, where he was assassinated by a local satrap in 651.[61] In the aftermath of their victory over the imperial army, the Muslims still had to contend with a collection of militarily weak but geographically inaccessible principalities of Persia.[44] It took decades to bring them all under control of the caliphate.[44] In what is now Afghanistan--a region where the authority of the shah was always disputed--the Muslims met fierce guerrilla resistance from the militant Buddhist tribes of the region.[64] Ironically, despite the complete Muslim triumph over Iran as compared to the only partial defeat of the Roman empire, the Muslims borrowed far more from the vanished Sassanian state than they ever did from the Romans.[65] However, for the Persians the defeat remained bitter. Some 400 years later, the Persian poet Ferdowsi wrote in his popular poem Shahnameh (Book of Kings):
"Damn this world, damn this time, damn this fate, That uncivilized Arabs have come to
Make me a Muslim
Where are your valiant warriors and priests
Where are your hunting parties and your feats?
Where is that warlike mien and where are those
Great armies that destroyed our county's foes?
Count Iran as a ruin, as the lair
Of lions and leopards.
Look now and despair".[66]
The end of the Rashidun conquests [ edit ]
Right from the start of the caliphate, it was realized that there was a need to write down the sayings and story of Muhammad, which had been memorized by his followers before they all died.[67] Most people in Arabia were illiterate and the Arabs had a strong culture of remembering history orally.[67] To preserve the story of Mohammad and to prevent any corruptions from entering the oral history, the Caliph 'Abu Bakr had ordered scribes to write down the story of Mohammad as told to them by his followers, which was the origin of the Koran.[68] Disputes had emerged over which version of the Koran was the correct one and, by 644, different versions of the Koran were accepted in Damascus, Basra, Hims, and Kufa.[68] To settle the dispute, the Caliph 'Uthman had proclaimed the version of the Koran possessed by one of Mohammad's widows, Hafsa, to be the definitive and correct version, which offended some Muslims who held to the rival versions.[68] This, together with the favoritism shown by 'Uthman to his own clan, the Banu Umayya, in government appointments, led to a mutiny in Medina in 656 and 'Uthman's murder.[68]
'Uthman's successor as Caliph, Mohammad's son-in-law, Ali, was faced with a civil war, known to Muslims as the fitna, when the governor of Syria, Mu'awiya Ibn Abi Sufyan, revolted against him.[69] During this time, the first period of Muslim conquests stopped, as the armies of Islam turned against one another.[69] A fundamentalist group known as the Kharaji decided to end the civil war by assassinating the leaders of both sides.[69] However, the fitna ended in January 661 when the Caliph Ali was killed by a Kharaji assassin, allowing Mu'awiya to become Caliph and found the Umayyad dynasty.[70] The fitna also marked the beginning of the split between Shia Muslims, who supported Ali, and Sunni Muslims, who opposed him.[69] Mu'awiya moved the capital of the caliphate from Medina to Damascus, which had a major effect on the politics and culture of the caliphate.[71] Mu'awiya followed the conquest of Iran by invading Central Asia and trying to finish off the Roman Empire by taking Constantinople.[72] In 670, a Muslim fleet seized Rhodes and then laid siege to Constantinople.[72] Nicolle wrote the siege of Constantinople from 670 to 677 was "more accurately" a blockade rather than a siege proper, which ended in failure as the "mighty" walls built by the Emperor Theodosius II in the 5th century AD proved their worth.[72]
The majority of the people in Syria remained Christian, and a substantial Jewish minority remained, as well; both communities were to teach the Arabs much about science, trade and the arts.[72] The Umayyad caliphs are well-remembered for sponsoring a cultural "golden age" in Islamic history--for example, by building the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, and for making Damascus into the capital of a "superpower" that stretched from Portugal to Central Asia, covering the vast territory from the Atlantic Ocean to the borders of China.[72]
Explanations of success of the early conquests [ edit ]
The rapidity of the early conquests has received various explanations.[73] Contemporary Christian writers conceived them as God's punishment visited on their fellow Christians for their sins.[74] Early Muslim historians viewed them as a reflection of the religious zeal of the conquerors and evidence of divine favor.[75] The theory that the conquests are explainable as an Arab migration triggered by economic pressures enjoyed popularity early in the 20th century, but has largely fallen out of favor among historians, especially those who distinguish the migration from the conquests that preceded and enabled it.[76]
There are indications that the conquests started as initially disorganized pillaging raids launched partly by non-Muslim Arab tribes in the aftermath of the Ridda wars, and were soon extended into a war of conquest by the Rashidun caliphs,[77] although other scholars argue that the conquests were a planned military venture already underway during Muhammad's lifetime.[78] Fred Donner writes that the advent of Islam "revolutionized both the ideological bases and the political structures of the Arabian society, giving rise for the first time to a state capable of an expansionist movement."[79] According to Chase F. Robinson, it is likely that Muslim forces were often outnumbered, but, unlike their opponents, they were fast, well coordinated and highly motivated.[80]
Another key reason was the weakness of the Byzantine and Sasanian empires, caused by the wars they had waged against each other in the preceding decades with alternating success.[81] It was aggravated by a plague that had struck densely populated areas and impeded conscription of new imperial troops, while the Arab armies could draw recruits from nomadic populations.[74] The Sasanian empire, which had lost the latest round of hostilities with the Byzantines, was also affected by a crisis of confidence, and its elites suspected that the ruling dynasty had forfeited the favor of the gods.[74] The Arab military advantage was increased when Christianized Arab tribes who had served imperial armies as regular or auxiliary troops switched sides and joined the West Arabian coalition.[74] Arab commanders also made liberal use of agreements to spare lives and property of inhabitants in case of surrender and extended exemptions from paying tribute to groups who provided military services to the conquerors.[82] Additionally, the Byzantine persecution of Christians opposed to the Chalcedonian creed in Syria and Egypt alienated elements of those communities and made them more open to accommodation with the Arabs once it became clear that the latter would let them practice their faith undisturbed as long as they paid tribute.[83]
The conquests were further secured by the subsequent large-scale migration of Arabian peoples into the conquered lands.[84] Robert Hoyland argues that the failure of the Sasanian empire to recover was due in large part to the geographically and politically disconnected nature of Persia, which made coordinated action difficult once the established Sasanian rule collapsed.[85] Similarly, the difficult terrain of Anatolia made it difficult for the Byzantines to mount a large-scale attack to recover the lost lands, and their offensive action was largely limited to organizing guerrilla operations against the Arabs in the Levant.[85]
Conquest of Sindh: 711–714 [ edit ]
Although there were sporadic incursions by Arab generals in the direction of India in the 660s and a small Arab garrison was established in the arid region of Makran in the 670s,[86] the first large-scale Arab campaign in the Indus valley occurred when the general Muhammad bin Qasim invaded Sindh in 711 after a coastal march through Makran.[87] Three years later the Arabs controlled all of the lower Indus valley.[87] Most of the towns seem to have submitted to Arab rule under peace treaties, although there was fierce resistance in other areas, including by the forces of Raja Dahir at the capital city Debal.[87][88] Arab incursions southward from Sindh were repulsed by the armies of Gurjara and Chalukya kingdoms, and further Islamic expansion was checked by the Rashtrakuta empire, which gained control of the region shortly after.[88]
Conquest of the Maghreb: 647–742 [ edit ]
Arab forces began launching sporadic raiding expeditions into Cyrenaica (modern northeast Libya) and beyond soon after their conquest of Egypt.[89] Byzantine rule in northwest Africa at the time was largely confined to the coastal plains, while autonomous Berber polities controlled the rest.[90] In 670 Arabs founded the settlement of Qayrawan, which gave them a forward base for further expansion.[90] Muslim historians credit the general Uqba ibn Nafi with subsequent conquest of lands extending to the Atlantic coast, although it appears to have been a temporary incursion.[90][91] The Berber chief Kusayla and an enigmatic leader referred to as Kahina (prophetess or priestess) seem to have mounted effective, if short-lived resistance to Muslim rule at the end of the 7th century, but the sources do not give a clear picture of these events.[92] Arab forces were able to capture Carthage in 698 and Tangiers by 708.[92] After the fall of Tangiers, many Berbers joined the Muslim army.[91] In 740 Umayyad rule in the region was shaken by a major Berber revolt, which also involved Berber Kharijite Muslims.[93] After a series of defeats, the caliphate was finally able to crush the rebellion in 742, although local Berber dynasties continued to drift away from imperial control from that time on.[93]
Conquest of Hispania and Septimania: 711–721 [ edit ]
Bilingual Latin-Arabic dinar minted in Iberia AH 98 (716/7 AD)
The Muslim conquest of Iberia is notable for the brevity and unreliability of the available sources.[94][95] After the Visigothic king of Spain Wittiza died in 710, the kingdom experienced a period of political division.[95] The Visigothic nobility was divided between the followers of Wittiza and the new king Roderic. Akhila, Wittiza's son, had fled to Morocco after losing the succession struggle and Muslim tradition states that he asked the Muslims to invade Spain. Starting in the summer of 710, the Muslim forces in Morocco had launched several successful raids into Spain, which demonstrated the weakness of the Visigothic state.[97]
Taking advantage of the situation, the Muslim Berber commander, Tariq ibn Ziyad, who was stationed in Tangiers at the time, crossed the straits with an army of Arabs and Berbers in 711.[95] Most of the invasion force of 15,000 were Berbers, with the Arabs serving as an "elite" force.[97] Ziyad landed on the Rock of Gibraltar on 29 April 711.[64] After defeating the forces of king Roderic at the river Guaddalete on 19 July 711, Muslim forces advanced, capturing cities of the Gothic kingdom one after another.[94] The capital of Toledo surrendered peacefully.[97] Some of the cities surrendered with agreements to pay tribute and local aristocracy retained a measure of former influence.[95] The Spanish Jewish community welcomed the Muslims as liberators from the oppression of the Catholic Visigothic kings.[98]
In 712, another larger force of 18,000 from Morocco, led by Musa Ibn Nusayr, crossed the Straits of Gibraltar to link up with Ziyad's force at Talavera.[98] The invasion seemed to have entirely on the initiative of Tariq ibn Ziyad: the caliph, al-Walid, in Damascus reacted as if it was a surprise to him.[99] By 713 Iberia was almost entirely under Muslim control.[94] In 714, al-Walid summoned Ziyad to Damascus to explain his campaign in Spain, but Ziyad took his time travelling through North Africa and Palestine, and was finally imprisoned when he arrived in Damascus.[64] The events of the subsequent ten years, the details of which are obscure, included the capture of Barcelona and Nar |
coming here. And then how will I survive? It is better to just keep quiet."
Ms Jana holds up a 500-rupee note up in the air so that all the women can see it.
She points to what looks like an empty space on the left side and then holds it up against the light and suddenly a picture of Mahatma Gandhi appears with the number 500 written on it.
The women start laughing and one of them jokes: "Satabadi, you are a magician."
She smiles and then shows them a series of other ways in which they can spot fake notes with the naked eye.
Sometimes, though, it is not possible to detect whether a note is real or not just by looking at it.
Brisk Business
So the organisation that Ms Jana works for, the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, has put a machine in its office that uses ultraviolet light to detect forgeries.
Image caption The sex workers are too scared to report the fake notes to the police for fear of being arrested
Not surprisingly, it is much in demand.
Seema Fokle says that if a client gives her a suspicious-looking note, she comes here to check it. "If it's fake, I ask them to change it and they do."
Ms Jana says that since they started the training programme, the number of fake notes in the area has declined by around 20%.
Prostitution is illegal in India but the country has more than three million sex workers.
Campaigners say the real figure is much higher than that and many of those working in the illegal sex industry are children who are trafficked from some of the poorest parts of the country.
By the time this training programme finishes, more than 10,000 women will have been taught how to recognise fake notes.
Ms Jana hopes that it will help one of the world's oldest professions get to grips with one of the world's oldest problems.A progressive activist who was quoted by the Washington Post and whose writing has been featured in Ravishly and Boing Boing claimed to be a “pedophile” and defended white nationalism, Breitbart can reveal.
Sarah Nyberg, a transsexual formerly living as Nicholas Nyberg, sometimes known as Sarah Butts, is a well-known critic of the GamerGate movement who was recently quoted on the topic by The Washington Post. She enjoys the support of prominent progressive commentators including Salon columnist Arthur Chu, former NFL punter Chris Kluwe and academic Katherine Cross.
But a recent leak from an online chat room owned by Nyberg reveals Nyberg’s disturbing past. In 2005, Nyberg described herself as a pedophile, revealed how she was obsessed with her young cousin, who was 8 years old at the time and whom we will refer to as “Alice,” defended white nationalism, and orchestrated a cyberattack against a rival’s website. Public records reveal that she currently owes at least $100,000 in back taxes and is classed as a “delinquent” by the Wisconsin Department of Revenue.
The content below is disturbing; readers are advised to proceed with caution.
CLAIMED PEDOPHILIA
Leaked chat logs from the Final Fantasy Shrine (FFshrine) forums, a website then owned by Nyberg, show how she condoned consensual sex between adults and children as young as age 6, openly fantasised about sex play with underage girls (including Alice) and shared pictures which others referred to as child porn.
Nyberg has admitted that the chat logs, which date back to 2005, are genuine and later, in a further admission of ownership, filed a DMCA copyright claim against at least one website that hosted the logs.
Many of the links to archived FFShrine content are unstable thanks to a spate of takedown requests Nyberg and her supporters issued when we approached her for comment on this story. Breitbart has obtained the full archives of all logs, leaked by citizen journalists over the past year.
The logs have been dissected by amateur sleuths on YouTube, such as “LeoPirate,” whose video on the subject had attracted nearly 70,000 views as we went to press. The logs themselves are still available in several locations online.
In a shocking post in Nyberg’s own FFShrine chat logs, dated 26 October 2005, Nyberg, who used the screen name “Sarah,” describes herself as a “submissive male to female transsexual pedophile that’s fond of ageplay and penisgirls that really misses Alice.” Elsewhere in the logs, she says “yes, I am a pedo. I embraced my childlover soul long ago.” Nyberg says she knows pedophiles: “I’ve probably known 8-12 pedo trannies,” she says.
Elsewhere in the FFShrine logs, Nyberg jokes: “If you’re not willing to hook up with an 11 year old, you’re an ageist, we hate you, and you need to leave.”
Nyberg told the chat room that she feared pedophilia might “run in the family” because her father is “dating someone 10 years younger than him” and because her brother’s girlfriend “isn’t legal.”
Nyberg claims to have been the subject of some kind of investigation in the past. She says that her computer was seized in 2005. Nyberg expressed concern that they might find her encrypted drive, which contained what she described as “non-nude model” pictures.
She also admitted to hosting pictures of “ptms” (pre-teen models) on one of her websites. In her view, naked pictures of children “isn’t cp.” (CP is web slang for child pornography.)
There seem to have been other members of the FFShrine chat room Nyberg operated who had similar inclinations. One member, writing under the pseudonym “Ego” tells the group that he is “waiting on the little neighbour twins to develop.” In response, Nyberg requests pictures of them.
Nyberg joked about using FFShrine as a grooming forum. “We use FFShrine to lure unsuspecting kiddies into our gingerbread house,” she writes at one point. But there are also signs that she wasn’t joking, as elsewhere in the logs she says: “other girls at FFshrine have talked to me about really young masturbation stuff in private.”
Nyberg entertains ambitions of having children herself one day, telling the chat room in 2007 that she “want[s] kids eventually. Being a mom.” She regularly talked about the possibility of adoption, sharing with others that she would try and “secure a single parent adoption” although she added that “trannyness + pedoness might complicate that.”
COUSIN “ALICE”
Alice is a pseudonym, which we are using to protect the identity of Nyberg’s cousin. Nyberg specifically names her then 8-year-old cousin using the latter’s real name and describes in detail how they are related. Using the information Nyberg posted online we were easily able to locate and contact Alice’s parents, who said they knew nothing about these logs but had made sure that Nyberg and their daughter had never been left alone together. Alice’s father preferred not to elaborate on why he and his wife took the decision to make sure Nyberg, then called Nicholas and living as a twentysomething man, was never given unsupervised contact with Alice, 8.
As the following logs reveal, ten years ago a then-twentysomething Nyberg developed an obsession with Alice, when the latter was just 8 years old.
“I used to think 5/6/7 was too young, but Alice changed my mind,” Nyberg writes.
In another FFShrine post, Nyberg boasts about how she plans to “finally get pictures of her,” telling chatroom members that “it’s all about Alice man.”
Nyberg kept her promise, and later, shared a folder of images of Alice with a fellow chat room member. The folder was hosted on FFShrine’s servers.
In another exchange on FFShrine, she goes on to talk about Alice wearing a bathing suit.
In yet another post about her cousin on the same site, Nyberg refers to herself as a “pedophile” who is attracted to Alice and seems to admit that she may get an erection if she spends time with Alice. Nyberg is a male-to-female transsexual, and at this point was presumably still able to achieve an erection.
She also spoke openly about her moments of physical contact with Alice on FFShrine, telling the chatroom about how “cute” she was when Nyberg tickled her feet.
Not only did Nyberg share photos of her then 8-year old cousin with her associates online, but she also referred to her cousin by her real name and provided all the information needed to track someone down not just today in the age of Facebook but then, too, by simply using the Yellow Pages.
There are tens of thousands of pages of FFShrine chat logs, and they have not been comprehensively swept. But even at this early stage of research, Nyberg’s obsession with Alice is clear.
In the logs, Nyberg says she believes that sexual relationships between adults and children will one day be legal, but laments the fact that “by then, Alice will be too old.” She regularly told the chatroom that she missed Alice, and joked about paying her parents to keep her.
PICTURES
Nyberg insists that she has never molested anyone. In the logs, she argues that being a pedophile and a child molester are “not the same.” Nevertheless, Nyberg may have shared images of barely-clothed underage girls in the FFShrine chat room.
In one post, she links to a.jpg image from 12chan, a now-defunct imageboard. Another chatroom member responded to Nyberg’s post with the words: “that’s CP” and “I can see underage twat.”
“I see some vagin,” agreed another member.
Nyberg responds saying “she can’t see anything” and that “nudity isn’t CP.”
“Oh bullcrap,” came the response.
In another post, Nyberg shared images from a website called “adieskids,” which described itself as a site for “appropriate, respectful images of children.” But in a chatroom post, Nyberg references a “nipple” in one of the pictures from the site.
Nyberg also joked about “evil nipples” in another of the images, while another chatroom member quipped that they would “report u 2 FBI.”
At one point, Nyberg accidentally uploads pre-teen model (ptm) pictures to her own site.
In an attempt to justify posting the images, Nyberg referenced U.S. laws on child pornography, which she described as “pretty bullshit.” She complained that “almost any pics of kids COULD be illegal.” Elsewhere, Nyberg says that child pornography “isn’t a moral issue. Not a controversial one, anyway.”
ADVOCACY
“Most ethical pedos don’t advocate penetrating little girls,” says Nyberg in one logged FFShrine post. But in another, she says: “I’d have sex with a little girl if she wanted to.” Elsewhere in the same chat room, Nyberg says that she “honestly doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with sleeping with kids,” adding that she wouldn’t do it but only “to avoid getting in trouble.”
“Most pedophiles wouldn’t be dangerous if society didn’t treat them the way they do,” lamented Nyberg in one post. “There’s nothing wrong with being a pedophile,” she says in another. Astonishingly, Nyberg also claims that “homosexuality is just as much of a mental disorder as pedophilia.”
Nyberg entertains hopes that society may change its attitudes. In one post, she discusses whether the age of consent should be lowered to 4. In another, she rails against TV shows that attack pedophiles, such as NBC’s To Catch A Predator. At one point, she praises a girl called “leeloo” for “standing up for pedos in her class because of me.” Elsewhere, she shares her hopes that adult-child sex will one day be legal.
FFShrine forum posts show Nyberg discussing the concept of child sexuality. “Child sexuality is typically not expressed in the form of full-blown intercourse,” Nyberg writes. “Childhood sex play is typically anything from playing doctor to mutual masturbation to “show me yours and I’ll show you mine.” There’s nothing harmful about it. What’s harmful is society pretending children are asexual.”
In 2007, she told the chat room: “Everything Illegal is better than what we have, Pot beats Beer. It is healthier than smoking. and Child Porn is healthier than pot. So by looking at child porn you are using time you might use to smoke or drink. Thus a healthier america looks at child porn.”
WHITE NATIONALISM
The FFShrine chat logs also reveal Nyberg to be a defender of white nationalism. “White nationalism is ‘racist’ in the same sense that feminism is ‘sexist,'” she said. “I’m mad at [other IRC users] for buying into everything the media says regarding white nationalism when they rant so often about the media skewing pedophile stuff.”
“You can be proud of being white without hating other races,” Nyberg continued. “You can be concerned with white issues without wanting to kill the n****rs.”
Nyberg’s comments are at stark odds with her Twitter persona today, where she regularly accuses others of racism. She accused a prominent game developer, Mark Kern, of “retweeting bigots” after a user featuring a picture of an Iron Cross appeared on his feed. When another Twitter user pointed out that Iron Crosses continue to be used by ordinary Germans, Nyberg retorted that “racists and white nationalists” also use the symbol.
Nyberg also accused the gaming subreddit /r/KotakuInAction of hosting racist content, and complained on Twitter that her critics were “perpetuating racism” by “pretending it doesn’t exist.”
Nyberg may have changed her views since she defended white nationalism 9 years ago, but she has yet to acknowledge or apologise for her previous comments.
CYBERATTACKS
One of the features on FFShrine was a large database of pirated video game music. In 2006, this database was copied, or cloned, by a third party. Nyberg went to the FFShrine chatroom, and spoke to another member, Roph, about potential retaliation.
Nyberg suggests a range of retaliation options, including releasing the man’s personal information online (a practice known today as “doxing”), as well as “nasty stuff” including “hacking and cracking.” She also responds positively to another user who suggests that FFShrine members “send him a bunch of hatemail.”
A day later, Nyberg returned to the chat room and asked a fellow member to test a link to the man’s website. The chatroom member confirmed that the link was down, and asked Nyberg what she had done. “It’s a secret,” said Nyberg. “I have neat friends. That is all.”
For someone who talks frequently and hyperbolically about “online harassment campaigns,” Nyberg’s involvement in her very own campaign of cyber-attacks represents an extraordinary double standard.
TAX PROBLEMS
Although forum and chat posts show Nyberg boasting about how much she earns from advertising on FFShrine, she also claims to have avoided taxes. In February 2007, she tells the chatroom that “I don’t pay quarterlies because im a fckn rebel, also IRS [please] don’t hurt me.” A Google Answers thread from 2006 shows Nyberg asking how to exempt her website purchases from federal tax.
“I don’t get money tax with holdlin in my [cheques]” she continues. “Its manual, I have to pay them estimated tax. But I don’t.”
The financial arrangements between Nyberg and her parents appear complex. When another user remarks that Nyberg’s parents drain money from her account, Nyberg remarks that “at least I can buy my own drugs,” adding that her mother “gets out of prison really soon” and she has yet to move out of her parents’ house. “I’d rather have my parents drain money from me than vice-versa.”
Nyberg’s main source of income was FFShrine, a site which owed much of its traffic to its large bank of copyrighted video game and anime music. When Boing Boing games editor Leigh Alexander published an article from Nyberg on the site, she was giving a platform to someone who admitted to making a profit from pirated video game content.
Yet Nyberg’s financial situation is not as secure as it once was, to put it mildly. Public records show that she is currently facing legal demands totalling at least $134,496, including a federal tax lien for $103,891. The most recent state tax warrant, for $7,290, was issued in May 2015.
Additionally, publicly searchable Wisconsin Department of Revenue records show that Nyberg is currently “delinquent” on debts to the state amounting to $49,603.31.
RUNNING FROM THE PAST
If you look at Sarah Nyberg’s comments on Twitter these days, they seem totally at odds with her history. Despite describing herself as a pedophile just nine years ago, she has posted streams of Tweets attacking the imageboard 8chan for their alleged failure to tackle child porn on their site.
Once, she defended white nationalism as “no more racist than feminism is sexist.” Now she regularly accuses her opponents of racism. Once, she mulled the possibility of a hate mail campaign against the owner of a rival website. Now, she tweets endlessly about alleged “online harassment.”
This is the behaviour of someone who wants to leave their past behind without owning up to it. She has tried to convince the public that she is a paragon of social justice, doling out advice for society on social media, and writing columns for prominent feminist and gaming publications.
Nyberg has convinced many people, who are presumably unaware of the allegations against her. Her work attracted praise by former NFL player Chris Kluwe, who praised Nyberg for doing a “great job” compiling questionable comments from GamerGate supporters. British comedian Graham Linehan praised Nyberg for her “tireless” work curating GamerGate tweets.
In most political movements, revelations about tax evasion, potential cyber crime and white nationalist apologism would be enough to sink an activist. In Nyberg’s case, they are just the tip of the iceberg. Yet progressive commentators continue to line up in support of her. To date Sarah Nyberg’s writings have appeared on the feminist-supporting sites Boing Boing and Ravishly despite these allegations being widely circulated since January of this year.
A third, ferociously pro-feminist progressive website, The Mary Sue, featured a writer called “Sarah Butts,” an alias of Nyberg’s, writing critically about GamerGate. But The Mary Sue now denies that this is the same person. Hardly surprising, when you consider a comment in one of these logs: “I am rape incarnate.”
But none of that compares to identifying by name, uploading pictures of, and publicly expressing sexual interest in that 8-year-old girl, Alice, nine years ago.
Several posters on the 8chan imageboard who claimed to have connections to the family expressed their intention to report Nyberg to local and federal law enforcement following the publication of our story. Nyberg herself did not respond to repeated requests for comment; nor did her editor at Boing Boing, Leigh Alexander, or any of the other people professionally connected to Nyberg whom we contacted.
All in all, we sent six requests for comment. MailTrack software confirms that at least four of these requests were read, but ignored. After our requests for comment, Nyberg began a frantic effort to remove all traces of the leaked chat logs from the internet.
One website owner contacted Breitbart after its host received an email from Nyberg asking the latter to remove the logs, on the grounds that they are her “copyrighted content” and that they are causing her “financial and personal problems.” She went on to threaten the host with legal action. Nyberg’s supporters have made similar claims to other websites, citing “harassment.”
Whether or not these copyright claims are valid, Nyberg has asserted that she is the owner of FFShrine and the writings posted in the site’s chat rooms, and she has asserted intellectual property rights over them in allegations made against multiple websites across the internet.
Breitbart is in contact with both of Alice’s parents. They confirm the facts of our story but have declined to comment on the record.
Follow Milo Yiannopoulos (@Nero) on TwitterUniversal’s remake of The Bride of Frankenstein is targeting Bill Condon for the director’s chair.
Condon, who is behind Disney’s live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast, is in early talks to helm the movie, which is part of Universal’s planned cinematic universe based on classic monsters of yore, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed. (The first entry, The Mummy, starring Tom Cruise, opens June 9.)
David Koepp wrote the most recent draft of the project, which is intended to be an Angelina Jolie vehicle. Securing Condon, considered a prestigious filmmaker thanks to movies such as the musical Dreamgirls, Kinsey and Gods and Monsters.
It’s the latter that shows Condon’s direct connection to the Bride material. The 1998 movie, starring Ian McKellan, told the sad last days of James Whale, the gay director of the original Bride of Frankenstein. Condon even re-created several scenes from the 1935 movie for his film, which won him an Oscar for best screenplay and also earned nominations for best actor and best supporting actress.
Condon got his start in B-horror movie genre with movies such as Strange Invaders and Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh. He also directed the two parts of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn.
Beauty and the Beast crossed the $1 billion mark at the worldwide box office this past week.Metadata retention, which George Brandis has most frequently described as reading the front of an envelope, is also like standing outside a lawyer's office watching who goes in and out.
That metaphor emerged perhaps accidentally from communications minister Malcolm Turnbull, in explaining why there's no need to exempt what many regard as privileged communications (such as between client and lawyer, or patient and doctor) from the data retention regime.
Speaking to ABC Radio's Fran Kelly, in a piece he's helpfully had transcribed and posted on his blog, Turnbull said the mere fact of a consultation isn't a secret.
Regarding the legal profession, he noted: “the fact that you or I have spoken to our lawyer, have sought advice from our lawyer, is not privileged. What is privileged is the content of that communication“.
Turnbull went on: “that information could be obtained if someone is standing outside the doctor’s surgery and sees me walking in”.
So there you go: the government's data retention scheme is not the Stasi-like mass invasion of privacy that activists believe it to be.
It's no worse, in fact, than being stalked by a private investigator to see who you talk to, which doctor you visit, which lawyer you consult – along with when and how often you do so. ®Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption "We make about 5% margin... that's not the reason why prices are going up" - SSE Director of Customer Services Tony Keeling
SSE customers will see an average 8.2% rise in gas and electricity prices from 15 November, the company has announced.
The energy firm said the rise reflected higher costs of buying wholesale energy and paying to deliver it to customers' homes, plus government levies.
The price rises will affect about 4.4 million electricity customers and 2.9 million gas customers, not including those on fixed-price tariffs.
SSE's average annual dual-fuel energy bill will rise by £106 to £1,380.
Business and Energy Minister Michael Fallon said he was "disappointed" by SSE's decision to increase energy prices.
Analysis Energy prices are centre stage in the push to deal with what Labour leader Ed Miliband calls the "cost of living crisis". He has promised a temporary price freeze if Labour wins the next election. He's blamed the big six energy firms for failing to pass on any fall in the wholesale price of gas. But the Prime Minister, David Cameron, believes you can't buck the market. He thinks the best way to help prevent more price rises is to increase competition, by encouraging people to switch supplier more. He's also promised a new law to ensure people are offered the lowest tariff. David Cameron wants to shift the focus of restricting price rises on to green taxes, which make up part of your bill. It's only a small percentage of what you pay but the government, or at least the Tory side of it, is looking at exempting some smaller firms to encourage them to compete. While the parties disagree on how to tackle rising bills, the decision by SSE to put their prices up by 8% means the political stakes have just been raised.
He told BBC Radio 5 live: "I would encourage all customers to look again at their tariffs and see whether they can switch to a cheaper tariff."
He added the long-term answer to high energy bills was "more competition and encouraging consumers to shop around".
Caroline Flint, shadow energy secretary, said: "When times are tough energy companies should be helping their customers not hitting them with more price rises to boost their profits."
'We're sorry'
The company said that 8.2% was an average rise. Customers in the North of England and central Scotland would see the smallest increase, of 7%, in their dual fuel price. Customers in the South East of England would see the biggest, up 9.7%.
SSE last increased its prices a year ago. It has now pledged not to raise them again before autumn 2014.
"We're sorry we have to do this," said SSE's Will Morris.
"We've done as much as we could to keep prices down, but the reality is that buying wholesale energy in global markets, delivering it to customers' homes, and government-imposed levies collected through bills - endorsed by all the major parties - all cost more than they did last year."
SSE, made up of Southern Electric, Swalec and Scottish Hydro, said that for a typical dual-fuel customer, wholesale energy prices had gone up 4%, paying to use delivery networks was 10% more expensive, and government levies were 13% higher.
About two-thirds of a household fuel bill goes on the cost of wholesale energy, the cost of running an energy sales business, and on the companies' profits.
Up to 11% goes on government programmes to save energy, reduce emissions and tackle climate change, according to regulator Ofgem. SSE said it wanted this to be included in general taxation, rather than added to bills.
However, Energy Secretary Ed Davey said: "Half of an average energy bill is made up of the wholesale cost of energy. This far outweighs the proportion of a bill that goes to help vulnerable households with their bills and to cut energy waste."
The latest calculations from the regulator found that the average profit margin made by an energy supplier on an average £1,315 bill is £65.
However, this figure can be volatile. The snapshot profit margin has risen above £100, but has also fallen to a negative figure at certain points in recent years.
Political row
Profit levels prompted Labour leader Ed Miliband to declare that gas and electricity bills would not go up for 20 months if Labour won the 2015 election.
It is a tricky issue for the prime minister: stand firm on the eco charges and he risks alienating Tory voters; bend and he is vulnerable to the allegation that he is condemning the neediest to being unable to keep themselves warm
Prime Minister David Cameron condemned the pledge as a "gimmick", saying the government was simplifying bills to make it easier for consumers to switch suppliers and encourage competition.
SSE, formerly Scottish and Southern Energy, said it expected its annual profit margin to average about 5% over a three-to-five-year period, which it believed was "a fair amount".
It said its profit margin was 4.2% in the 2012-13 financial year and was expected to fall short of the 5% target again this year.
"We know we will come in for a great deal of criticism for this decision and politicians will no doubt be lining up to condemn us," said SSE's Mr Morris.
"But over many years, policymakers themselves have failed to highlight adequately the cost to consumers of the policies they have pursued in government.
"They can't expect to have power stations replaced with new technologies, the network to be upgraded and nationwide energy efficiency schemes all to be funded for free.
"And as an energy provider, we are in the unenviable position of having to pass this cost on to consumers through energy bills."
The announcement comes about a year after the last set of gas and electricity price rises.
Between August and December 2012, the "big six" energy companies outlined price rises of between 6% and 10.8%.
At that time, the companies blamed rising wholesale prices, the cost of transporting energy to homes, and the increasing cost of government social schemes for the increases.
Advice line National Debtline said it had received a record 15,502 calls from people seeking help with energy debts in the first six months of this year. This was up 10% on last year.
Adam Scorer, of watchdog Consumer Futures, said: "SSE and others who follow need to demonstrate why this rise is justified."Image copyright Reuters Image caption Egypt's parliament is dominated by supporters of the president
Egypt's parliament has expelled an MP who was an outspoken critic of the government's human rights record.
Mohammed Anwar Sadat, a nephew of the late President Anwar Sadat, was accused of forging signatures on a draft bill and leaking sensitive information to foreign organisations.
Speaker Ali Abdel Aal said 468 of the 596 MPs in parliament, which is dominated by President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi's supporters, voted to unseat him.
Mr Sadat has denied the allegations.
"I answered the accusations with documents and demanded they be investigated by the judiciary," he said in a statement on Monday.
Mr Sadat was chairman of the House of Representatives' committee on human rights until last August, when he resigned over the failure to address abuse allegations.
The accusations he faced centred on his criticism of a draft law approved by MPs in November that human rights activists say would effectively prohibit independent non-governmental groups from operating in the country by subjecting their work and funding to control by the authorities.
Mr Sadat was accused by fellow MPs of leaking a copy of the draft law to a foreign embassy and revealing the inner workings of parliament in a message to the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU).
Mr Sadat said he had not leaked anything to the embassy, noting that the law had already been published online by a ministry, and that his message to the IPU was a press release that was also sent to journalists and posted on his website.
In January, Mr Sadat also criticised the speaker for spending more than $1m (£800,000) on armoured vehicles for himself and two deputies at a time of austerity.
Mr Abdel Aal described such criticism of the parliamentary budget as a "crime".This should not come as any surprise. There is another closure of Hwy. 100 on tap for the weekend.
But construction-weary drivers will also have to contend with orange cones and detours on a portion of I-35W through Roseville. Ramsey County officials are warning of delays on County Roads H and 10 near the Mermaid Supper Club in Mounds View.
It’s a truck race at the ERX Motor Park that has MnDOT warning of backups on Hwy. 169 in Elk River while construction on I-35 between Pine City and Hinckley could spawn delays.
Large traffic generating events this weekend include Twins games at Target Field, a Lynx game Friday at Target Center, Lumberjack Days in Stillwater, Rondo Days and Highland Fest in St. Paul, the Ramsey County Fair in Maplewood and Street Machine Nationals at the State Fairgrounds.
Rail riders, take note of maintenance activities from 7 p.m. Sunday until 3 a.m. Monday. Buses will fill in for Green Line trains between Target Field and Stadium Village and for Blue Line trains from Target Field to 38th Street.
Here is your guide to this weekend’s road construction:
1. I-494 in Plymouth: Traffic between Fish Lake Road in Maple Grove and Hwy. 55 in Plymouth is to two lanes each direction until Nov. 4.
2. Hwy. 100 in St. Louis Park: Northbound lanes between Crosstown and I-394 will be closed from 10 p.m. Friday until 5 a.m. Monday. Southbound reduced to two lanes between W. 36th Street and Crosstown.
3. I-35W in Roseville: Northbound will be closed from Hwy. 36 to I-694 from 10 p.m. Friday until 5 a.m. Monday.
4. I-694 in Shoreview: Westbound traffic has two lanes separated by a concrete barrier between I-35E and Lexington Avenue. Ramp from Rice Street to westbound 694 closed until November.
5. I-35E in northeast metro: Intermittent lane closures between County Roads 96 and J. County 96 is single lane from Centerville Road to White Bear Parkway and closed at Manning Avenue.
6. Hwy. 61 and 97 in Forest Lake: No access to eastbound Hwy. 97 from Hwy. 61. Single lane traffic on both directions of Hwy 61 between the north intersection of Hwy. 97/Scandia Trail and 202nd Street.
7. Hwy. 8 in Franconia: Closed between the south junction of Hwy. 95 in Franconia Township and downtown Taylors Falls.
8. I-94 from St. Paul to Maplewood: The resurfacing project between E. 7th Street and Century Avenue will last until the end of 2017. The left westbound lane between Mounds Blvd and Century Ave. is permanently closed through early August. Hwy 61 to westbound I-94 is reduced to a single lane through August. The left eastbound lane is closed from 4 a.m. until 2:30 p.m. weekdays and Saturdays until Aug. 19.
9. I-94 in the Midway: Both directions will be reduced to a single lane at Snelling and Cretin Avenues until 6 a.m. Saturday. Prior Avenue bridge over 94 remains closed.
10. I-35E in St. Paul: Southbound is single lane between Grand and St. Clair avenues from 7 p.m. Friday until 6 a.m. Sunday. The St. Clair Ave bridge is closed. The ramp from southbound I-35E to St. Clair ramp is also closed through July 31.
11. Hwy. 36 and Lexington Avenue in Roseville: The ramp from Dale Street to westbound Hwy. 36 is closed, as are all ramps at Lexington Avenue.
12. Hwy. 280 in Minneapolis: Single lane in each direction between Broadway St. and Como Avenue.
13. I-35W in northeast Minneapolis: The following bridges over I-35W have lane closures: Westbound Hennepin Avenue, eastbound Broadway Street and northbound Johnson Street.
14. Hwy. 5 in St. Paul: Single lane in both directions over the Mississippi River near Fort Snelling for bridge repair.
15. Hwy. 13 in Lilydale: Closed between Wachtler Avenue and Sylvandale Road until Sept. 2.
16. Franklin Avenue in Minneapolis: The bridge over the Mississippi River is closed until Labor Day weekend.
17. Minnehaha Avenue in Minneapolis: Closed between 34th and Lake streets. In downtown, detours and lane restrictions are in place along portions of 3rd Avenue S.
And here is a late addition that didn't make the map: Both directions of Hwy. 10 between Foley Blvd. and Hwy. 610 in Spring Lake Park and Coon Rapids will be a single lane from 7 p.m. Friday until 5 a.m. Monday.I don't think that outright banning BP will ever be the correct solution to this. The fact is that BP's primary mechanic (switching it's user out) is no more unhealthy than U-turn or Volt Switch, and it is a really useful tool for anything that gets it with no other VoltTurning moves (and there are a lot of legal drypassers, even if the viability of some is questionable). Take Mawile as a prime example of a'mon that puts drypass to good use, as well as Musharna--who can use it to grab momentum or dodge a boosted Pursuit if it hasn't got up any CMs. I think that BP is balanced when passing boosts too for the most part; you have stuff like SD pass Leafeon, CM pass Mush and even stuff like Stockpile+WP pass Drifblim if you're feeling particularly experimental. The fact is that BP as a move isn't a problem, but rather the way that it was being abused by Pokémon like Ninjask and Combusken. For what it's worth, I think even really niche methods of speed passing like Solrock pass were straight up unbalanced and that SD pass, NP pass, CM pass, Stockpile/Cosmic Power pass are not on the basis that passing speed to something that can boost offensive stats quickly or to something which has stupidly high offenses which are held back by their inability to outpace anything creates unhealthy scenarios which wouldn't be problematic without speed being passed, and if anything it can be likened to giving Archeops Illuminate in the respect that it artificially creates an overpowered Pokémon with little effort on the speed passer's part. If you were to pass +2 speed to something like LO Magmortar or SD Samurott it is safe to say that it'd be more dangerous than, say, having Mr. Mime pass the former a Nasty Plot boost or the having Musharna pass the latter a Calm Mind/Barrier on the basis that it has taken the middling speed which holds it back and completely negating the issue as opposed to buffing it's already-insane SpA stat or by allowing it to set up by BPing in against something which the passer baits out (e.g. Combusken baiting out Ground-types or Ninjask baiting out Rock- or Fire-types--both of which Samurott eats for breakfast). At +2 it can no longer be revenge killed by things like Tauros while still hitting like a fucking truck, and and this makes it much harder to deal with even before you consider that it or another teammate can be passed to again later in the match--which is why I think that speed is where the line should be drawn. Sure it's annoying as hell to be faced with someone who has bolstered an already-high stat, but the counterplay to this is much easier to come by than it is for speed passing.
This is just me though, and tbf I'm typing this when I'm really tired so there are probably a load of |
Bushman has been studying the topic of violence in media for a quarter of a century and has more than 150 publications in peer-reviewed journals. His focus emphasizes the causes, consequences, and solutions to the problem of human aggression and violence. Google’s scholar list identifies him as the second-most cited communications scholar in America. One of his main focuses has been challenging the idea that violent media has only a trivial effect on aggression.
“We recently did a comprehensive review of every study ever conducted on violent video games and found 381 studies involving over 130,000 participants,” he said. “That’s just video games—I’m not talking about television programs or movies—hundreds of studies have been conducted on the topic.”
After looking at the results, Dr. Bushman said that, across the board, individuals who play violent video games have higher levels of aggressive thoughts, angry feelings, arousal, and aggression. They also have lower levels of helping and empathy.
Focusing on those six factors—aggressive thoughts, angry feelings, arousal, aggression, helping, and empathy—he cited examples of different studies and their results. The studies included men and women of all ages from around the world. Even with taking into account a margin of error, none of the results come even close to a correlation of zero—meaning no effect—in looking at the overall impact, he said.
Although the extreme violent behaviors—such as assault and even murder—are very rare and very difficult to predict, violent video games often lead to other aggressive behaviors, such as threats of violence, pushing and shoving, verbal aggression, and violent thoughts.
For most of the studies, researchers randomly assigned some participants to play violent video games and other participants play nonviolent video games for a duration of time—usually 20 minutes. Different tests and questions conducted after the study show the effects of the violent video games.
Individuals who play violent video games have higher levels of aggressive thoughts and lower levels of empathy.
To measure their aggressive thoughts, the researchers gave a hypothetical situation of a car hitting another car—no one injured—and asked what the response of the person who had been hit would be. Responses of violent measures were more prevalent among those who had been playing violent video games.
“Violent video games influence aggressive thoughts,” he said.
With screens getting bigger and bigger and technology allowing for 3-D experiences, individuals are able to have a large experience when playing video games, even within their own homes. For one study, researchers used equipment to measure heart rate and breathing patterns to analyze the physical effects of violent video games. Cardiac incoherence—irregular heart rate and breathing patterns—were more prevalent among individuals who played the violent video games.
Another study allowed the “winner” of a game to blast a loud noise through headphones at a competitor for the duration and decimal that they chose. Those who had been playing violent video games often chose a louder and longer blast, even though the “winner” erroneously thought the blast could cause permanent damage to his or her opponent.
“The more people play, the more aggressive they become,” he said. “They become numb to the pain and suffering of others.”
Another study included a fake fight outside the room where the test subjects were located. Those who had been playing violent video games were much slower to respond to someone who, for all appearances, seemed to have been attacked and left hurt.
“What happens in the brain changes how you act,” Dr. Bushman said.
The Assembly Hall of the Hinckley Alumni Center on BYU’s campus is filled February 13 during the annual Lecture for the Marjorie Pay Hinckley Endowed Chair in Social Work and the Social Sciences. The lecture was by Dr. Brad Bushman, a professor of communication and psychology at Ohio State University. Photo by Marcos Escalona, BYU.
Although there are many studies showing the negative effects of violence in video games, many people choose not to listen. Many like the games and don’t want to believe their effects, while others say they aren’t “killing anyone in real life” and so the games must not have an effect on them.
“Even the surgeon general warned of violence in the media in 1972,” Dr. Bushman said. Pointing out that the warning was about violent TV programs and films, he posed the question, “What about video games?”
Recognizing that all video games do not have a negative effect, he said that good parenting is the key to make sure that children have the appropriate guidelines for their media choices. In his home they have passwords for their computers and TV, which are not allowed in children’s rooms, and their personal electronic devices are used in rooms with open doors and are turned in at night.
Although these rules aren’t always popular—even in his own home—they are what are going to make the difference, he declared.
“Being a professor is easier than being a good parent,” he said, adding that “violent media is something we can do something about.”
Each year a national researcher is chosen to speak at the annual lecture honoring Sister Hinckley. For this lecture, all five of President Gordon B. Hinckley and Marjorie Pay Hinckley’s children attended the lecture, along with other family members.Your Strava profile is your way to show the world who you are as an athlete. To help you showcase your athletic history, we’ve released a much needed update to our logged-out athlete pages. We’ve cleaned up the design, made them mobile-friendly, and included more top-level stats.
Now when you share your profile with friends they’ll be able to see more of your accomplishments and social connections on Strava. You can set up a custom URL for your profile in your Settings so it’s easier to share and remember.
As a reminder, we do have Privacy settings that let you choose how much personal information is shared to logged-in and logged-out visitors. If you’d prefer to keep your name anonymized and require that athletes request to follow you to see your activities and photos, you can turn on Enhanced Privacy Mode.
We have more great updates in store for profile pages and we’d love to hear more about what you’d like to show off, so please share your feedback with us.During an interview with a Fayetteville radio station on Tuesday, Rep. Robert Pittenger (R-NC) claimed there is no meaningful distinction between Black Lives Matter demonstrators and the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who recently rallied in Charlottesville, Virginia. That rally left a counter-protester dead and 19 others injured after an alleged Nazi sympathizer drove his vehicle through a crowd of people.
Asked by the host what he took away from the violence in Charlottesville, Pittenger quickly steered the conversation away from groups like the KKK, which seek to terrorize minority groups and establish whites as the master race. Instead, he focused his criticism on Black Lives Matter, a group that works to stop the unjustified killing of black people, saying the group was “just as engaged in hate” as neo-Nazis, the KKK, and other white supremacists.
“You look at the actions of Black Lives Matter and people like Al Sharpton who have not condemned it — we never heard President Obama condemn the violence of Black Lives Matter,” Pittenger said. “And so it’s a bit disingenuous to me that so much pressure and criticism has been put on President Trump for what he didn’t say, and yet when these things happen on the other side, there’s silence.”
The host pushed back, asking Pittenger, “Can you really compare Black Lives Matter to Nazis and the KKK and white supremacists?” But Pittenger didn’t back down, saying “hate in all forms is wrong” and asking, with regard to Black Lives Matter, “where is the spirit of Martin Luther King in all this?”
Advertisement
Unconvinced, the host challenged Pittenger again. He pointed out that Black Lives Matter is not a hate group and said, “You’re not going to have a Black Lives Matter person drive a car into a crowd of people and kill a bunch of people.”
“How do you know that?” Pittenger interjected, before going on to claim that “they’ve done other things… some of the people involved have demonstrated hate.”
In September of last year, Pittenger apologized for racially charged criticism he made of protesters who had gathered in Charlotte in response to the death of Keith Lamont Scott at the hands of a cop.
Pittenger, who represents part of Charlotte, said during a BBC-TV interview that some of the protesters who took to the streets in the city “hate white people.”
Advertisement
“The grievance in their minds — the animus, the anger — they hate white people because white people are successful and they’re not,” he said, before taking aim at people who receive welfare. “It is a welfare state. We have spent trillions of dollars on welfare, and we’ve put people in bondage, so they can’t be all they’re capable of being.”
Pittenger subsequently apologized in a statement, saying his comment “doesn’t reflect who I am.”
“My intent was to discuss the lack of economic mobility for African Americans because of failed policies,” he added. “I apologize to those I offended and hope that we can bring peace and calm to Charlotte.”Many of the employees at Google's Zurich headquarters get hired out of the nearby Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zurich (Keystone)
A recent report on Swiss salaries left many wondering whether software developers really only earn a mediocre amount in Switzerland compared to other professions.
Programmers and software developers – some of today’s most in-demand jobs – earn middle-of-the-road starting salaries according to the Zurich salary book, at CHF4,608 per month for a 42-hour week for those who have finished an apprenticeship and CHF5,446 for those with a Bachelor’s degree. By comparison, a Zurich-area bus driver with no experience makes CHF4,858 per month for a 40.5-hour work week.
chart The following content is sourced from external partners. We cannot guarantee that it is suitable for the visually or hearing impaired.
That sounds about right to Laurent Meyer, dean and co-founder of the Zurich-based Propulsion Academy which teaches people how to code so they can become software developers. The salaries reflected in the Zurich book are for junior developers, of which there are many on the market, according to Meyer.
“It’s the senior developers who are in especially high demand, but to become senior you have to be junior first,” he says.
That said, junior programmers usually rise up the ranks quickly after being hired. And, those coming out of Zurich’s Federal Institute of Technology ETH – about 40% of which get snapped up by nearby Google – make more than CHF80,000 per year or more than CHF6,000 per month their first year on the job.
Of course, when looking at Swiss salaries, it’s important to keep in mind that the country’s cost of living is among the highest in the world. The budget below shows what a typical middle-class family might spend their earnings on in a given month.
(swissinfo.ch)
swissinfo.ch
Neuer Inhalt Horizontal Line
SWI swissinfo.ch on Instagram SWI swissinfo.ch on InstagramFritz the Wampa was among the local "Star Wars" superfans with the 501st Legion-Black Ice Squad, Mandalorian Mercs Costume Club and The Rebel Legion who donated their time to pose with cats and dogs at Green Bay Animal Rescue to help them find homes. (Photo: Courtesy of Lauren Haag)
The Force met the fur at Green Bay Animal Rescue and the results were, as any cat- or dog-loving “Star Wars” fan might expect, out of this world.
You don’t know what a softie a Stormtrooper can be until you see one cradling a 3-week-old kitten or how a cat named Buddy can make a Jawa’s eyes light up — literally.
Hardly the kind of scenes you’re going to see in George Lucas’ next film, but they played out Sept. 17 in a galaxy not very far, far away. Local “Star Wars” superfans with the 501st Legion-Black Ice Squad, Mandalorian Mercs Costume Club and The Rebel Legion donated their time to pose with animals up for adoption through Green Bay Animal Rescue, a nonprofit organization whose 20 active volunteers care for animals in foster homes and at the Kathy Bootz Memorial Cat Sanctuary inside Parkside Animal Care Center.
Members of the 501st Legion, a worldwide, all-volunteer network of “Star Wars” fans who take their handmade costumes as seriously as their love for the film franchise, make appearances at charitable and civic events to raise awareness and spirits. They say things like, “Here’s my trading card,” and then slip you one of themselves in character complete with their Legion ID number.
RELATED:Spartacus the cat is Parkside clinic's 'team love'
The 501st has more than 10,000 members in 61 countries, but closer to home, there are about 50 active members in Northeastern Wisconsin in the Black Ice Squad, one of the many smaller divisions within the 501st and part of a 92-member statewide collective known as the Wisconsin Garrison. Members have shown up at everything from community celebrations and charity fundraisers to birthday parties and hospital bedsides for Make-A-Wish requests.
The photo shoot with cats and dogs in need of homes was a first for a 501st Legion group in Wisconsin, said Rachel Hanks, the Appleton member who coordinated the event after talking with co-worker Amanda Hostak, who volunteers with Green Bay Animal Rescue. It wasn’t a hard sell to get members — even the ones who play the bad guys — to suit up on a Saturday morning to give animals some love.
“Everybody pounced, because who doesn’t want to work with animals?” said Hanks, whose character is Darth Revan. “Everybody loves animals. Everybody loves ‘Star Wars.’ Suddenly you have ‘Star Wars’ mixed with animals and everyone goes crazy.”
Buy Photo Can you feel the "Star Wars" love? Members of the 501st Legion-Black Ice Squad, Mandalorian Mercs Costume Club and The Rebel Legion shower a kitten up for adoption through Green Bay Animal Rescue with attention. The local "Star Wars" superfans volunteered their time Sept. 17 to pose with the animals in an effort to help them find homes. (Photo: Kendra Meinert/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin)
That Green Bay Animal Rescue is a smaller group that would benefit from the attention appealed to the 501st members, Hanks said. They’re also one of the few rescues in the state that will take in any breed, said Briana Petersen of De Pere, who was dressed as Padme Amidala.
“Anything for the fur babies,” she said.
About 15 members from Green Bay and the Fox Valley signed up for the photo session at Parkside, where they arrived an hour in advance to get into their costumes, which are extensive. One of the requirements for membership in the 501st Legion is at least one screen-accurate costume and participation in at least one public event each year. Mandalorians, Tusken Raiders, TIE fighter pilots, Stormtroopers and a Republic Commando were among the willing models.
Most of the four-legged subjects seemed oblivious to the heavy armor, menacing masks and glowing orange eyes. For those cats too scared to join the invasion in the lobby, the characters went to them, posing for photos in the tight quarters of cat rooms and office spaces. The biggest and furriest of the bunch wasn’t a cat or a dog, but Fritz the Wampa, the carnivorous ice creature that towers high above the rest of the “Star Wars” conglomeration. He made his appearance for the photo shoot finale, as Petersen helped him get into his huge arms and then fluffed up his coat.
“We thought it would be fun to have a furry friend,” Petersen said.
Buy Photo Booker and Tia, two of the dogs up for adoption through Green Bay Animal Rescue, had no qualms about cozying up to the masked "Star Wars" characters for a group shot outside Parkside Animal Care Center in Green Bay. (Photo: Kendra Meinert/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin)
Fritz, along with his “Star Wars” co-stars, all but stopped traffic along Military Avenue when they posed for a group photo outside Parkside. There were more than a few honks and several cars with children pulled in and asked to get a photo. For those in the the 501st Legion, who do as many as 40 appearances a year, it's all part of the reward of giving back.
“We’re very blessed we get to do this,” Petersen said.
Photos have already been shared on the 501st Legion Facebook page, where they have 4,900 likes, as well as on the Wisconsin Garrison and Black Ice Squad Facebook pages. Green Bay Animal Rescue will use them to help catch the eye of potential pet adopters.
“We all know that there are more cats and kittens in shelters than there are homes,” said Green Bay Animal Rescue president Kathy DeChamps. “We’ve had cats that have been with us for a very long time. We hope this is a new way to showcase them, bring some interest to them and hopefully find them a home.”
Never doubt the Force. One of the cats was already adopted last week by a couple with the Mandalorian Mercs who participated in the shoot.
kmeinert@pressgazettemedia.com and follow her on Twitter @KendraMeinert
To adopt
Green Bay Animal Rescue’s available pets are featured on the nonprofit group’s website at greenbayanimalrescue.weebly.com and on its Facebook page.
Read or Share this story: http://gbpg.net/2dpBcRoHundreds of swimmers in Brazil are being warned to stay out of the water following a spate of attacks by shoals of deadly piranha, which has left more than 50 people injured in just over a month.
Unsuspecting tourists have had chunks of flesh bitten out of their hands and feet as drought conditions in the South American country force the lethal predators to migrate from their natural habitat to deeper waters packed with holidaymakers.
Join Independent Minds For exclusive articles, events and an advertising-free read for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent With an Independent Minds subscription for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent Without the ads – for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month
This week at least eight bathers were bitten by the man-eaters, known as “white bitches”, the 6in-long species blamed for the attacks, on beaches in Palmas, in Tocantins State, north-east Brazil. Three children were among the casualties as people took to the waters to cool off during the hot holiday weekend. A four-year-old boy had a chunk taken out of his heel.
Veraluci Milhomem’s toe was bitten on the same day. “I felt a stab of pain in my foot and started screaming,” said the 55-year-old administrative assistant. “My friends dragged me out of the water before anything else could happen.”
Also in the north-east in the last 10 days, 25 people reported vicious attacks scaring off swimmers in a popular stretch of the San Francisco river in the town of Pao de Acucar, in Alagoas.
Among the victims was student Lucas André da Silva, 15, whose heel was lacerated on Sunday. “I was playing in the river with friends when I felt something dig into me. I pulled my foot out of the water to see what had happened and saw a lot of blood. The bite still really hurts,” he said.
On a freshwater beach in Populina in Sao Paulo, south-east Brazil, 20 holidaymakers were injured by lone piranha. Juraci de Souza, 42, was just getting out of the Rio Grande when it happened.
“I was swimming to the shallower part of the river when I felt a twinge. As I came out onto the sand I saw that I was bleeding heavily from my foot,” said the forklift truck driver. “Thankfully I’d been bitten by a bitch [piranha]. If it had been a whole school it would have been much worse,” he said.
According to Bruno Benhocci, a biologist at the Votuporanga University in Sao Paulo, the unusually high numbers of piranha plaguing the waterways could be linked to drought conditions in recent years which has affected food supplies.
“In the absence of their natural food, piranha are moving from shallow areas to deeper parts where they can find it,” he said. “Piranha can’t detect whether a movement is made by a finger or a fish, they just bite what they can get.”
The predators can smell blood up to two miles away and pound for pound their sharp toothed bite is more powerful than a great white shark’s and three time stronger than that of an alligator.
Every year hundreds of piranha attacks are reported in South America. The most frightening in Brazil was in 2011 when a series of incidents left 100 people injured. In 2012, a five-year-old girl died after she was eaten by piranhas when her canoe capsized in the Amazon.Tunis, 13 June (AKI) - A 22-year-old Tunisian man has died from the injuries he sustained during violent clashes in the east Tuesday between police and Salafites angered by an art exhibition they claim offends Muslims, local website al-Sabeel reported.
Al-Sabeel named the Tunisian as Fahmi al-Aouni and said he died in clashes in the coastal city of Sousse that left 10 people injured. Clashes also took place in the capital, Tunis.
The riots came a day after the Spring of Arts exhibition in Tunis's upscale La Marsa suburb sparked an outcry from some the puritanical Salafites who say it insulted Islam.
The work that appears to have caused most fury amongst hardliners spelt out the name of God using insects.
Police imposed a curfew late Tuesday after thousands of Salafites rampaged in through parts of Tunis, hurling rocks and petrol bombs at police stations, a court house and the offices of secular parties.
The interior ministry said a total of 62 people were detained and 65 members of the security forces were wounded trying to quell the riots, the worst clashes since last year's revolt ousted autocratic president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and triggered uprisings across the Arab world.As the floods raged across the north-east, one of the area’s biggest concerns surrounded the future of Abergeldie Castle, with fears that the rising River Dee could wash away the building which has stood strong since the 16th century.
The Queen’s neighbour at Balmoral, John Gordon, had to flee the castle as the raging River Dee swept away trees and a huge chunk of land at the rear of his ancient Abergeldie Castle.
When Mr Gordon looked out of his back door he saw just 5ft of dry land between him and the fearsome flood – where before there has been 60ft of ground stretching out to the to the river bank.
Immediately work began to save the castle as the rain continued to pour, the floods continued to rise and the river continued to roar.
Press and Journal photographers Kenny Elrick and Jim Irvine positioned a camera across from the castle and captured five days of remedial work carried out by the council to shore up the foundations around the 16th century A-listed building.
Abergeldie Castle dates from the mid-16th century and was built by Sir Alexander Gordon of Midmar. Thankfully, due to, the work carried out over the last week, it looks like the building will survive long into the 21st century and beyond.
Work to save Abergeldie Castle after it was almost washed into the River Dee. Pictures by Kenny Elrick and Kami ThomsonBuy Photo A pedestrian crosses Main Avenue at the 8th Street intersection on Wednesday in front of southbound traffic in downtown Sioux Falls, S.D. (Photo: Joe Ahlquist / Argus Leader )Buy Photo
Sioux Falls city councilors want to keep Main Avenue on a diet through the holidays and beyond.
The pilot project that has reduced Main from three lanes to two downtown was set to end Friday.
But now, councilors have asked city staff members to consider keeping the road diet and making a permanent change sooner than planned.
"We're getting such a good response to it," Councilor Rex Rolfing said.
In mid-July, one traffic lane on Main Avenue was transformed into angled parking and seating areas. Bumpouts at the crosswalks were meant to make pedestrians more visible and give them a buffer from traffic.
Survey response showed walkers felt safer, and business owners reported a positive affect.
The plan was to then tear down the road diet for the winter and set it up again in the spring. Rolfing worried that would be too expensive and confusing to drivers. But the paint and angled parking spaces aren't designed to withstand snowplowing.
Plus, the city wanted the changes to be reversible if the project wasn't successful, said Heath Hoftiezr, principal traffic engineer.
Some parts of the project will be tweaked, based on feedback. That includes changing the angle of the parking spaces to make it easier for drivers to see while backing out and looking for a way to incorporate a bike lane, Hoftiezer said. For the pilot project, the shared bike lane was moved from the eastern-most lane to the west side of the street.
One issue that already was addressed was visibility when leaving the parking ramp on Main Avenue and 10th Street.
As many as 5,000 vehicles travel the southbound one-way in a day — about 700 during the evening rush hour.
The narrowing of Main Avenue didn't significantly slow traffic downtown, and there were no crashes attributed to the changes, city staff members said.
Councilor Michelle Erpenbach said people did complain about congestion during rush hour, but they then found alternate routes. She also doesn't support removing the road diet and bringing it back.
"I don't think it's fair to drivers," she said.
Council President Dean Karsky encouraged staff members to find a way to make the road diet permanent now.
"Keep it on a holiday diet through the end of November," Councilor Christine Erickson said.
Main Avenue Road Diet
A pilot project that reduced Main Avenue from three to two lanes will end Monday. Here's how it changed things:
• Average speed reduced by 8 percent
• 120 fewer vehicles per day exceeded 30 mph (The speed limit is 20 mph)
Survey found:
• Drivers felt it took the same amount of time to travel the stretch as before the road diet
• Pedestrians felt safter
• Drivers more quickly found parking
• Positive affect on businesses
Read or Share this story: http://argusne.ws/1u3Lzg0To connect a billion people, India must choose facts over fiction
In every society, there are certain basic services that are so important for people’s wellbeing that we expect everyone to be able to access them freely.
We have collections of free basic books. They’re called libraries. They don’t contain every book, but they still provide a world of good.
We have free basic healthcare. Public hospitals don’t offer every treatment, but they still save lives.
We have free basic education. Every child deserves to go to school.
And in the 21st century, everyone also deserves access to the tools and information that can help them to achieve all those other public services, and all their fundamental social and economic rights.
That’s why everyone also deserves access to free basic internet services.
We know that when people have access to the internet they also get access to jobs, education, healthcare, communication. We know that for every 10 people connected to the internet, roughly one is lifted out of poverty. We know that for India to make progress, more than 1 billion people need to be connected to the internet.
That’s not theory. That’s fact.
Another fact – when people have access to free basic internet services, these quickly overcome the digital divide.
Research shows that the biggest barriers to connecting people are affordability and awareness of the internet. Many people can’t afford to start using the internet. But even if they could, they don’t necessarily know how it can change their lives.
Over the last year Facebook has worked with mobile operators, app developers and civil society to overcome these barriers in India and more than 30 other countries. We launched Free Basics, a set of basic internet services for things like education, healthcare, jobs and communication that people can use without paying for data.
More than 35 operators have launched Free Basics and 15 million people have come online. And half the people who use Free Basics to go online for the first time pay to access the full internet within 30 days.
So the data is clear. Free Basics is a bridge to the full internet and digital equality. Data from more than five years of other programs that offer free access to Facebook, WhatsApp and other services shows the same.
If we accept that everyone deserves access to the internet, then we must surely support free basic internet services. That’s why more than 30 countries have recognized Free Basics as a program consistent with net neutrality and good for consumers.
Who could possibly be against this?
Surprisingly, over the last year there’s been a big debate about this in India.
Instead of wanting to give people access to some basic internet services for free, critics of the program continue to spread false claims – even if that means leaving behind a billion people.
Instead of recognizing the fact that Free Basics is opening up the whole internet, they continue to claim – falsely – that this will make the internet more like a walled garden.
Instead of welcoming Free Basics as an open platform that will partner with any telco, and allows any developer to offer services to people for free, they claim – falsely – that this will give people less choice.
Instead of recognizing that Free Basics fully respects net neutrality, they claim – falsely – the exact opposite.
A few months ago I learned about a farmer in Maharashtra called Ganesh.
Last year Ganesh started using Free Basics. He found weather information to prepare for monsoon season. He looked up commodity prices to get better deals. Now Ganesh is investing in new crops and livestock.
Critics of free basic internet services should remember that everything we’re doing is about serving people like Ganesh. This isn’t about Facebook’s commercial interests – there aren’t even any ads in the version of Facebook in Free Basics. If people lose access to free basic services they will simply lose access to the opportunities offered by the internet today.
Right now the TRAI is inviting the public to help decide whether free basic internet services should be offered in India.
For those who care about India’s future, it’s worth answering some questions to determine what is best for the unconnected in India.
What reason is there for denying people free access to vital services for communication, education, healthcare, employment, farming and women’s rights?
How does Ganesh being able to better tend his crops hurt the internet?
We’ve heard legitimate concerns in the past, and we’ve quickly addressed those. We’re open to other approaches and encourage innovation. But today this program is creating huge benefits for people and the entire internet ecosystem. There’s no valid basis for denying people the choice to use Free Basics, and that’s what thousands of people across India have chosen to tell TRAI over the last few weeks.
Choose facts over false claims. Everyone deserves access to the internet. Free basic internet services can help achieve this. Free Basics should stay to help achieve digital equality for India.
Also read: Nikhil Pahwa’s counterview on Free Basics and net neutrality
What is net neutrality and why it is important?Answer
First off, it’s great that you have started on the difficult work involved in figuring out your emotions surrounding this issue and have realized that your feelings have shifted without blaming your partner at all. Very few people pull this off so well, so way to demonstrate some emotional intelligence! However, you still have a few places to improve in the emotional intelligence department. You mention that you aren’t sure why you’re feeling this way, and that is something you will definitely need to figure out. You mention feeling a bit guilty about the fact that you’re experiencing some jealousy, too. Please try not to be so hard on yourself! It’s perfectly natural to feel jealous about someone you love. The trick is to look at jealousy as a warning flag that something might be wrong with how your relationship is currently set up, and not assume that the feeling is either totally unwarranted or totally justified. In your case, it sounds like the jealousy might be signaling that your current relationship terms need some retooling — you aren’t as comfortable with non-monogamy as you once were, perhaps because your relationship is getting more serious and you’d like to “settle down,” or perhaps for another reason. That’s for you to think about, figure out and communicate to your partner.
So, what do you do from here? Well, for starters, it is super important that you communicate your discomfort to your partner non-violently, without blaming him or making him feel responsible for your negative emotions surrounding non-monogamy. It sounds like you don’t feel he’s responsible for how you’re feeling, so this part shouldn’t be too difficult for you. You might say something like, “I am feeling more jealous than I ever have before. How can you help me to feel better about the relationship dynamic that we have?" By asking the question in this way, you keep the conversation constructive and engage your partner as an equal in doing some problem solving with you and determining how you are to proceed together. This conversation may involve the two of you renegotiating your relationship terms to be more restrictive, or it may not, depending on what you both determine your needs and wants are.
In the short term, I would suggest cutting back on the amount of sex outside of the relationship each of you has. To avoid punishing other partners who are emotionally invested in your partner, you might tell him that he can continue to see them, but no new partners, at least for a while as you try to sort out the real source of your jealous feelings.
To solve this issue long term, you need to work on trying to disarm the jealousy by figuring out what it is you’re afraid of losing when your partner is intimate with other people. Are you afraid of losing control? Afraid of others performing better than you? Afraid of losing your partner to someone else? Afraid he won’t enjoy or seek out sex with you anymore? Afraid he’ll fall in love with someone else? Afraid he’ll harm your chance of having a future together? At the end of the day, almost all jealous feelings are based in some combination of fear and insecurity, so unpacking why it is you’re feeling jealous will really help you with figuring out where to take things from here. To borrow an analogy from medicine, jealousy is like a fever; you know something is wrong, and you can treat the symptoms (by taking an aspirin), but that doesn’t address the root cause of your discomfort. In order to feel better in a durable way, you need to figure out what you are sick with, so you can treat the cause (such as by taking antibiotics).
Ultimately, you might decide that nothing is really wrong, and that you just need to work on converting your jealousy into happiness that your partner is happy, also known as compersion. Assuming good faith in your partner and being courageous in allowing him to indulge in what makes him happy might be the solution you need. If instead you determine that what you really want is more of a closed relationship, then you will need to ask your partner for that and see if he’s willing to go there with you.Spoiler Warning! While this piece of merchandise and description was released directly by the manufacturer, there is a possibility it was not yet meant to be public – particularly before the first trailer. If you would rather discover at least one of the new dinosaur species directly from the marketing, it’s best to turn back now.
Still with us?
While the eagerly anticipated first trailer for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom has yet to release, small tidbits of news continue to surface from various sources. The eminent threat of a volcanic eruption has been confirmed from numerous pieces of artwork featured on upcoming products, as well as the return of fan favorites such as Velociraptor Blue and the Tyrannosaurus Rex. The latest batch of information comes from the upcoming ‘Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’ augmented reality book by Carlton Kids, and it’s quite exciting.
While the cover art reveals nothing new, it does once again hammer home the fiery theme of a volcanic eruption which has been present in all forms of Fallen Kingdom marketing and merchandise. However, the description of the book is a different story – while it’s fairly vague, it outright confirms that a fan favorite dinosaur will be making its on screen debut in Fallen Kingdom: Baryonyx.
Carlton’s official Augmented Reality book is jam-packed with exclusive movie imagery and background facts, and lets you experience original Jurassic World dinosaurs through mind-blowing next-generation, fully interactive Digital Magic. Learn how to bond with and train alpha Velociraptor “Blue”, then use her as your protector and guide as you encounter other dinosaurs through the app. From brand-new movie dinosaur characters including awesome Baryonyx and a terrifying new hybrid breed, to old favourites like T. Rex and Stegosaurus, this Jurassic World AR book will wow readers all over again.
Baryonyx is a bipedal carnivousous dinosaur, that could reach lengths of over 30 feet long, and stood nearly 10 feet tall. The fossil record suggest this predatory dinosaur lived primarily off of a diet of fish, swiping them from the water with long clawed limbs or its crocodile like jaw. However, that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be regarded as a threat – especially as InGen creations tend to be more dangerous than their real world namesakes.
Barynoyx has an interesting history with the Jurassic Park franchise, and despite never being seen in any of the films, was allegedly on Isla Nublar during the events of Jurassic Park and Jurassic World. According to the first films park map, it had a riverside paddock on the far east of the island. Likewise, it appears on the Jurassic World park map, and is said to be one of the dinosaurs you can see during the ‘Cretaceous Cruise’.
Further, Baryonyx was almost the main antagonist of Jurassic Park 3, but was later replaced by its larger cousin species the Spinosaurus. In fact, an early version of the Jurassic Park 3 logo featured the Baryonyx over its sailed back relative, which was featured on the final logos. As an homage to this change, Billy Brennan mistakenly identifies the Spinosaurus as a Baryonyx, and when corrected by Alan Grant, comments the Spinosaurus was never present on InGen’s list.
While the Baryonyx has never been depicted in the films, artwork was created for it by paleoartist Julius Csotonyi for the official Jurassic World website – however, it should be noted, this was not commissioned by the fillmaking team, but rather a late addition by the web marketing |
the country’s future success...
When too much power is centralised in Whitehall it holds us back. When power is centralised in markets the same is true. So just as we must reform the state to make it more responsive – we must reform markets to make them truly competitive.
This matters most in finance. We are strong in financial services but the sector should be there to serve the rest of the economy. Because finance drives investment, and investment drives productivity.
It’s what turns good ideas into commercial propositions. It’s what enables small companies to become larger and more productive. And it’s what equips domestic traders to become international exporters. But we have too little variety and too little competition in our banking sector....
Reform of our finance system is how we give businesses the power to invest and grow. The aim of this must never to be anti-bank – but to be aggressively and insistently pro-business.
Some reflections on what the candidates say
If one is to learn lessons, it is important to learn the right ones. If one is going to apologize for past errors, it is vital that the sole or principal error is correctly identified. All candidates accept that the electorate needs at least some suasion that a future Labour government will run the economy soundly and securely, since it is a fact that the financial crisis came about on its watch, with a bigger impact in the UK than in most countries. So to identify the causation of the crisis, and drawing the right lessons is of great importance.
All of the candidates seem to accept that the principal cause of the global financial crisis was not high public debt or spending as such, but most are vague as to what did cause it.
Yvette Cooper got somewhere close when she told the BBC back in May:
the real economic issue of the time was that we had banks who were involved in huge private lending that nobody had spotted the scale of; private sector debt that had been growing up that was unsecured; the links between the financial sector all over the world.
The problem here is that many (including of course PRIME’s director Ann Pettifor) had indeed “spotted” the scale of private debt building up and foresaw the crisis – so for the government and Opposition not to have seen it tells us a lot about a common blinkered view.
But at least Ms Cooper is clear on the cause. Since she became a candidate, she has not (to my knowledge) publicly addressed this issue of what caused the crash.
So what does Andy Burnham say about the financial crisis?
We achieved many great things but we can see now that it would have been better to have been spending less in the run-up to the crash. It wouldn’t have prevented it.
Our investments in public services didn’t cause the global financial crisis. But it would have meant we were in a stronger position to deal with the consequences.”
There is no explanation at all from him about the causes of the financial crash, it just happened, an Act of God! This is therefore worse than Yvette Cooper. Instead of assessing the degree of Labour government’s responsibility for the crash/crisis, through deregulation and failure to oversee the finance sector, he simply asserts that “we should have been spending less”, even though public debt as a percentage of GDP was not rising. This completely accepts the false “framing” of Mr Osborne.
Next, what does Liz Kendall tell us about the causes of the crash?
The financial crisis came about because of deep-seated international problems in the financial system. The Tories would like to write this out of history but it is the truth.
It is also true that countries are not like households. Sometimes, in some years, governments need to run deficits. If Britain had not run a deficit at the start of the financial crisis the social and economic costs would have been much higher. But any country’s capacity to deal with shocks is dependent on long-term strength.
And long-term strength comes from only running deficits when you have to, bringing them down as soon as you responsibly can, and running surpluses in the good years. Because however much we tell the truth about the causes of the financial crisis, any political party that wants to be elected must be trusted with people’s money.
This has the merit of referring to “problems in the financial system”, and indeed to “causes”, but in no way explains anything further, and fails to say what if any responsibility the Labour government (supported by the Conservatives) had for it. The implicit message is that pre-crisis deficits were a major contributory factor.
There is a deep lack of logic to all this. If the finance sector had not blown up, there would have been no problem with the public finances – or with Labour’s reputation! But it did blow up – affecting countries with right-wing and social democrat governments alike. Not due to public debt but because of private debt and the excesses of the private finance sector. Governments (of various hues) had a total blind spot for this – to prevent it would have meant challenging the basic premise of financialised globalisation which they had all taken for granted.
None of the three "mainstream" candidates have accepted any degree of Labour (and Conservative) responsibility for the true failure; they have rather accepted all or much of Mr Osborne’s false framing of the problem as one of public debt and public finances.
Finally on this point, Jeremy Corbyn:
...and secondly the economic reality that it was the reckless behaviour of the finance sector that got us into this mess and they should be paying for it.
If we cast our minds back almost eight years, to September 2007, customers were not queuing out of the doors of Northern Rock branches because a Labour government had spent too much on nurses and teachers. Just two weeks before, George Osborne had backed Labour’s spending plans.
Labour does have some responsibility for the crash. Not because we spent too much, but because we didn’t regulate enough.
Whether or not you favour his programme and candidacy as a whole, it seems to me undeniable that on this crucial point, Mr Corbyn is right. It was not Labour overspending or fiscal irresponsibility that caused the crash or made it materially worse – but the last Labour government (together with all its peers, and with the Opposition) was partly responsible for it due to its failure to regulate the finance sector properly and restrain the massive build-up of private debt across both financial and non-financial sectors.
Are deficits a problem?
The assumption shared by all candidates - except to some extent Mr Corbyn - is that good husbandry requires governments to avoid deficits, save maybe in very difficult times. The duty in normal times, we infer, is to run a budget surplus and use it to “pay down the debt”.
We need to consider the different types of deficit (I ignore alleged “structural deficits” for now). Deficits can be considered in cash terms – how much have we borrowed? In which case the deficit may go up from year to year – even if as a percentage of national income it comes down.
Or we can look at deficits as a percentage of national income (GDP) – and here it is the size of the “cake” of economic activity that in particular matters – if each year the “cake” increases by a greater percentage than the (cash) budget deficit rises (if it does rise), then the deficit as a percentage of GDP falls - without cutting public expenditure.
This point is vital, since it has been the way that the UK – under Conservative and Labour governments – has for over 50 years succeeded (for the most part) in reducing or keeping down the debt to GDP ratio.
It has been rare indeed NOT to run an overall budget deficit. Since 1960, there have been just 9 years out of 55 when the UK has had a budget surplus or deficit of less than 1% of GDP. Of the 7 years when an actual overall surplus was achieved, four were under Labour governments, 3 under Conservative governments.
The distinction between current and overall deficits
This brings us to the second distinction to be made over “deficits” – between an overall deficit, and a current budget deficit. The last paragraph and its statistics refer to overall deficits – i.e. overall net borrowing. That includes borrowing in respect of capital (investment) expenditure as well as (if necessary) in relation to current spending. (Annual investment spending has normally ranged between 1.5% and 3% of GDP)
As Liz Kendall rightly commented, “countries are not like households” – but it is worth recalling that even households do tend to borrow long-term for major long-term investment purposes, e.g. house purchases or major improvements.
The candidates are again unclear on whether borrowing for capital purposes comes with their definition of “deficit” (we assume yes unless they tell us otherwise) – or whether they are only referring to avoiding any current budget deficit.
If the latter, then it is generally impossible to achieve an overall surplus that enables a government to “pay down the debt”, since if one borrows for capital purposes, any surplus on current account will be used to pay for part of the capital programme, not for reducing overall debt.
Again, Jeremy Corbyn is clear on the difference, when he says:
We all want the deficit closed on the current budget, but there was no need to try to do it within an artificial five years…”
Yvette Cooper referred to the current deficit when speaking to the BBC before announcing her candidacy (“The deficit at the time was 0.6%, the current deficit…”), but her speeches since do not clarify her view on the distinction.
Liz Kendall made this commitment:
We will bring debt down as a proportion of our GDP and we’ll make surpluses in the good times.
…only running deficits when you have to, bringing them down as soon as you responsibly can, and running surpluses in the good years.
This leaves unclear what she means by the term “deficit”, and whether in ordinary times (neither “good” nor “dreadful”) an overall (not current) deficit is acceptable provided that it still leads to the debt/GDP ratio falling. This is of course difficult stuff to get across to the wider public, but we really need to know what the candidates mean
Andy Burnham is also opaque – he promises
Labour under my leadership will always run sound public finances and we will reduce the national debt, back toward its sustainable pre-global financial crisis levels.
But it is possible to borrow for investment purposes and still reduce the national debt if by that we understand – as the final clause possibly implies – that he means the pre-crisis level as a percentage of GDP.
Jeremy Corbyn accepts the desirability of getting rid of a current budget deficit (if achieved by increased economic activity) and appears to accept that borrowing for investment is acceptable for him:
if the deficit has been closed by 2020 and the economy is growing, then Labour should not run a current budget deficit – but we should borrow to invest in our future prosperity. You don’t close the deficit fairly or sustainably through cuts.
In brief, my conclusion is that on the issues of basic macroeconomic and fiscal policy, Jeremy Corbyn has, to his credit, expressed the clearest and (macroeconomically) soundest view on the role and acceptability of deficits, and on the distinction between borrowing for current purposes, and for investment purposes. He is also clearer than the others on the need to reduce the deficit by economic activity, not further cuts.
Where however I have problems with the current formulation of his policy is around the (to me) excessive role and prominence given to taxation as the principal - certainly by far the most detailed - policy tool. A fair redistributive tax system – in which tax evasion and avoidance are clamped down on - is vital, and far more than the other candidates, he does underline the role of tax as an issue in economic justice. This is absolutely right.
But he dedicates much more space to tax than other issues (such as types of investment and how to raise levels of economic activity), and goes on to argue:
The biggest issue facing British politics right now is not whether the top rate of tax should be 45% or 50%, or whether corporation tax should be 18% or 20%. The big question is how to get some of the wealthiest individuals and biggest corporations to pay anything like their fair share.
A big question, yes. The big question, or the biggest question – well, in my view probably not. The electorate need a more positive vision of our economic and social future - and how to create tomorrow's economy than comes across thus far.
Silly and wrong to fall for Mr Osborne's economic framing
Final point to conclude this overlong blog - I offer the following three charts, which I hope clarify or demonstrate many of the points raised above. All three come from a really useful short House of Commons Briefing Paper by Matthew Keep, dated 28 July 2015.
The first chart deals with net borrowing as a percentage of GDP (i.e. the overall deficit), the second with public sector net debt as a percentage of GDP, and the third with debt interest payments as a percentage of GDP.
You will see that prior to the financial crisis, deficits were not historically high, that public sector debt was relatively low and stable, and that debt interest payments are also relatively low in historical terms. (All as % of GDP, which is the best way to look at them). So to fall for Mr Osborne's economic framing is both silly and wrong.Emma Swan’s life has been anything but a fairy tale. She's been on her own since she was abandoned as a baby--that is, until the night of her twenty-eighth birthday, when Henry, a ten-year-old boy, shows up on her doorstep. He's the son Emma gave up for adoption, and this surprise visit turns her life upside down.
Henry takes Emma back to his home in Storybrooke, Maine, where, Henry claims, all the residents are actually fairy tale characters who can't remember their true identities. And if Henry's right, that means that his sweet-natured, lonely schoolteacher Mary Margaret Blanchard is really Snow White, the iconic princess... and also Emma's long-lost mother.
In Fairy Tale Land, we meet Snow White as a bandit on the run, forced into exile by her stepmother, the Evil Queen. Snow's a young woman learning to become a hero, who will do anything to live happily ever after with her one true love, Prince Charming.
The closer Emma comes to Henry in Storybrooke, the harder it is for her to ignore the dark curse that haunts this small New England town and binds her to Mary Margaret. If Emma can learn to accept her destiny as Storybrooke's savior and break the curse, she just might get the family reunion she's dreamed about her entire life.
ABC's ONCE UPON A TIME is a modern adventure with thrilling twists and hints of darkness, brimming with wonder, and filled with the magic of our most beloved fairy tales.BOSTON – While it remains a mystery just how many of Boston’s eight draft picks will stick beyond Thursday night, we already know the summer plans for those who will be on the team’s summer league roster.
The NBA released the Las Vegas Summer league schedule on Tuesday with the Celtics being one of the 24 NBA teams planning to participate. In addition, Boston will once again play in the Utah Jazz Summer League, which consists of the host team Utah Jazz as well as the Celtics, Philadelphia 76ers and San Antonio Spurs.
Here’s a look at the Celtics’ full summer league schedule with dates and times (all local).
SALT LAKE CITY (JULY 4-7)
Monday, July 4: vs. Philadelphia, 5 p.m.
Tuesday, July 5: vs. Utah, 5 p.m.
Thursday, July 7: vs. San Antonio, 5 p.m.
LAS VEGAS (JULY 8-18)
Saturday, July 9: vs. Chicago, 3 p.m.
Sunday, July 10: vs. Phoenix, 7:30 p.m.
Tuesday, July 12: vs. Dallas, 3 p.m.
Wednesday, July 13: Seeds 9-24 will play in 8 games at the following times and locations:
Thursday, July 14: Seeds 1-8 will play against the winners of July 13th games at the following times and locations:
Friday, July 15: Losers from games on July 13th and July 14th will play at the following times and locations:
Saturday, July 16 – Quarterfinals: Winners from games on July 14th will play at the following times:
Sunday, July 17 – Semifinals: Winners from games on July 16th will play at the following times:
Monday, July 18 – Championship: Winners from games on July 17 will play at Thomas & Mack Arena at 6 p.m.Most people who want more grammar schools admit that less academically able children would be better off in a comprehensive system
With the schools debate dominating the government’s political agenda, new research from YouGov finds that grammar schools are seen by the majority of people to be good in one way – that is, at giving a high standard of education to academically able children.
The flip side of this is that the majority of English people also think that selective school systems are bad for academically less able children. Selective school systems are also seen as much more beneficial to children from better-off families than to those from poorer families.
Six in ten (61%) think that smart children would do better in a selective system than in a comprehensive system, and although the number falls by 10 points, a majority thinks the same is true for academically able children from poorer families.
Likewise, a solid majority of 59% think a comprehensive education would be better for less able children from poorer families, dropping slightly to 55% for less able children from rich families.
Even amongst those who want to see the creation of more grammar schools, there is acknowledgement that selective school systems are bad for less able children. Whilst 85% of those who want more grammar schools say they are good for able children, this drops to 26-24% for less able children. Around six in ten who want more grammar schools think that less able children would be better off in comprehensive areas.
This begs the question - do people back grammar schools because they think their own child is smart enough to get into one? The answer seems to be yes.
Asked to imagine that they had a child who could pass the 11 plus exam, 48% of people said that they would prefer to live in an area with a selective system, whilst 32% said they would choose a comprehensive area. These figures flip when asked to imagine their child would fail the 11 plus exam, with 50% saying they'd prefer to live in a comprehensive area and 27% saying a selective area.
The research also finds that people’s attitudes to what type of school system they would prefer their children to be in is highly influenced by what type of school they attended themselves.
Among those who attended grammar schools themselves, as well as the privately educated, the proportion of people who would want to live in a selective system shoots up to 73% and 63% respectively if their child could pass the 11 plus. A selective area would also be the favoured option for those who attended secondary moderns themselves at 46%. Those who attended comprehensives are split 40%/40% between selective and comprehensive areas.
When asked subsequently to imagine they had a child who would fail the 11 plus, however, those who attended grammar schools themselves would still prefer to live in a selective area, albeit narrowly at 47% vs 42%. This potentially indicates a “they can’t all be that bad” mindset regarding secondary moderns.
Those who went to secondary moderns themselves would seem to prefer to prevent their own child from doing the same though. Nearly half (47%) would rather live in a comprehensive area vs 29% a selective area. Comprehensively educated people are the most likely to prefer to send a less gifted child to a comprehensive school at 59% vs 20%.
Finally, just over a third of people (34%) say that the government should encourage more schools to select by academic ability and build more grammar schools – slightly lower than a month previously when the debate was just getting started. One in five want to keep the status quo – allowing current grammar schools to stay open but no more to be added – whilst 25% of people want to convert all grammar schools into comprehensives.
Photo: PA
See the full results here and hereVeteran sport director Dirk Demol has worked with both riders, and he tells VeloNews one of them holds a slight edge in the classics.
Few know Tom Boonen and Fabian Cancellara as well as veteran Belgian sport director Dirk Demol.
Demol nurtured Boonen in his U23 years and helped usher him into the pro ranks at U.S. Postal Service in 2002. And since 2012, Demol has been working alongside Cancellara.
Cancellara (Trek – Segafredo) and Boonen (Etixx – Quick-Step) are set to clash one last time in this year’s spring classics, and Demol is relishing the chance to see the two cobblestone specialists wrangle over the pavé. As the two dominant classics riders of their generation, Demol has had an interesting view. When stacked up side-by-side, Demol said the balance tips ever so slightly in favor of Cancellara.
“When you talk about the pure talents, Fabian is even more talented than Tom,” Demol told VeloNews. “They are both super strong, but when you talk about pure talent — and don’t get me wrong, I respect and admire them both — I would give Fabian a little bit more than Tom.”
Demol is hesitant to measure them against each other. It’s like comparing a Ferrari to a Porsche. Both are damn fast and stand above the pack. But Demol has dedicated his entire life to cycling, first as a 14-year pro with a Paris-Roubaix win on his palmares, and now 16 seasons as a sport director. His opinion counts.
“In general, when they do the same training, I believe that Fabian will be a little stronger than Tom,” Demol continued. “When you talk about pure talent, I would give that little bit more to Fabian.”
Once again this spring, Demol will be behind the wheel at Trek – Segafredo in what will be Cancellara’s final stampede across the pavé. Demol admitted he’s relishing a clash between his two star pupils.
“Many people are thinking that Boonen and Cancellara are behind us now, and that’s true that we have a new generation coming up, but they are proud riders. They are not just going to be in the races to wave to the crowds,” Demol said. “This is war, and these guys are warriors.”
Demol said Cancellara’s imminent retirement means the Swiss superstar is motivated to go out on top. He’s already won Strade Bianche and two individual time trials this season as he hits peak form for the spring classics.
“Fabian’s motivation is really high. He didn’t want to quit after a difficult 2015. He wants to perform,” Demol said. “When they are there, they are there to perform. Tom and Fabian are special. They have a lot of respect for each other. They are both great riders.
“I hope they are both there for the classics.”The latest episode of the Paddock Pass Podcast takes a look back at the two opening rounds of the World Superbike championship. Steve English, WorldSBK commentator extraordinaire, talks to David Emmett about the Philllip Island and Thailand rounds of WorldSBK.
Though Jonathan Rea is dominating the series so far, the competition is still looking pretty tough. Chaz Davies is doing his best on the Ducati to make Rea's life a misery. Once he got his head round the new grid formation for the second race, Tom Sykes put up a pretty stiff challenge to his teammate. And returnee Marco Melandri is banishing any idea that he may be washed up, holding his own at the front.
Steve and David discuss the effect of the revised grid format for the second race, and how riders have faced the dilemma between taking third and fourth place. They also go over how competitive the Yamaha is, and the long uphill battle facing Honda riders Nicky Hayden and Stefan Bradl.
They also take a quick look at the World Supersport championship, and how Kenan Sofuoglu has lost very little by sitting out the first two rounds of the series. And finally, we take a peek at the new World Supersport 300 championship, and how that might play out.
The next episode of the Paddock Pass Podcast will cover the MotoGP season opener at Qatar. We will be recording that show on Tuesday, and it should be online later this week.
Enjoy the show!
If you don't want to miss out on these episodes as they are released, make sure you follow The Paddock Pass Podcast on Facebook and Twitter, or subscribe to it on iTunes or Soundcloud. If you do use iTunes, please remember to rate the show and leave a review, as this helps other MotoGP fans find it. Enjoy the show!The picture clearly shows a saucer shaped craft in the area I've highlighted. The area outside of my highlight appears to be clouds of smoke from several large explosions that is being illuminated by the lights. Look closely at the explosions. They don't look like they are actually coming in contact with the craft. Witnesses told LA Times reporters that the bombs exploded in rings around the craft. Could it be that the craft had SHIELDS that are very similar to the shields used by the imaginary craft of Star Trek? I added the red highlight to clarify what I was looking at. Coincidentally, it seems to mark the place where those shields seem to be having an effect. The Battle of LA makes a very convincing argument for the presence of alien craft in our skies. The fact that something not of this Earth flew slowly over LA County is very clear. There were hundreds of thousands of witnesses to the craft as it traveled apparently without being in any hurry while our military tried very hard to knock it out of the sky. Once the craft had slowly traveled out of range of our guns the battle was over. Since Pearl Harbor had happened only a few months before it was easy to believe that the Japanese had made the flight. Now that theory simply doesn't make any sense. If the Japanese had aircraft that were immune to our antiaircraft guns then the war would have taken a very different path. Even 60 years later no country on Earth have aircraft that can continue to fly without any apparent damage after being hit with even opne antiaircraft shell. The aircraft that flew over LA County that night had to have been an alien craft. The aircraft wasn't hostile. If the pilots of the craft had wanted to hurt someone they certainly had the chance. I can't say whether that craft was armed, but if humans had designed a craft that could take such punishment they would have designed it to be able to carry weapons. There wasn't any mention about the craft doing anything hostile in any of the news stories I,ve read. It didn't drop any bombs and it didn't fire back at the gun emplacements. WHY would anyone human or alien make such a flight? I see this flight as a kind of a show of force without using force. The craft flew very slowly along without taking any evasive action as our military threw everything it could at it. If this was an INTELLIGENTLY controlled vehicle then there is NO WAY that the pilots didn't notice the barrage of shells that were being directed at their craft. It's obvious that they weren't concerned that their craft would be harmed. The craft withstood the best we could do to it without showing any damage. It clearly says that the technology used to manufacture this craft is far superior to ours. What happened suggests intent. They ignored the provocation of our attempt to destroy them. It might have been done to make a statement. I think the pilots of that craft were trying to say that we couldn't hurt them and that we shouldn't be afraid of them. I don't believe the craft was designed with antiaircraft gunfire in mind. I think that it was built so strong because of another concern. Let's say that they have a way to propel a craft very fast in open space. There's a lot of room in space, but it isn't exactly empty. Space is filled with objects large and small. There are Billions of asteroids in our solar system. Most of them are orbiting the sun just like the planets. If this fast moving craft hit a piece of rock or metal the size of a dime it might destroy it. The energies involved would be tremendous. I think that this type of impact is what the craft was designed to withstand. The Battle of LA happened long before the idea that an Unidentified Flying Object might be an alien craft was widespread. The Government simply said that the craft they were shooting at was unidentified. They let the public ASSUME that the craft had been Japanese. I wonder how many people even questioned the idea that the craft MUST have been Japanese. I wonder what would have happened if they had brought that ship down? The Government has had enough trouble covering up what happened at Roswell. I don't think they would have been able to cover up a crashed alien craft the size of an apartment building in the middle of the city of LA I wonder what would happen if our Government started shooting at an UNIDENTIFIED craft over a city today? What if it happened exactly the same way? The craft flies slowly over a city without firing a shot while we throw everything we have at it. Can you imagine seeing LIVE news coverage of the event being broadcast around the world? I wonder how many people would immediately conclude that the unidentified craft was an aircraft manufactured by beings NOT OF THIS EARTH? Can you imagine how fast the lid of secrecy would TRY TO come down on the story? Alien craft are flying in our skies. There is no doubt in my mind that one flew over LA County on a clear and cold night 60 years ago. THE TRUTH IS RIGHT HEREGaming Performance
Please note all testing was conducted using Vega 64 Liquid Cooled since we’re mostly focusing on DX12 performance. My upcoming Core i5-8400 review will again feature both the GTX 1080 and Vega 64 graphics cards. Anyway when testing with Battlefield 1 we see a few interesting things.
Starting with the Core i3-8100 we see that the faster DDR4-3200 memory boosts the average frame rate by 10% and that was enough to overtake the stock R5 1500X. Even with the DDR4-2400 memory the 8100 was still 8% faster than the Ryzen 3 1300X. Meanwhile the higher clocked 8350K does well, maxing out the Vega 64 Liquid Cooled graphics card at 1080p using the ultra quality settings.
Next up we have Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation and this time the Ryzen 3 1300X gets dominated by the Core i3-8100. Even with the slower DDR4-2400 memory the 8100 was 21% faster than the R3 1300X. Once we paired the 8100 with DDR4-3200 it was able to match the R5 1500X. The 8350K streaked further ahead and was able to match the heavy batch result of the Ryzen 5 1600 and Ryzen 7 1700 CPUs.
When testing with Civilization the Core i3-8100 with the faster DDR4-3200 memory was 5% faster for the average frame rate and 9% for the minimum. So while using DDR4-2400 memory will limit the 8100 to Ryzen 3 1200 like performance, faster memory does give it an edge, at least when compared to Ryzen's out of the box performance. The R3 1300X was still slightly faster and not much slower than the 8350K in this game. Meanwhile the R5 1500X was considerably faster than the 8350K.
Finally we have F1 2017 and there the Core i3-8100 using DDR4-2400 memory was 13% faster than the Ryzen 3 1300X and just 3% slower than the R5 1500X. Increasing the memory speed allowed the 8100 to beat the R5 1500X by a convincing 7% margin.
The 8350K was a further 5% faster as it matched the 7600K but that meant it was still 9% slower than the Core i5-8400.The rising toll of knife-wielding and car-slamming Palestinians who have been tragically shot and killed on an almost-daily basis over the past two months in Israel has helped fuel a popular narrative among many of the country’s critics: The expansion of settlements in the West Bank by Benjamin Netanyahu’s increasingly racist right-wing government and the spike in Jewish terrorism have empowered young Palestinians to throw off the yoke of oppression and take up arms against the occupation. This romanticized version of events, which purposely downplays the immediate cause of recent Palestinian deaths—the fact that they were killed because they tried, and often succeeded, in killing Jews—conveys the impression that innocent Palestinian youths are being senselessly and ruthlessly shot down, randomly, by trigger-happy Israeli cops and soldiers.
It is no coincidence that this plot sounds familiar to American ears. It’s meant to. Framing the escalating violence in Israel in such a way consciously seeks to create an analogy between the recurring shooting and killing of unarmed black men in the United States and the deaths of Palestinians in order to promote solidarity and link the two struggles in the American public imagination. A recent media campaign featuring iconic African-American activists like Lauryn Hill and Angela Davis along Palestinian activists aims to solidify the notion of a shared destiny by employing the catchy slogan: “When I see them I see us.”
Yet something is very wrong with the vision that links Palestine to Ferguson. It is one thing to convey sympathy for oppressed people—and yes, in many ways Palestinians are oppressed. But comparing Gaza to Baltimore or Jerusalem to Ferguson isn’t just inaccurate or unfair—it’s insulting. African-American teenagers aren’t being shot in American cities by policemen because they are randomly attacking innocent civilians in the streets with knives, or shooting parents in front of their children. The entire point of the Black Lives Matter movement is that the victims are innocent.
And despite the ongoing occupation and subsequent injustices that Israel propagates, Palestinians do share in the responsibility for their own travails and suffering. Trying to obfuscate this inconvenient truth by incorporating their cause into the heroic struggle against racism in America threatens to invest Palestinian terror with a moral legitimacy that does violence to the facts, and will only inflame rather than help end the conflict.
***
During a public gathering to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Million Man March that was held on Capitol Hill in October, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the outspoken and controversial pastor whose church President Obama once attended, declared that “The youth in Ferguson and the youth in Palestine have united together to remind us that the dots need to be connected.” He went on to blame “racism, militarism and capitalism” for their historical agonies and implied that Israel was reproducing the European colonial scheme: “Apartheid is going on in Palestine. … As we sit here, there is an apartheid wall being built twice the size of the Berlin Wall in height, keeping Palestinians off of illegally occupied territories, where the Europeans have claimed that land as their own.” Such rhetoric, which has become widespread among Israel’s critics (especially on the academic left), aims to reduce the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a formulaic anti-colonial David vs. Goliath standoff. In doing so, it threatens to transform the conflict from a historically complicated political, geographic and religious struggle to the one thing it has never actually been about: racially motivated imperialism.
The increasingly ubiquitous habit of tying together the Palestinian and African American causes with the thread of colonialism seems to forget, ironically, just what the European colonial project was all about. Rooted in a realpolitik competition for global domination between great powers, a rapacious need for raw materials and new markets to satisfy growing industrial economies and consolidating political regimes, and imperious fantasies of national grandeur and racial supremacy that concocted the so-called “White Man’s Burden” to “civilize” the world, Europeans employed their technological and administrative superiority to forcefully subjugate native peoples in Africa, Asia and Latin America, plunder their lands, and in some places like the Congo, devastate entire populations.
Israel, unfortunately, has done a lot of regrettable and unjust things. But none of them have ever amounted to this. And whereas western colonialism was dedicated to conquest and exploitation, the origins of Israeli expansionism are located in a markedly different motive: sheer physical survival. Although it is true that many Israeli settlers justify their presence in the West Bank with biblically rooted claims of a greater Israel, the state’s influential military establishment along with the majority of the population, have always been much more pragmatic and accordingly concerned with the strategic security that such motivations serve, rather than with fringe messianic fantasies.
The settlers, who are often presented by Israel’s detractors as the true face of the nation, represent a small fraction of the general population (and the extremist and violent sects among them are tellingly despised and condemned by a vast majority of Israelis on both sides of the political aisle as well as by the settler establishment). The settlers may be vocal, well organized and disproportionately influential due to Israel’s unstable parliamentary system—but they lack the political legitimacy that is falsely attributed to them. Polling suggests that their public appeal has been plummeting due to the atrocious terrorist acts against Palestinians perpetrated by fanatic settler youths, and that less than a third of Israelis support their cause.
One of the saddest twists of fate in this conflict is that, like in any Greek Tragedy, Israel continues to do the last thing it actually wants to: control the lives of millions of Palestinians. Although the occupation is unjust, it must not be understood as an expression of racial apartheid or Zionist imperialism as much as a counter-productive national security strategy. After all, Israelis have voted, repeatedly and overwhelmingly, in 1992, 1999, and 2006 for left-centrist governments that were dedicated to securing a land for peace agreement with the Palestinians and withdrawing from the occupied territories. Regardless of who was to blame for the failures to achieve a final deal in Camp David fifteen years ago—a thorny issue that to this day both sides continue to contest—Israelis have proven time and again their willingness to return the West Bank in exchange for ensured security. Just this summer, despite the spike in religiously motivated violence, polls surprisingly indicated that a majority of Israelis still favored a two-state solution.
The reason for this is clear: Most Israelis, despite what the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions efforts have tried to suggest, do not want their kids to serve in the West Bank, they don’t want their taxes to fund the settlements, and they don’t see the territories as necessary for realizing the Zionist dream. |
wa Odighizuwa is stepping away from the NFL. The former third-round pick took to Twitter moments ago to announce what could be termed as a soft retirement.
“I have all love for everyone.. at [this] point [in] time, I believe it’s in my best interest to take some time to get away from the game,” Odighizuwa wrote.
We heard earlier this year that this would be a “do-or-die offseason” for Odighizuwa. The 2015 third-rounder didn’t do much in his two NFL seasons and he acknowledged that he’d have to step it up in order to stick in New York.
“It’s real important for me,” Odighizuwa said. “That’s how I’m approaching it, that it’s kind of do-or-die in terms of my preparation and getting ready. You have to exhaust all of your resources into training properly and getting ready for the year. Really pouring everything you have into preparation.”
Odighizuwa had two years remaining on his Giants contract.
Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images.Loading...
BREIZATAO – NEVEZINTIOU (03/06/2015) Gaspard Glanz est ce que l’on pourrait appeler un « clochard » de l’information institutionnelle. Evoluant entre Rennes, Paris ou Strasbourg, ce militant d’extrême-gauche d’origine juive tente avec difficulté d’exister en tant que pigiste dans le monde de plus en plus précaire du journalisme officiel. Il vient récemment de créditer son CV professionnel d’un appel à neutraliser illégalement un site internet de réinformation : BREIZATAO.com.
Demi Cohen-Bendit, le talent en moins
Gaspard Glanz ne brille certes pas par la finesse de son style. L’individu est un ancien militant de l’UNL, un syndicat lycéen créé par Benoît Hamon, comme le rappelle La Croix (source) :
« L’UNL a été initiée au sein du Mouvement des jeunesses socialistes par le courant Nouvelle gauche de Benoît Hamon afin de constituer un pendant à la Fidl », explique un secrétaire national du PS. «Une proximité qui perdure de façon informelle. Ce qui est d’ailleurs plus efficace », relève-t-il.
A l’occasion des manifestations contre le CPE, en 2006, le proviseur de son établissement avait porté plainte pour une agression verbale assez représentative du personnage. Le journal 20 Minutes rappelle l’affaire (source) :
« A la barre, le prévenu a nié avoir proféré des insultes ou des menaces à leur encontre. « Fasciste », « Sale pute », « Tu vas crever », aurait-il lancé à la proviseure ».
Le pigiste des romanos
Gaspard Glanz a le judaïsme honteux mais l’antifascisme fiévreux. Si notre histrion n’aime guère que l’on évoque ses hébraïques ascendances, ce n’est pas par timidité naturelle. Brouillon, cette cervelle s’enflamme à intervalle régulier pour une obsession qui lui est chère : la pouillerie clandestine.
Ainsi le trouve-t-on dans tout ce qui peut ressembler à un camp puçeux de romanichels au bord de l’évacuation, où à un village africain improvisé excité par une poignée de trotskistes spetuagénaires. Comme récemment près de Barbès, à Paris, où Glanz pour sa mirifique « agence de presse » Taranis News mitraillait les grappes d’africains agglutinés sous un pont (source). Un drama usé jusqu’à la corde dont notre héraut de l’humanité révoltée escomptait, au passage, retirer quelques shekels.
En proie à des bouffées de mythomanie régulière, Glanz avait juré ses grands dieux que des « nazis » avaient « attaqué » un « camp de migrants » à Rennes, en 2014. Arborant avec humilité la qualité de « reporter » en tête d’article, Gaspard avait résumé l’affaire (source) : « Des racistes bourrés viennent d’attaquer un camp de migrants à Rennes ».
Breizh-Infos était revenu sur les visions de Gaspard et de ses amis de la chapelle antifasciste rennaise, résumant l’affaire (source) : « La préfecture de Rennes et les clandestins de Cleunay. Chronique d’un coup monté ».
En fait d’équipée sauvage menée par des nazis, il ne s’était agi que d’un rodéo se terminant en querelle de voisinage.
Shylock des rédactions
Notre ami Gaspard, déraciné lui-même, traîne cette qualité dans son travail. Sans employeur fixe après un lamentable échec autour de son projet de mirobolante « télévision rennaise » – ou « Rennes TV » – Glanz vagabonde à la recherche de chèques et de sujets susceptibles d’intéresser le monde très précaire de l’information subventionnée.
Joignant l’utile à l’agréable, il n’est jamais en peine lorsqu’il s’agit de voler au secours d’un immigré agressif, comme ici avec le rappeur « Abdelos », d’origine maghrébine, qui arborait avec une faune bigarrée des fusils à pompe dans un de ses clips vidéos. Gaspard, soucieux de la justice, a donc commis une pige pour le très objectif « Rue89 » du juif antisioniste Pierre Haski, pige dans laquelle, bien sûr, notre rappeur maghrébin pleure sur les esprits rétifs à son génie créatif (source). Vous pouvez en juger :
Une objectivité reconnue mondialement
Jadis, à l’occasion d’un défilé de rue de la Manif’ Pour Tous, Gaspard avait tenté, pour sa boursoufflure qu’était « Rennes TV », de hurler au carnage fasciste contre « la presse libre », conformément à tout bon scénario issu de la mystique gauchiste (source). Las, c’était un africain qui avait vigoureusement alpagué la fine équipe de « Rennes TV ».
Plus tard, lors de la diffusion des images de la fameuse « agression », on découvrira que Glanz avait grossièrement trafiqué les propos prononcés par des opposants par l’usage de sous-titres mensongers. Rien de nouveau.
Pigiste occasionnel du milliardaire juif Rupert Murdoch
Gaspard officie également pour VICE News, une chaîne de propagande atlantiste appartenant notamment au milliardaire australien d’origine juive Rupert Murdoch. Ce dernier a investi 70 millions de dollars dans VICE (source). Le rôle de VICE News est de servir les intérêts du puissant oligopole atlantiste en offrant une information d’opposition factice dans le cadre plus général de la « démoralisation » des pays ciblés.
A titre d’exemple, VICE News mobilisa en Ukraine le journaliste juif américain Shimon Ostrovsky (source) pour offrir une narration du coup d’état mené par la CIA à Kiev en février 2014 favorable aux intérêts globalistes. Ce coup amena au pouvoir des oligarques issus de la pègre juive comme l’actuel président Poroshenkho ou le premier ministre Yatsyenuk. Le juif Raphaël Glucksmann, agent de la CIA via la Freedom House – comme son père André – a réalisé un travail de désinformation identique en France au profit du gouvernement fantoche d’Ukraine.
Gaspard Glanz fulminait ainsi dans VICE News à propos de BREIZATAO.com dans un article du 23 septembre 2014 (source) après que notre journal l’ait sérieusement étrillé dans un papier où nous soulignions tout le ridicule de l’illuminé précité.
Entre deux piges sur des Gitans, Glanz réalise aussi de curieux entretiens, fort complaisants, avec les plus hautes autorités militaire françaises (source).
Soutien actif à l’extrême-gauche ayant expulsé Maryvonne
Mais Glanz s’est illustré plus récemment par son soutien actif à une bande d’anarcho-nihilistes ayant décidé d’exproprier une vieille dame de plus de 80 ans, Maryvonne Thamin, à Rennes. L’affaire a défrayé la chronique, notamment grâce à l’action des nationalistes d’ADSAV qui a suscité un scandale dans tout l’Hexagone. Il n’est pas jusqu’à Russia Today qui n’ait évoqué l’affaire, comme nous le rapportions hier (source).
A cette occasion, c’est Glanz qui a réalisé une énième pitoyable interview des punks à chiens susmentionnés, crasse asociale qui légitimait sa rapine commise à l’encontre d’une vieille dame par une brumeuse geste marxiste, le visage courageusement masqué.
L’affaire a cependant tourné court, la mairie socialiste fuyant devant le scandale, la justice lui emboîtant le pas et décidant de virer séance tenante les camés qui s’entassaient dans la propriété, transformée en taudis.
Glanz appelle à neutraliser illégalement un site qui le dérange
Alors que nous évoquions le rôle de cet élément louche, l’intéressé décidait – très stupidement – d’appeler publiquement à neutraliser illégalement BREIZATAO.com :
Avant qu’une connexion « militante » ne s’établisse entre une avocate, elle aussi visiblement d’origine juive, Eve Matringe, et notre ami Gaspard sur fond de sollicitation de l’UEJF, l’Union des Etudiants Juifs de France, syndicat ne représentant que lui-même, mais suffisamment fort pour dicter la restriction globale du droit de la presse auprès de Christine Taubira (source).
La solidarité ethnique – le recours à l’UEJF comme l’allusion à l’union « entre cosmopolites »- étant bien mise en avant par l’avocate précitée… Le « racisme antiraciste », en somme.
Notre rédaction remercie Gaspard pour cet appel public, dûment archivé et transmis à qui de droit.
Salut vieille branche!HalluciGen, Inc. is a location in the Commonwealth in 2287.
Contents show]
Layout Edit
When the Sole Survivor first encounters the facility, a chemical leak causes all the NPCs to attack one another. Towards the end, there is a decontamination chamber that cures radiation poisoning.
Due to collapsed floors, the building's layout can be confusing. The entryway's reception area appears to open onto the second floor.
To access the third floor, the player character may need to walk into a wall painting blocking the doorway to the staircase, nudging it out of the way. Further, two inactive protectrons may block the way into the first room on the third floor, requiring their destruction.
At some point, one can ascend into a corridor with several doors, which are opened by buttons. There are Gunners fighting behind each of them. Alternative to direct combat, the player can jump to the balcony with a staircase. This leads upstairs to a room, which will greet the player character with an announcement and invite them to test some "products." Pressing the various buttons in this room will emit poisonous gases to the rooms downstairs housing the Gunners. A terminal in this room reveals that the rooms below were actually used to demonstrate the products to VIPs, after which the rooms should be "cleared of test subjects, blood, fluids."
Behind the building is an exterior room with a green Gun Shop sign, inside which is a power armor station, a chemistry station, and a weapons workbench.
Notable loot Edit
Entrance area Edit
Two Help wanted! notes – On the entrance reception desk.
Five drugged water cartons in the entrance room: one on the small table immediately to the right after entering the building from the main entrance; four more behind the reception desk.
Day Tripper in the toilet tank after passing through locker/shower room.
Tesla Science Magazine issue #7 – Entrance level, northeast corner of the building, after ascending via a collapsed section of roofing. This is the room with the research terminal controlling a HalluciGen Suppressor prototype device.
Note from Eric – On a desk beside the accounting terminal on the second level.
Testing chambers Edit
Two drugged water cartons in a locker room down the hallway from the room with two Gunners locked in.
Basement Edit
Notes Edit
A non-hostile female Gunner is in a locked room, as one makes their way through the building from the main entrance. She asks the player character to look through the window of her room, where they are able to talk to her. The chemical leak has almost driven her mad, and she tells the player character she can't remember anything. If they convince or threaten her to open the door, she will run to the entrance, screaming that she has to get out. She will then leave the building.
The special grenade, HalluciGen gas grenade, can only be made when a HalluciGen gas canister is in the player character's inventory, i.e. it will not appear as a crafting option if the canisters are placed in the workbench or workshop inventory. The canisters are regarded as "junk."
There are numerous canisters in the broken-out spaces near the basement-level exit. While crouching, the player character may jump on the control panel in front of the broken panel glass. From here, they can grab the ones out of reach.
A hazmat suit will protect the player character from the toxic gas in the contamination area. The player will flinch as if taking damage while wearing it but will not lose health.
Power armor and/or a gas mask will not protect the player character from the toxic gas in the contamination area.
protect the player character from the toxic gas in the contamination area. The Gunner commander may take and use the Stealth Boy, which can make it a harder fight.
Once activated, the decontamination equipment remains on indefinitely, and can be used by the player character to purge radiation.
Companions will still complain about the smell even if they have a gas mask on (with the exception of robotic companions, such as Codsworth).
This area is visited during the Vault-Tec Workshop add-on quests to obtain a chemical formula needed for the experiments.
add-on quests to obtain a chemical formula needed for the experiments. A non-hostile Gunner conscript is on the bottom floor, forward and to the left as one comes down the stairs. He appears to be injured, as he is holding his side and sitting against a wall. He also appears to be hallucinating from the chemical leak.
The effects of the gas seen in the game are similar to those of the real-life 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate gas, tested by the U.S. military.
Appearances Edit
HalluciGen, Inc. appears only in Fallout 4.I have spoken at some length in the Internet Dating series of articles, and in other posts, about the importance in this society of creating your own alibi in advance by archiving your every interaction with the wimminz.
This is like wearing a parachute when flying, you may look like an asshole 99.99% of the time, but that remaining 0.01% of the time you are not going to give a flying fuck how you look, suddenly wearing a parachute will give you other options than putting your head between your legs and kissing your ass goodbye.
What you probably will not be aware of is the sheer volume of potentially life saving exculpatory evidence you can build up in one year with nothing more than an Android smartphone and Google services.
How does 32,475 SMS messages, 307 separate people you have spoken to on the phone, and couple of thousand emails grab you? Plus all the goodness of Latitude tracking you via the GPS in your phone…
I’m 50+ years old, and that is the sort of volumes of data that I am generating every single year, I imagine a texting mad teen could quadruple that without even breaking a sweat.
Frankly it is a *fascinating* exercise to go through the last year’s data come January, and shortly I will get to discussing some numbers, but first I want to make the point that even with my new life without wimminz in my home life to distract me, even though it is only one year ago and not the many years mentioned in false accusations by skank ho ex’s, this archive is chock full of things that I had simply forgotten.
The following is unedited from an SMS sent to me by some skank ho a year ago;
“In love you and I want to fuck outside somewhere. I do need you to fuck me and good and hard and sort me out. Need a real man to get me used to having big cock on regular base.”
What is interesting is not that it was a year ago, nor the fact that I did not in the end fuck her, which as you know is no defence, what is interesting is that SMS was around 24 hours before I discovered that the chick in question is a part time cop, and full time fucking liar and fruitcake…. in short she is in a perfect position to fuck some man over totally, even months or years after the alleged event, and the man she works over could be so totally innocent that even one year after the alleged event he has forgotten all about her… lets face it, the reason I forgot about this skank ho is BECAUSE NOTHING HAPPENED memorable or otherwise, and that is while relaxed and sat at home.
Traumatise me by arresting me and telling me I am an evil rapist to who going to prison for a very long time, and my chances of remembering what happened last fucking week are almost zero, and I say that from actual experience, and it takes MONTHS for your full faculties to come back and you can trust me on that too.
However I am now in the situation where I only have to remember one thing.
ALL MY INTERACTIONS WITH WIMMINZ ARE ARCHIVED TO THE CLOUD.
That’s it, that will pop into my head soon enough, no matter how messed up and upset I am, that will pop into my head, probably even before “I want a lawyer”
So, back to the archive, like I said, I don’t try real hard, just make sure that all my transactions with wimminz are recorded to the cloud thanks to my Android smartphone and google services, and yet I build up 30,000+ SMS messages, talk to 300 people / wimminz on the phone and have a couple thousand emails, don’t forget, that 30,000 SMS messages in one year is what I have sent the wimminz, and what the wimminz have sent me, complete with any cunt shot pictures etc.
Where this gets really interesting is the “everyone is 6 steps removed from everyone else” scenario, in 2011 past year I have SMSed maybe 1,000 wimminz, spoken on the phone to 200 ( I could give you EXACT numbers thanks to my archives, but you get the idea) and fucked 37.
If we assume that these wimminz are the same as me in numbers terms, which is reasonable and rational, that means each of these wimminz has SMSed 1,000 men, spoken on the phone to 200, and fucked 40, in 2011.
Already we are up to 1,000 x 1,000 = 1,000,000 individuals in the SMS network, 40,000 in the phone network, and 1,600 in the swapped bodily fluids network.
If each one of those has done the same we are up t0 64,000 actual sex partners only two steps away from me, 16 million phone partners and a billion SMS partners, so clearly there is a lot of non unique individuals here, and a lot more “cross pollination” than the pure math would imply.
In short, everyone is indeed fucking everyone else, and a LOT more than they will admit.
However, we are already at a place where these actual electronic records, and buddy, they exist, whether you decide to sign up and embrace it like I did, or whether you reject it, they exist, but we are already at a place where these actual electronic records are cross reference-able, it is just a computational problem to plot the connections between people, for example any SMS between two people of a sexual nature, or with a picture attachment, and the plot the connections between any two people via these intermediary relationships.
We are already at the point where it is computationally trivial for any single personal computer to go through a years worth of records for one individual, my laptop can do this as quick as I can type a search query, so searching for correlations between the records of two people, or incompatibilities, is trivial.
An Intel Core i5 can analyse and correlate and index that volume of data well enough to permit full text keyword searching in under 5 minutes.
What this means, is that there is already enough data out there, not just to determine who is talking to who, who is fucking who, but also who is lying about who fucked them, who beat them, who raped them…. the data already exists, the data has already been indexed, but just not with that purpose in mind.
What it does mean is that there is opportunity to crowd source or open source this, if you look at the numbers above, you come to a very interesting conclusion.
The population of my region of the country is around 5 million.
Say 2.5 million females, exclude the under 20 and over 50 and we have around a million plus wimminz, and trust me, they are all fucking and available to fuck.
Fact is they will all be within 6 fucks of me, and the more local they are the more likely it will be five or four or even three or just two fucks away.
So statistically speaking, each extra step is an extra order of magnitude of probability, the root of a million is a thousand, the root of a thousand is 31, and 31 different sexual partners in one year is not unusual in this internet generation. To be specific, the 31 would be wimminz, the thousand males, the million wimminz.
So I am two fucks away from a million women, let’s look at the numbers.
Lets say there are 10 guys like me in this region who archive everything as I do… there is a 10 in 1,000, which equals 1 in 100, which equals a 1% chance that one of the wimminz I fucked in the last year, is within two fucks of one these ten guys in the last year.
Stop and think about that, it only takes ten other guys to be doing my shit with archiving everything, before there is a 0.01% chance that one of the wimminz I fucked in the last year also fucked one of them, or there is a 1% chance one of the wimminz I fucked last year fucked some guy who fucked some other wimminz who fucked them…..
Flip that on it’s head by the way when it comes to wimminz with a Cluster B personality disorder, which by may reckonings is 10% of all wimminz, what are the chances you are one step removed AT MOST from one of these psycho skank ho’s?
But, back to my side of it, there is a 0.01% chance that one of the wimminz I fucked last year also fucked one of the ten theoretical guys who archive shit like me, and a 1% chance that one of the wimminz I fucked last year fucked a guy, who fucked a wimminz, who fucked one of the ten theoretical guys who archive shit like me.
SO already there is a 0.01% chance that MY OWN PERSONAL ARCHIVE ALONE has a bearing on what any one of those wimminz was actually doing in the last year when she accused MrX of beating / raping her, and a 1% chance that my own personal archive has some data on one of the one further step removed wimminz and men she is associated with.
The flip side is, if I could get 32,000 men to archive and track everything to the extent that I do, then every wimminz in the region, all one million plus of them, would feature somewhere in the records of one of those men…. 32,000 men out of a similarly aged sexually active population of a million plus men in the region is chicken feed.
Fuck, we aren’t even talking a google level of market penetration, or a VISA level, or a Coke level, we are talking small regional on-line newspaper, or small regional on-line dating agency, or small regional employment agency.
The technology is here, we just need to be aware of it, and start embracing it.
Yes, there is a 100% chance that the megacorporations and the state will use the technology to track you for THEIR ends, but dudes, they are doing that ANYWAY, what we are talking about here is a chance to turn the tables, as it stands there is a 100% chance that you have fucked an undiagnosed Cluster B psycho skank ho, or that you know a guy who has / is, and as it is there is a 100% chance that between google and Vodaphone etc the evidence to PROVE that those false accusations of domestic violence and sexual abuse are total made up bullshit, and a 0.01% chance the psycho skank ho in question is one step removed from my own archive, and a 0% chance you will either be aware of that or have access to it.
So, back to the archive, and as promised keywords, where “fisting” is different from “fisted” and fisting shows up one skank ho that I did fuck, who sent me an SMS saying
You could force me to take a whole wine bottle up my cunt. Then followed by you fisting me!
Which as we all know, is a billion miles from how she will, and did, portray herself when she screwed her ex over in family court, and what she told police when she got him arrested, and how she will behave in future with some other unfortunate.
Wouldn’t YOU like to be able to take advantage of MY data on that skank, I am sure her ex would, whoever he is, wherever he is….. he’d have loved to have been able to produce that SMS, indeed that series of messages etc, in his family court case where he got nailed as a sexual predator and a violent man with vile and disgusting sexual tastes.
PS
by way of an edit, some of the math…
Assuming 40 sexual partners each, 1,000,000 / 40 = 25,000, so 25,000 men could fuck a million wimminz in a year, and vice versa.
25,000 / 40 = 625
625 / 40 = 15 and a bit
Related articlesThe Everest has taken the Melbourne Cup's mantle of Australia's richest race
*Conditions Apply. Excl VIC, NSW, SA & WA. Gamble Responsibly
Sydney will host the world’s richest sprint race on turf with the first $10 million The Everest set to be held during the spring carnival.
The Everest will be run at Royal Randwick racecourse over 1200 metres for the first time on 14th October 2017 and thereafter on the second Saturday of October each year.
The Everest will be unique in Australian racing in that the race will be open to local and international buyers to purchase a spot in the race at a price of $600,000. Racing NSW will contribute $2.8 million into the pool which will come from additional revenues such as TV rights on the race.
The 1200m event will become Australia’s richest race surpassing the $6.5million dollar Melbourne Cup as well as the richest turf race in the world.
The massive prize purse is set to lure the worlds best sprinters and is timed specifically before the Hong Kong International sprints in December.
Have Your Say: Do you think this is a good initiative by Racing NSW? – Leave a comment below.
Prizemoney distribution
1st – $5,800,000
2nd – $1,425,000
3rd – $800,000
4th – $400,000
5th – $250,00
6th-12th – $175,000
Equine Welfare Fund $100,000
Racing NSW announces $10 million race named ‘The Everest.’ 1200m race on October 14 at Randwick. — Matt Kelly (@matty_kel) February 1, 2017
Racing NSW will put in $2.8 million which will come from additional revenues like TV rights around the world to show the Everest. — Andrew Bensley (@AndrewBensley) February 1, 2017
$300 in Bonus Bets Get $300 in Racing Bonus Bets when you join and deposit $250!*
*Conditions Apply. Excl VIC, NSW, SA & WA. Gamble ResponsiblyThe cryptocurrency community in Israel now has some clarity about the legal status of Bitcoin in their country. The country’s tax authorities have recently announced that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will be considered as assets and are taxable.
The legal status of Bitcoin has always been a grey area in many countries across the world. But with the Israeli authorities clarifying their stance over the cryptocurrency, people can now manage their tax filings accordingly. At the same time, few community members have expressed their concerns over certain prohibitive clauses that might make cryptocurrency usage a very costly affair.
According to media reports, the Israel Tax Authority clarified the tax rules about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in its latest draft paper. The authorities claim to have done so following multiple requests from the cryptocurrency community within the country. However, it is not clear when Israel will implement the regulations.
The authorities have classified cryptocurrencies as assets that are not synonymous with financial securities or stocks. At the same time, it will not be considered as a form of currency either. It also makes cryptocurrencies eligible for a 25 percent capital gains tax whenever somebody sells their cryptocurrency holding. Also, the exchanges trading cryptocurrencies will have to charge a 17 percent VAT for asset sales and pass it on to the government in addition to the existing corporate income tax.
The new draft is set to increase the cost of every single cryptocurrency transaction in the country, negating some of its benefits. Also, the implementation of such draft rules is expected to make it much harder for businesses receiving cryptocurrency payments as they will have to classify it as a barter and file paperwork accordingly, says an online financial magazine.
Bitcoin has already proven itself to be a reliable form of currency. The digital currency, like gold, satisfies all the properties of an ideal money. But governments are hesitant to call Bitcoin a currency as they should, mainly because they fear losing control over the monetary system.
The situation is expected to remain the same for a long time unless some country wakes up and decides to call bitcoin a form of currency openly.
Ref: Finance Magnates | Image: NewsBTCStory highlights Both Brennan and Clapper praised Robert Mueller
Clapper warned publicly about Russian interference in US affairs
(CNN) Former CIA Director John Brennan says government officials should refuse orders to fire special counsel Robert Mueller if they are told to by the White House.
"I think it's the obligation of some executive branch officials to refuse to carry that out. I would just hope that this is not going to be a partisan issue. That Republicans, Democrats are going to see that the future of this government is at stake and something needs to be done for the good of the future," Brennan told CNN's Wolf Blitzer at the Aspen Security Forum.
Brennan was appearing with former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and both men, who served in the Obama administration, told Blitzer they have total confidence in Mueller. "Absolutely. It was an inspired choice- they don't come any better, " Brennan said. He added that "If Mueller is fired, I hope our elected reps will stand up and say enough is enough."
Clapper again warned publicly about Russian interference in US affairs. He was asked about the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower that Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort had with a Russian lawyer and others.
"I'm an old school, Cold War warrior and all that -- so I have, there's truth in advertising, great suspicions about the Russians and what they do. A lot of this to me had kind of the standard textbook tradecraft long deployed by Russians," Clapper said. "It would have been a really good idea maybe to have vetted whoever they were meeting with."
Read MoreMarch is a month of adventure. The sun's out again, spring break is here, and the world is ready to be explored. And what better way to get started than with some fresh new reads?
The list of the best books of March 2016 is filled with characters who step into new skin (sometimes literally — see A. Igoni Barret's Blackass ). As authors dive into their characters, many of these books address ideas about where our identity comes from and how we tend to it. Readers, get ready to try on new perspectives and get drawn delightfully in.
This month features a pantheon of stories of revolution, from Ireland to India. Side by side these reads ask important questions about where we draw the line: what is revolution and what is terrorism? Plus, history-lovers, this month's for you, as you'll plunge into true-to-life tales of radical change and their resounding effects. From refugees to duchesses, these unforgettable characters are just bursting to tell you their story.
Family goes a long way this month, and mother-daughter relationships in particular are being examined. We'll see estranged families forced to come together, and tight-knit families who have to stay strong in the face of an impossible world. Some of these books span generations, while others zero in on a particular, explosive moment in a family's life. Throughout it all, have your tissue box ready, because you are going to feel some intense emotions.
Finally, book nerds rejoice, there are quite a few books out this month about literature itself. From exploring the artistic psyche to reimagining Jane Eyre, it's like an English major's playground. Talk about shifting perspectives, you'll be looking at the literary world in an entirely new light.
So, as you get a running start on spring, these reads will lift you up by your imagination and help you soar to fantastic new heights. Let's go.
1. Blackass by A. Igoni Barrett (March 1; Graywolf Press)
In both concept and execution, this book is stunning. Set in Lagos, Nigeria, this is the story of a young black man, Furo, who wakes up one morning to find that he's turned white — minus his name, his background, and his ass. As Furo navigates the new world as a white man, he lands a job, moves in with a woman, and finds himself pursued by a writer named Igoni. Told with fantastic voice, this book gives a complex look into the forces whirling within contemporary society, from race to social media. This book is irresistible — read this excerpt and you'll see exactly what I mean.
Click here to buy.
2. The Passenger by Lisa Lutz (March 1; Simon & Schuster)
"Slippery" is the best adjective to describe the main character of this book — a woman who sheds her identity again and again. As you follow her across the country, in and out of names and hotel rooms, you'll be questioning her motives every step of the way. Why would she flee after her husband's death, when she had nothing to do with it? Who is the mysterious voice she calls to get a new name? And what is she really running from? Thrilling and addictive, this is the thriller you've been longing for.
Click here to buy.
3. The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing (March 1; Picador)
What does it mean to be lonely? This book is a deep and resounding exploration of loneliness and all that it holds. Part-memoir, part biography, Laing explores her own experience as well as those of iconic artists, including Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz, Edward Hopper, Henry Darger and Klaus Nom. With a particular focus on NYC, this book is as dazzling as it is unique.
Click here to buy.
4. The Birds of Opulence by Crystal Wilkinson (March 7; University of Kentucky Press)
From the award-winning author of Blackberries, Blackberries and Water Street, this sweeping novel will take your breath away. Centered on several generations of women who live in a black Southern township called Opulence, this book is set apart by the strength of its characters and its lyrical style. From the reputable Goode-Brown family's struggle to overcome dark secrets to single mother Francine Clark's journey to raise her daughter, this novel is fueled by relationships intense and complex.
Click here to buy.
5. What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi (March 8; Riverhead Books)
Helen Oyeyemi is a literary genius, and it shows in this fantastic collection of short stories. Glowing with imagination, each piece |
not be using sulfate -- and carbon chemistry predictions there might be inaccurate. So might the estimates of carbon dioxide released. Climate modelers: take notice.
"Very few studies have investigated whether these metals get out to these deep regions, and no one knew how much iron there was in deep sediments off the Congo River coast, until our study," Beckler said. "We found that reactive iron is not only present in the deep sediments of both of our study sites, but that bacteria there process carbon mainly using iron, not sulfate. Most folks had assumed sulfate was the important compound in similar sediments. Ours is the first study to show 'rust-breathing' is actually the dominant form of carbon respiration."
Beckler added: "More research is needed to fully understand how much carbon dioxide is escaping from these two sites, but the evidence so far suggests that these areas may release more of it than we previously thought."
The team chose these two sites for good reason -- both have chemistry influenced by big rivers, increasing the chances that metals from land might be carried to the deep sea. Thanks to the Mississippi river, mud is carried far out and spills over the edge of the continental slope, most likely during winter storms. Meanwhile, the Congo River sends mud and clay particles directly through an underwater canyon and into the depths, where they spread out in a deep sea fan.
"When it comes to chemistry, the Congo deep sea fan reminds me of a shallow, coastal ecosystem transported to the deep ocean," Beckler said. "It's the most interesting study site -- a natural laboratory, if you will."
Is this kind of site rare? How much does this surprising, deep sea chemistry matter in the global scheme of the carbon cycle?
The study authors note: "Several large rivers in Asia or Oceania (e.g. the Ganges, Yellow, and Irrawady) discharge high concentrations of iron-rich suspended sediment beyond their shelves, and even arctic rivers may transport terrigenous (land-derived) material off-shelf via pack ice." However, the authors say more research is needed, as "iron biogeochemistry in deep continental margin sediments adjacent to these rivers has yet to be investigated."
In other words, these kinds of metal ions probably reach the deep ocean more often than expected -- and play a greater role in carbon cycling than once believed. For a better understanding of the carbon cycle, scientists must iron out these details.The world’s oldest barmaid Dolly Saville, who pulled pints at the Red Lion in Wendover for 74 years, sadly passed away on Tuesday(24 February).
Mrs Saville, who celebrated her landmark birthday in April last year, moved to Wendover with her family aged three and first started her job behind the bar in 1940, when a pint cost a mere eight pence.
The great-great grandmother was labelled a ‘national treasure’ by the pub’s staff and the whole village came together last year to celebrate her 100th birthday in style with a party.
Jonathon Swaine, managing director of Fuller’s Inns which owns The Red Lion, said: “We can confirm that Dolly Saville, long serving barmaid at the Red Lion in Wendover, has sadly passed away at the remarkable age of 100 years.
“We are all saddened by this news – she was not only a popular team member but a huge part of the community within Wendover and a true asset to the Red Lion and Fuller’s alike.
“We were delighted that we had the chance to celebrate her 100th birthday last year with a special celebration at the Red Lion.
“Our thoughts are with Dolly’s family, her colleagues and indeed her faithful customers at this difficult time.”
In her lifetime Mrs Saville lived through two world wars, saw two monarchs take the throne and 14 Prime Ministers voted into Parliament.
During her years working in the Red Lion, Mrs Saville shared jokes with famous faces including actor Pierce Brosnan, former Prime Minister Ted Heath, Dame Margot Fonteyn, footballer Sir Stanley Matthews and Dame Vera Lynn.
Last year she appeared on the BBC’s The One Show with Chris Evans and Alex Jones.
Share your memories of Dolly here, email editorial@bucksherald.co.uk, on our Facebook page or on Twitter @bucks_herald
More: How the world has changed since world’s oldest barmaid pulled her first pint, April 2014.This article is over 3 years old
President Cristina Fernández joins Amnesty International in call for thorough investigation after leading LGBT activist is found dead in Buenos Aires
A well-known Argentinian LGBT activist has been found dead in her Buenos Aires apartment, the third transgender woman to have died violently in the country over the last month.
Rights group Amnesty International said on Wednesday that the body of Diana Sacayan showed signs of violence. President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who in 2012 personally gave Sacayan her national identity card recognizing her as a woman, joined Amnesty in calling for justice.
“I ask the national security services and the metropolitan police to solve this horrible crime,” Fernández said during a public address.
Argentina is one of the few countries that allow people to change their gender on official identification documents. Latin American countries have some of the world’s highest murder rates for transgender people, according to rights groups.
Sacayan’s death followed the killings of Marcela Chocobar and Coty Olmos, two transgender women whose bodies were found over the last month in the provinces of Santa Fe and Santa Cruz.
“A dark cloud has set over Argentina’s trans community,” said Mariela Belski, executive director of Amnesty International Argentina. “Unless this latest wave of murders is effectively investigated and those responsible taken to justice, a message will be sent that attacking trans women is actually OK.”
Dozens of people held a vigil outside Argentina’s supreme court building in solidarity with the victims. Social media lit up with messages of support for the community.
“We are obligated to find out what happened to Diana Sacayan, and to continue to advocate her ideas,” said one tweet.
According to Transgender Europe, which advocates for transgender people worldwide, Latin America accounted for 78% of the 1,731 murders of transgender and gender-diverse people reported worldwide between January 2008 and December 2014.This week, I'm in Antwerp, Belgium for the annual Devoxx conference. After traveling 21 hours door-to-door yesterday, I woke up and came to the conference to attend some talks on Play and PhoneGap. I just got out of the session on Play 2.0, which was presented by Sadek Drobi and Guillaume Bort. Below are my notes from this presentation.
The Play 2.0 beta is out! You can read more about this release on the mailing list. This beta includes native support for both Scala and Java, meaning you can use both in the same project. The release also bundles Akka and SBT by default.
In other news, Play 2.0 is now part of the Typesafe Stack. Typesafe is the Scala company, started by the founder of Scala (Martin Odersky) and the founder of Akka (Jonas Bonér). Guillaume is also joining the Typesafe Advisory Board.
Sadek and Guillaume both work at zenexity, where Play is the secret weapon for the web applications they've built for the last decade. Play was born in the real world. They kept listening to the market to see what they should add to the project. At some point, they realized they couldn't keep adding to the old model and they needed to create something new.
The web has evolved from static pages to dynamic pages (ASP, PHP). From there, we moved to structured web applications with frameworks and MVC. Then the web moved to Ajax and long-polling to more real-time, live features. And this changes everything.
Now we need to adapt our tools. We need to handle tremendous flows of data. Need to improve expressiveness for concurrent code. We need to pick the appropriate datastore for the problem (not only SQL). We need to integrate with rapidly-evolving client side technologies like JavaScript, CoffeeScript, and Dart. We need to use elastic deployment that allows scaling up and scaling down.
zenexity wanted to integrated all of these modern web needs into Play 2.0. But they also wanted to keep Play approachable. They wanted to maintain fast turnaround so you can change your code and hit reload to see the changes. They wanted to keep it as a full stack framework with support for JSON, XML, Web Services, Jobs, etc. And they wanted to continue to use and conventions over configuration.
At this point, Guillaume did a Play 2.0 Beta demo, show us how it uses SBT and has a console so everything so it runs really fast. You can have both Scala and Java files in the same project. Play 2.0 templates are based on Scala, but you don't need to know Scala to use them. You might have to learn how to write a for loop in Scala, but it's just a subset of Scala for templates and views. SBT is used for the build system, but you don't have to learn or know SBT. All the old play commands still work, they're just powered by a different system.
After the demo, Sadek took over and started discussing the key features of Play 2.0.
To handle tremendous amounts of data, you need to do chunking of data and be able to process a stream of data, not just wait until it's finished. Java's InputStream is outdated and too low level. Its read() method reads the next byte of data from the input and this method can block until input data is available.
To solve this, Play includes a reactive programming feature, which they borrowed from Haskell. It uses Iteratee/Enumerator IO and leverages inversion of control (not like dependency injection, but more like not micro-managing). The feature allows you to have control when you need it so you don't have to wait for the input stream to complete. The Enumerator is the component that sends data and the Iteratee is the component that receives data. The Iteratee does incremental processing and can tell the Enumerator when it's done. The Iteratee can also send back a continuation, where it tells the Enumerator it wants more data and how to give it. With this paradigm, you can do a lot of cool stuff without consuming resources and blocking data flow.
Akka is an actor system that is a great model for doing concurrent code. An Actor could be both an Enumerator and an Iteratee. This vastly improves the expressiveness for concurrent code. For example, here's how you'd use Akka in Play:
def search(keyword: String) = Action { AsyncResult { // do something with result } }
Play does not try to abstract data access because datastores are different now. You don't want to think of everything as objects if you're using something like MongoDB or navigating a Social Graph. Play 2.0 will provide some default modules for the different datastores, but they also expect a lot of contributed modules. Anorm will be the default SQL implementation for Play Scala and Ebean will be the default ORM implementation for Play Java. The reason they've moved away from Hibernate is because they needed something that was more stateless.
On the client side, there's so many technologies (LESS, CoffeeScript, DART, Backbone.js, jQuery, SASS), they didn't want to bundle any because they move too fast. Instead, there's plugins you can add that help you leverage these technologies. There's a lot of richness you can take advantage of on the client side and you need to have the tools for that.
Lastly, there's a new type of deployment: container-less deployment to the cloud. Akka allows you to distribute your jobs across many servers and Heroku is an implementation of elastic deployment that has built-in support for Play.
They've explained what they tried to design and the results of this new, clean architecture have been suprising. Side effects include: type-safety everywhere for rock-solid applications. There's an awesome performance boost from Scala. There's easier integration with existing projects via SBT. And it only takes 10 lines of code to develop an HTTP Server that responds to web requests.
The memory consumption is amazing: only 2MB of heap is used when a Play 2.0 app is started. Tests on Guillaume's laptop have shown that it can handle up to 40,000 requests per second, without any optimization of the JVM. Not only that, but after the requests subside, garbage collection cleans up everything and reduces the memory consumption back to 2MB.
At this point, Guillaume did another demo, showing how everything is type-safe in 2.0, including the routes file. If you mistype (or comment one out) any routes, the compiler will find it and notify you. Play 2.0 also contains a compiled assets feature. This allows you to use Google's Closure Compiler, CoffeeScript and LESS. If you put your LESS files in app/assets/stylesheets, compilation errors will show up in your browser. If you put JavaScript files in app/assets/javascripts, the Closure compiler will be used and compilation errors will show up in your browser.
Play 2.0 ships with 3 different sample applications, all implemented in both Java and Scala. HelloWorld is more than just text in a browser, it includes a form that shows how validation works. Another app is computer-database. When Guillaume started it, we saw how evolutions were used to create the database schema from the browser. The Play Team has done their best to make the development process a browser-based experience rather than having to look in your console. The computer-database is a nice example of how to do CRUD and leverages Twitter's Bootstrap for its look and feel.
The last sample application is zentasks. It uses Ajax and implements security so you can see how to create a login form. It uses LESS for CSS and CoffeeScript and contains features like in-place editing. If you'd like to see any of these applications in action, you can stop by the Typesafe booth this week at Devoxx.
Unfortunately, there will be no migrating path for Play 1.x applications. The API seems very similar, but there are subtle changes that make this difficult. The biggest thing is how templating has changed from Groovy to Scala. To migrate from 1.2.x would be mostly a copy/paste, modify process. There are folks working on getting Groovy templates working in 2.0. The good news is zenexity has hundreds of 1.x applications in production, so 1.x will likely be maintained for many years.
Summary
This was a great talk on what's new in Play 2.0. I especially like the native support for LESS and CoffeeScript and the emphasis on trying to keep developers using two tools: their editor and the browser. The sample apps look great, but the documentation look sparse. I doubt I'll get a chance to migrate my Play 1.2.3 app to 2.0 this month, but I hope to try migrating sometime before the end of the year.Speculation mounts that departure of president could lead to the break-up of country
President Ali Abdullah Saleh's authoritarian grip on Yemen appeared to be slipping as he accepted an offer from the Saudi king to travel there for medical treatment for wounds suffered in a rocket attack on his compound.
A Saudi official, who asked not to be named, said: "He's just landed. He's here for medical treatment. We are the closest country and we have the capabilities."
Asked whether Saleh was stepping down, the official said only: "He's coming for medical treatment."
The reports of Saleh's journey to Saudi Arabia came amid speculation from Yemeni and western analysts that it was unlikely that he would be able to return to Yemen if he was forced to seek medical assistance abroad.
Saleh delivered an audio address on television to reassure supporters, but his voice sounded laboured and the address was made accompanied by an old photograph of him on the screen.
Analysts fear that a sudden departure by Saleh, after 33 years in power, would leave a political vacuum and create even deeper chaos in Yemen, where the government has already lost control of some outlying provinces and al-Qaida and other jihadists have appeared to exploit the political turmoil to move more freely.
A leaderless Yemen would place enormous pressure on Saudi Arabia, which has long played the role of kingmaker for its much smaller, and infinitely poorer, neighbour.
The offer of treatment came as it was confirmed that Saudi Arabia – which has been deeply shaken by the events of the Arab spring – had acted to negotiate a ceasefire between the rival factions in Yemen even as it was arranging for Saleh's evacuation.
There are fears that without Saleh, whose regime has been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of protesters and political opponents, the nascent civil war between rival factions could escalate further and splinter the fragile state that is home to one of al-Qaida's most active franchises.
Earlier yesterday, conflicting reports of his whereabouts and condition spread through the Middle East after officials and opposition tribal leaders reported that Saudi King Abdullah had mediated a ceasefire in the conflict.
The violence in the country grew out of pro-democracy protests that has turned into a power struggle between Saleh's ruling clique and his former allies in the Ahmar clan.
Sadeq al-Ahmar, the eldest of the Ahmar brothers, whose fighters have been battling Saleh's forces in the capital, confirmed that the Saudis had arranged a ceasefire, which he said he would respect.
The extent of the president's injuries has been a matter of intense speculation: when the rocket struck the mosque in his presidential compound, he was surrounded by senior officials and his bodyguards. Eleven guards died and five officials standing near the president were seriously wounded. They have already gone to Saudi Arabia for treatment.
King Abdullah intervened in the conflict after almost four months of largely peaceful protests against Saleh spun out of control into an increasingly bloody civil conflict.
Late last night, al-Ahmar, who is also the head of the Hashid confederation, accused Saleh's troops of not observing the ceasefire. He said that the president's forces had not withdrawn from their positions in the city but were instead reinforcing those positions.
"We are respecting what we agreed upon under the guidance of the Saudi monarch to stop the bloodshed of innocents and bring safety for citizens based on our desire to bring security and quiet back to the capital, which is living through a terrible nightmare that Saleh's regime has brought upon it," al-Ahmar said in a statement.
Inspired by uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, protesters have been trying unsuccessfully since February to oust Saleh with a wave of peaceful demonstrations that have brought out hundreds of thousands daily in Sana'a and other cities. Now the crisis has transformed into a power struggle between two of Yemen's most powerful families: Saleh's, which dominates the security forces, and the al-Ahmar clan, which leads Yemen's strongest tribal confederation, known as the Hashid. The confederation is grouped around 10 tribes across the north.
Al-Ahmar announced the Hashid's support for the protest movement in March, and his fighters adhered to the movement's non-violence policy. But last week, Saleh's forces moved against al-Ahmar's fortress-like residence in Sana'a, and the tribe's fighters rose up in fury.
There were signs last night the ceasefire was already unravelling as the boom of artillery fire could be heard again near the al-Ahmar compound in the Hasaba neighbourhood in northern Sana'a, where the fighting has been concentrated in the past two weeks.Coordinates:
[1] Buildings of Tin Pan Alley, 1910 The same buildings, 2011
Tin Pan Alley is the name given to the collection of New York City music publishers and songwriters who dominated the popular music of the United States in the late 19th century and early 20th century. The name originally referred to a specific place: West 28th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in the Flower District[2] of Manhattan; a plaque (see below) on the sidewalk on 28th Street between Broadway and Sixth commemorates it.[3][4][5][6]
The start of Tin Pan Alley is usually dated to about 1885, when a number of music publishers set up shop in the same district of Manhattan. The end of Tin Pan Alley is less clear cut. Some date it to the start of the Great Depression in the 1930s when the phonograph, radio, and motion pictures supplanted sheet music as the driving force of American popular music, while others consider Tin Pan Alley to have continued into the 1950s when earlier styles of American popular music were upstaged by the rise of rock & roll, which was centered on the Brill Building.
The origins of the name "Tin Pan Alley" are unclear. One account claims that it was a derogatory reference to the sound of many pianos (comparing them to the banging of tin pans). Others claim it arose from songwriters modifying their pianos to produce a more percussive sound. After many years, the term came to refer to the U.S. music industry in general.
Origin of the name [ edit ]
Various explanations have been advanced to account for the origins of the term "Tin Pan Alley". The most popular account holds that it was originally a derogatory reference by Monroe H. Rosenfeld in the New York Herald to the collective sound made by many "cheap upright pianos" all playing different tunes being reminiscent of the banging of tin pans in an alleyway.[7][8] This article has not been found.[9]
Simon Napier-Bell quotes an account of the origin of the name which was published in a 1930 book about the music business. In this version, popular songwriter Harry von Tilzer was being interviewed about the area around 28th Street and Fifth Avenue, where many music publishers had their offices. Von Tilzer had modified his expensive Kindler & Collins piano by placing strips of paper down the strings to give the instrument a more percussive sound. The journalist told von Tilzer, "Your Kindler & Collins sounds exactly like a tin can. I'll call the article 'Tin Pan Alley'."[10]
With time, this nickname was popularly embraced and came to describe the American music publishing industry in general.[8] The term then spread to the United Kingdom, where "Tin Pan Alley" is also used to describe Denmark Street in London's West End.[11] In the 1920s the street became known as "Britain's Tin Pan Alley" because of its large number of music shops.[12]
Origin of song publishing in New York City [ edit ]
In the mid-19th century, copyright control of melodies was not as strict, and publishers would often print their own versions of the songs popular at the time. With stronger copyright protection laws late in the century, songwriters, composers, lyricists, and publishers started working together for their mutual financial benefit. Songwriters would literally bang on the doors of Tin Pan Alley businesses to get new material.
The commercial center of the popular music publishing industry changed during the course of the 19th century, starting in Boston and moving to Philadelphia, Chicago and Cincinnati before settling in New York City under the influence of new and vigorous publishers which concentrated on vocal music. The two most enterprising New York publishers were Willis Woodard and T.B. Harms, the first companies to specialize in popular songs rather than hymns or classical music.[13] Naturally, these firms were located in the entertainment district, which, at the time, was centered on Union Square. Witmark was the first publishing house to move to West 28th Street as the entertainment district gradually shifted uptown, and by the late 1890s most publishers had followed their lead.[8]
The biggest music houses established themselves in New York City, but small local publishers – often connected with commercial printers or music stores – continued to flourish throughout the country, and there were important regional music publishing centers in Chicago, New Orleans, St. Louis, and Boston. When a tune became a significant local hit, rights to it were usually purchased from the local publisher by one of the big New York firms.
In its prime [ edit ]
I'm a Yiddish Cowboy (1908)
The song publishers who created Tin Pan Alley frequently had backgrounds as salesmen. The background of Isadore Witmark was selling water filters. Leo Feist had sold corsets, and Joe Stern and Edward B. Marks had sold neckties and buttons respectively.[14] The music houses in lower Manhattan were lively places, with a steady stream of songwriters, vaudeville and Broadway performers, musicians, and "song pluggers" coming and going.
Aspiring songwriters came to demonstrate tunes they hoped to sell. When tunes were purchased from unknowns with no previous hits, the name of someone with the firm was often added as co-composer (in order to keep a higher percentage of royalties within the firm), or all rights to the song were purchased outright for a flat fee (including rights to put someone else's name on the sheet music as the composer). An extraordinary number of Jewish East European immigrants became the music publishers and song writers on Tin Pan Alley – the most famous being Irving Berlin. Songwriters who became established producers of successful songs were hired to be on the staff of the music houses.
"Song pluggers" were pianists and singers who represented the music publishers, making their living demonstrating songs to promote sales of sheet music. Most music stores had song pluggers on staff. Other pluggers were employed by the publishers to travel and familiarize the public with their new publications. Among the ranks of song pluggers were George Gershwin, Harry Warren, Vincent Youmans and Al Sherman. A more aggressive form of song plugging was known as "booming": it meant buying dozens of tickets for shows, infiltrating the audience and then singing the song to be plugged. At Shapiro Bernstein, Louis Bernstein recalled taking his plugging crew to cycle races at Madison Square Garden: "They had 20,000 people there, we had a pianist and a singer with a large horn. We'd sing a song to them thirty times a night. They'd cheer and yell, and we kept pounding away at them. When people walked out, they'd be singing the song. They couldn't help it."[15]
When vaudeville performers played New York City, they would often visit various Tin Pan Alley firms to find new songs for their acts. Second- and third-rate performers often paid for rights to use a new song, while famous stars were given free copies of publisher's new numbers or were paid to perform them, the publishers knowing this was valuable advertising.
Initially Tin Pan Alley specialized in melodramatic ballads and comic novelty songs, but it embraced the newly popular styles of the cakewalk and ragtime music. Later on jazz and blues were incorporated, although less completely, as Tin Pan Alley was oriented towards producing songs that amateur singers or small town bands could perform from printed music. In the 1910s and 1920s Tin Pan Alley published pop-songs and dance numbers created in newly popular jazz and blues styles.
Plaque commemorating Tin Pan Alley
Influence on law and business [ edit ]
A group of Tin Pan Alley music houses formed the Music Publishers Association of the United States on June 11, 1895, and unsuccessfully lobbied the federal government in favor of the Treloar Copyright Bill, which would have changed the term of copyright for published music from 24 to 40 years, renewable for an additional 20 instead of 14 years. The bill would also have included music among the subject matter covered by the Manufacturing clause of the International Copyright Act of 1891.
The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) was founded in 1914 to aid and protect the interests of established publishers and composers. New members were only admitted with sponsorship of existing members.
The term and established business methodologies associated with Tin Pan Alley persisted into the 1960s when innovative artists like Bob Dylan helped establish new norms. Referring to the dominant conventions of music publishers of the early 20th century, "Tin Pan Alley is gone," Bob Dylan proclaimed in 1985, "I put an end to it. People can record their own songs now."[16]
Contributions to World War II [ edit ]
During the Second World War, Tin Pan Alley and the federal government teamed up to produce a war song that would inspire the American public to support the fight against the Axis, something they both "seemed to believe … was vital to the war effort."[17] The Office of War Information was in charge of this project, and believed that Tin Pan Alley contained "a reservoir of talent and competence capable of influencing people's feelings and opinions" that it "might be capable of even greater influence during wartime than [George M. Cohan's "Over There" during World War I]."[17] The song "Over There" can be said to be the most popular and resonant patriotic song associated with World War I.[17] Due to the large fan base of Tin Pan Alley, the government believed that this sector of the music business would be far-reaching in spreading patriotic sentiments.[17]
In the United States Congress, congressmen quarrelled over a proposal to exempt musicians and other entertainers from the draft in order to remain in the country to boost morale.[17] Stateside, these artists and performers were continuously using available media to promote the war effort and to demonstrate a commitment to victory.[18] However, the proposal was contested by those who strongly believed that only those who provided more substantial contributions to the war effort should benefit from any draft legislation.[17]
As the war progressed, those in charge of writing the would-be national war song began to understand that the interest of the public lay elsewhere. Since the music would take up such a large amount of airtime, it was imperative that the writing be consistent with the war message that the radio was carrying throughout the nation. In her book, God Bless America: Tin Pan Alley Goes to War, Kathleen E.R. Smith writes that "escapism seemed to be a high priority for music listeners," leading "the composers of Tin Pan Alley [to struggle] to write a war song that would appeal both to civilians and the armed forces."[17] By the end of the war, no such song had been produced that could rival hits like "Over There" from World War I.[17]
Whether or not the number of songs circulated from Tin Pan Alley between 1939 and 1945 was greater than during the First World War is still debated. In his book The Songs That Fought the War: Popular Music and the Home Front, John Bush Jones cites Jeffrey C. Livingstone as claiming that Tin Pan Alley released more songs during World War I than it did in World War II.[19] Jones, on the other hand, argues that "there is also strong documentary evidence that the output of American war-related songs during World War II was most probably unsurpassed in any other war."[19]
Composers and lyricists [ edit ]
Leading Tin Pan Alley composers and lyricists include:
Notable hit songs [ edit ]
In popular culture [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Notes
Bibliography
Bloom, Ken. The American Songbook: The Singers, the Songwriters, and the Songs. New York: Black Dog and Leventhal, 2005. ISBN 1-57912-448-8 OCLC 62411478
. New York: Black Dog and Leventhal, 2005. ISBN 1-57912-448-8 OCLC 62411478 Charlton, Katherine (2011). Rock music style: a history. New York: McGraw Hill.
. New York: McGraw Hill. Forte, Allen. Listening to Classic American Popular Songs. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.
. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Furia, Philip (1990). The Poets of Tin Pan Alley: A History of America’s Great Lyricists. ISBN 0-19-507473-4..
. Furia, Philip and Lasser, Michael (2006). The American's Songs: The Stories Behind the Songs of Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley. ISBN 0-415-99052-1..
. Goldberg, Isaac. Tin Pan Alley, A Chronicle of American Music. New York: Frederick Ungar, [1930], 1961.
. New York: Frederick Ungar, [1930], 1961. Hajduk, John C. "Tin Pan Alley on the March: Popular Music, World War II, and the Quest for a Great War Song." Popular Music and Society 26.4 (2003): 497-512.
Hamm, Charles. Music in the New World. New York: Norton, 1983. ISBN 0-393-95193-6
. New York: Norton, 1983. ISBN 0-393-95193-6 Jasen, David A. Tin Pan Alley: The Composers, the Songs, the Performers and Their Times. New York: Donald I. Fine, Primus, 1988. ISBN 1-55611-099-5 OCLC 18135644
. New York: Donald I. Fine, Primus, 1988. ISBN 1-55611-099-5 OCLC 18135644 Jasen, David A., and Gene Jones. Spreadin’ Rhythm Around: Black Popular Songwriters, 1880–1930. New York: Schirmer Books, 1998.
. New York: Schirmer Books, 1998. Jones, John Bush (2015). Reinventing Dixie: Tin Pan Alley's Songs and the Creation of the Mythic South. Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 9780807159446. OCLC 894313622.
Marks, Edward B., as told to Abbott J. Liebling. They All Sang: From Tony Pastor to Rudy Vallée. New York: Viking Press, 1934.
. New York: Viking Press, 1934. Morath, Max. The NPR Curious Listener’s Guide to Popular Standards. New York: Penguin Putnam, Berkley Publishing, a Perigree Book, 2002. ISBN 0399527443
. New York: Penguin Putnam, Berkley Publishing, a Perigree Book, 2002. ISBN 0399527443 Napier-Bell, Simon (2014). Ta-ra-ra-Boom-de-ay: The Beginning of the Music Business. ISBN 978-1-78352-031-2.
Sanjek, Russell. American Popular Music and Its Business: The First Four Hundred Years, Volume III, From 1900 to 1984. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Sanjek, Russell. From Print to Plastic: Publishing and Promoting America’s Popular Music, 1900–1980. I.S.A.M. Monographs: Number 20. Brooklyn: Institute for Studies in American Music, Conservatory of Music, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, 1983.
. I.S.A.M. Monographs: Number 20. Brooklyn: Institute for Studies in American Music, Conservatory of Music, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, 1983. Smith, Kathleen E. R. God Bless America: Tin Pan Alley Goes to War. Lexington, Ky: University Press of Kentucky, 2003. ISBN 0-8131-2256-2 OCLC 50868277
. Lexington, Ky: University Press of Kentucky, 2003. ISBN 0-8131-2256-2 OCLC 50868277 Tawa, Nicholas E. The Way to Tin Pan Alley: American Popular Song, 1866–1910. New York: Schirmer Books, 1990. ISBN 0028725417
. New York: Schirmer Books, 1990. ISBN 0028725417 Whitcomb, Ian After the Ball: Pop Music from Rag to Rock. New York: Proscenium Publishers, 1986, reprint of Penguin Press, 1972. ISBN 0-671-21468-3 OCLC 628022
. New York: Proscenium Publishers, 1986, reprint of Penguin Press, 1972. ISBN 0-671-21468-3 OCLC 628022 Wilder, Alec. American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950. London: Oxford University Press, 1972.
. London: Oxford University Press, 1972. Zinsser, William. Easy to Remember: The Great American Songwriters and Their Songs. Jaffrey, NH: David R. Godine, 2000. ISBN 1-56792-147-7 OCLC 45080154
Further readingOriginally published June 20, 2012.
EDMONTON - Alberta bosses who don’t pay their employees will have their names posted online for all to see, the province announced Tuesday.
Human Services Minister Dave Hancock said roughly 1,700 employers owe 3,500 Alberta workers more than $14 million in unpaid earnings. Their names are now listed in a searchable online database.
“These numbers are disturbing,” Hancock said. “These claims represent money that was properly earned by Albertans, but never received.
“Employers have had a chance to appeal orders and dispute the claims, but in the end, they’ve refused to pay what was owing to the employees.”
The amounts owed range from $15 to more than $3 million. The vast majority of companies owe fewer than 10 people, and just a handful owe more than 20.
The worst offender is SSEC Canada Inc., which has 129 complaints against it and owes workers a total of $3.5 million.
The company is the Canadian subsidiary of Chinese state-owned oil giant Sinopec, which also faces charges under Alberta’s Occupational Health and Safety Act for the 2009 deaths of two Chinese men working on an Canadian Natural Resources project in Alberta’s oilsands.
The top five offenders also include Conversion Works Canada, which owes 19 people $682,000, and KP Manufacturers, a Calgary-based woodworking company that owes 17 people nearly $236,000.
Southview Kiddie Kampus Daycare in Medicine Hat is next on the list, owing 51 people more than $188,000. The last in the top five is Life Time Stucco and Plastering, which owes 31 people more than $187,000.
Hancock said the government is posting the names of the companies on its website “so the public can easily see which firms are treating their employees properly, and which ones are not.”
Richard Truscott of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business said he supports the move as long as the government’s information is accurate and efforts to educate business owners continue.
“If they have it wrong, there could be significant damage to a business owner’s reputation that is completely undeserved,” Truscott said. “But as long as those businesses have been given reasonable opportunities to appeal... then there doesn’t seem |
but said he only heard "anecdotally" that voter cards were used fraudulently. He did not say on Feb. 13, as he did Feb. 6, that he personally witnessed that happening.
Meanwhile, the NDP on Monday called for hearings for the bill, which the Conservatives have been trying to quickly push through the House of Commons.
NDP Deputy Leader David Christopherson tabled a motion Monday, effectively calling for a vote – expected by the NDP on Monday or Tuesday – on whether the committee reviewing the government bill should tour the country and hear input from several groups, including Elections Canada, other political parties and several advocacy groups. The motion also called for the committee to travel to "all regions of Canada," including urban and rural locations, during March and April. The proposal would then see the committee begin its clause-by-clause review in May.
Story continues below advertisement
Story continues below advertisement
"I rise as much in sorrow as in anger – sorrow in the state of affairs of our democracy," Mr. Christopherson said in the House on Monday, saying the bill includes "massive, sweeping changes" but that government shut down debate.
"Any attempt to change the rules of an election needs to have the buy-in of all those that are participating," he said.
The NDP argue the bill would block "tens of thousands" of people, including seniors, students and lower-income people, from voting by changing the rules on what is considered valid ID and eliminating so-called "vouching," or allowing someone to vote if someone else swears to the voter's identity. Mr. Christopherson said Monday the bill will also muzzle Elections Canada and "create loopholes that will allow big money back into Canadian politics" with changes to campaign finance rules.
"Let's go ask the Canadian people what they say," he said Monday.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper's parliamentary secretary, Paul Calandra, responded to Mr. Christopherson Monday by saying the NDP are simply opposed to the bill itself. He did not address the request for cross-country hearings. "I've yet to hear from the NDP what difference they would propose," Mr. Calandra said when addressing some of the proposed changes.
Conservative MP Michelle Rempel, the Minister of State for Western Economic Diversification, said the NDP motion for a cross-country tour was better suited for the committee than the House of Commons itself. "I really don't understand the purpose of it, given committee is the master of its own business," Ms. Rempel said. The Conservatives hold a majority in the House and the committee.
Story continues below advertisement
Liberal MP Kevin Lamoureux said the handling of the bill has been "an absolute, total disgrace," and has not sufficiently included public consultation. "Many including myself would say they should have consulted with Canadians prior [to tabling the bill]," he said, backing the NDP's call for hearings.
The NDP had previously blocked funding for all other committee travel, a rare move that effectively grounds parliamentary committees. Conservative Caucus Whip John Duncan had signalled the Tories will simply work around the travel ban, rather than relent and allow the Fair Elections Act a cross-country tour. "Government members will work to ensure that thorough studies continue to occur by continuing to meet in Ottawa and by using available technology. This will likely result in cost savings, which Conservative members strongly support," Mr. Duncan's office said in a statement earlier this month.
If the Conservative majority in the House of Commons votes down the NDP proposal, the opposition won't yet be out of options to slow the bill's passage – Mr. Christopherson says he will continue to hold the floor when the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs resumes its consideration of the bill Tuesday. In its last meeting on Feb. 13, Mr. Christopherson filibustered proceedings by speaking on the bill until the end of the meeting. "We have the floor and we're not relinquishing it," Mr. Christopherson said Monday, referring to the committee.There may be growing legislative support for one more Minnesota Vikings stadium idea: Selling the Metrodome to the team for $1.
Sen. John Marty, DFL-Roseville, and Rep. Linda Runbeck, R-Circle Pines, have scheduled a press conference for Friday to “present an alternative Minnesota Vikings football stadium plan.”
Although details were not known, Marty had recently told a reporter that he and Runbeck were considering a proposal to sell the Metrodome to Vikings owner Zygi Wilf for $1 and simply have Wilf remodel or build a new stadium on the downtown Minneapolis property. The Vikings have played at the Metrodome since 1982.
In addition, Rep. Larry Howes, R-Walker, said he too had considered proposing similar legislation with Rep. Steve Drazkowski, R-Mazeppa, but said Thursday he would drop back to see what Marty and Runbeck would unveil. “We were going to do it,” said Howes.
“If we give [the Vikings] the Metrodome for a buck, they can make that into a very good facility that they can make a lot of revenue on,” he added.
The Vikings however are continuing to focus on a $1.1 billion proposal to build a new stadium in Ramsey County’s Arden Hills. Under a proposal from the team and Ramsey County, $650 million of the project would be paid for by the state and Ramsey County taxpayers.
The Metrodome-for-a-dollar proposal is not new. Former Rep. Paul Kohls, R-Victoria, proposed the same idea more than a year ago. Said Kohls at the time: “Let’s give it to the Vikings and let them do what they want with it.”Labour’s new employment relations policy is well intentioned, but not fit for the future of work that the Party has spent so much time thinking of. Instead its recommendations interfere in how businesses are run, potentially fatally. At the Opportunities Party (TOP) we are also upset about how modest income folk are not sharing sufficiently in the fruits of national prosperity, but rather than take to workplace relations with a wrecking ball we want to focus on the fundamentals that impact people’s lives: housing, immigration, investment, tax, and fixing our broken welfare system.
Most critically, in terms of the wage rates people are paid, we wish to remove the downward influence that comes from allowing hordes of low skilled immigrants to enter New Zealand. Instead, we want to see those businesses that are running out of labour start paying people more to attract staff. The most profitable firms will be able to afford this, the least profitable firms will either have to improve their act or fade away. This is good, these are the natural forces of bog-basic market capitalism at work. Creative destruction of unprofitable businesses and flourishing of the incomes of the owners and employees of successful businesses is just what we want.
Labour’s Plan – not quite with it
Labour are pointing out the problems that we all see – rising child poverty and families struggling to keep up with the cost of living, especially housing. Not enough of the benefits of economic growth are going to those on the lowest incomes. In other words, trickle down has failed. We couldn’t agree more.
Labour’s plan to solve this problem involves 4 key planks:
An increase in the minimum wage to $16.50;
Offering core public sector employees a ‘living wage’;
Placing conditions around the 90 day trials; and
Making ‘Fair Pay Agreements’ by sector – similar to the 1970s approach of national awards.
The first three changes are pretty minor. The minimum wage has increased by 50c per year for the past few years and is currently $15.75 or 67% of the median wage. That’s very high by international comparisons (as a percentage of both mean and median wage) if Labour keep pushing then there is always a downside – not just a higher bill for workplaces but also the risk of lower employment, particularly for young people.
Labour are also offering a living wage that offer is very selective – it’s only to a small number of ‘core public service’ workers; probably compromising their generosity here in an effort to avoid a cost blowout.
The idea that has really attracted the ire of employers is the last one – Fair Pay Agreements. And rightly so, given Labour’s own acknowledgement of how precarious the Future of Work is.
Fair Pay Agreements
These seem very similar to the system of national awards in the 1970s. There the terms and conditions of different businesses in an industry were set by a national agreement. On the one hand it was a hugely cumbersome system, and on the other they were easy to fiddle.
National awards worked where businesses in an industry are all structured the same (like hospitals and schools), but what if two businesses in the same industry work in completely different ways? They might not even employ the same kinds of people, but they might achieve the same outcome. This is a massive barrier to innovation, doing things differently and remaining competitive. Just look at Team New Zealand – where would they be if they had to employ grinders instead of cyclists?
The national awards approach is still open to manipulation by the bad employers that Labour is worried about. Assuming there is a performance pay system, if a business wants to suppress wages they will simply promote people more slowly.
The final point is how does is this work in a modern economy where workers demand greater flexibility in terms and conditions? Short answer is that it doesn’t. This would be a total anathema to young people who are quite used to negotiating an agreement that works for them. And as long as they get the job done, why would any sane employer be worried about that? The world is changing and Labour needs to shed its 1970’s-type ideas for ones that ensure wage rises aren’t offset by job losses, that businesses cannot thrive because of the rigidity of legacy labour market restrictions.
How should the problem be fixed?
There are a number of other things that The Opportunities Party would do to improve the lot of New Zealand’s wage earners. First off our tax policy would stop speculation in housing, making it more affordable over time and in particular taking pressure off rents. It would also drive increased investment in businesses, which means more, better paid jobs. We’ve already announced that we would restrict low skilled immigration, so we remove the brake on wage rates for New Zealanders rising.
Longer term we also support an Unconditional Basic Income, which will improve the lot of workers because they retain this as they move in and out of work. We want targeted welfare wound back in prominence, particularly the most demeaning aspects of witchhunt welfare. These policy advances are the only real way to insulate people from the realities of the future workplace.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.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Fight Back! Sign up for Take Action Now and we’ll send you three meaningful actions you can take each 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 we’ll send you three meaningful actions you can take each week.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Travel With The Nation Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits. Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
Protesters march against government austerity measures in Madrid, March 10, 2013. (Reuters/Sergio Perez) Ad Policy
Tens of thousands of protesters flooded the streets of Spain and Greece this week in response to ongoing budget cuts and high unemployment. In Spain, unemployment has passed the 5 million mark for the first time since records began—attracting widespread criticism over the conservative government’s austerity plans. Similarly, Greece, which has served as a laboratory for austerity enthusiasts, has suffered mass poverty, unemployment and suicide since severe budget cuts were implemented by the government.
“Poverty, unemployment, suicides. Enough is enough,” was the slogan chanted on Syntagma square by some 1,500 Greek demonstrators non-affiliated with political parties who were mobilized through social media. The demonstration ended when police shot tear gas at protesters—a police tactic also used during the anti-austerity demonstrations in Athens when the debt crisis began in late 2009.
Earlier this month, three people in central Greece killed themselves on the same day, and analysts said there is a correlation between the rising rates and three years of pay cuts, tax hikes and slashed pensions that have pushed many people into poverty. According to the Greek Reporter:
There has been a sharp rise in the number of suicides in Greece since the beginning of the crisis in 2009, with official sources putting the figure at over 3,100 from the start of 2009 to August 2012, though experts say that deaths by suicide are often not documented as such because of the social stigma attached to them.
On Saturday, Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras promised that there would be “no more austerity measures” as international creditors prolonged an audit of crisis reforms.
“There will be no more austerity measures,” Samaras said in a televised speech to his conservative party’s political committee. “And as soon as growth sets in, relief measures will slowly begin,” Samaras said. But he noted that Greece’s ailing economy was “out of intensive care, not out of the hospital.”
However, it seems unlikely Samaras will have the last word on budget cuts, and auditors have made it clear they expect to see an increase in privatization plans. Under the bailout conditions adopted last year, Greece needs to cut public sector workers by 25,000 in 2013 and a total of 150,000 by the end of 2015.
In Spain, the Madrid protest ended when police fired tear gas at protesters and arrested forty-five people, including nine minors. Reportedly, forty people were injured during the protest, and police claim they found four firebombs in a backpack abandoned on a street, in addition to twenty-two firecrackers, five flares and a stick from two minors near Madrid’s main railway station.
The AP reports that rallies were organized in Madrid and sixty other cities by 150 organizations, including trade unions representing the construction, car and television industries as well as police and health services. Police estimated some 20,000 people marched in Barcelona, but authorities did not have figures for a large rally held in Madrid.
Protesters marched to the Spanish parliament in opposition to tax hikes, spending cuts, high unemployment and alleged corruption. At the tail end of the demonstrations, young protesters threw bar chairs into a road and burned garbage containers.
At the beginning of the month, many thousands of demonstrators held marches in more than twenty cities in Portugal to protest against austerity measures. Tens of thousands filled a Lisbon boulevard during the protests and headed to the finance ministry carrying placards that read, “Screw the troika, we want our lives back.” The troika is a slang term for the three organizations which have the most power over debt-ridden countries’ financial futures: the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank.
Protesters can be heard in the video below singing a song linked to a 1974 popular uprising known as the Carnation Revolution—named because no shots were fired when the population started descending the streets to celebrate the end of Marcello Caetano’s reign; instead protesters placed carnation flowers into the muzzles of rifles and on the uniforms of the army.
Portugal is expected to suffer a third straight year of recession in 2013, and the overall jobless rate has grown to a record 17.6 percent—of which young people are a particularly devastated demographic with unemployment close to 40 percent.
It’s time to reclaim labor rights as an American ideal, John Nichols writes.Issue 30 of the Ironwatch magazine is now available for your reading pleasure!
Please select any of the below links to view the Ironwatch Issue 30 pdf.
Dropbox Link
Scribd Link
Google Docs Link
(Please note that due to Google’s image compression, the colors will look off on Google Docs)
Please submit any comments, criticisms, ideas, or inquiries about how you too can help contribute either here in the comments below, or at the following link to the Mantic Forums “Ironwatch Issue 30 Feedback” discussion:
Ironwatch Issue 30 Feedback Discussion
For those of you who might have missed it, we now offer on-demand printing again!
Issue 30 Hard Copy
Table of Contents:
Iron Forge 4
See the amazing array of top tier paintjobs from our team of professional-quality painters.
The Mantic Calendar 12
Learn what Mantic related events and tournaments are upcoming in your area.
Q&A with Chris Palmer 15
Chris Palmer answers questions from the Mantic fans about Warpath, Kings of War, and the future of Mantic.
Advertisements 49
Our section where you can advertise your local Mantic game group or store for free!
Kings of War:
Humans in the Endless Keep, by Neil Dixon 19
This Dwarf Kings Hold scenario features Humans probing the Necromancer’s fortress
Hamfist Borin Part V, by Michael DeFranco 22
Grobar and Bugger encounter the cursed Abyssal Dwarves.
The Trouble at Gawick upon Tibble, by Stuart Smith 28
This Kings of War scenario human village is caught between the Orcish hordes and the Elves
The Zz’or Kingdom, by Daniel King 33
Learn how to use your Dreadball Zz’or and Mars Attacks giant bugs in a Kings of War army
The Bloodstone of Cerillion, by Jonathan Peace 48
Check here to find out how to pre-order a copy of Mantic’s first Kings of War novel
Warpath:
The Battle for Goat Sector 58, by Jason Moorman 38
This batrep overview shows the progress of various factions fighting over a valuable Deadzone
Mars Attacks:
The Unlucky Heroes, by Blake Earle 44
See the fate of a pair of humans trapped between the Martians and the horrors they have created
AdvertisementsA tremble dance is a dance performed by forager honey bees of the species Apis mellifera to recruit more receiver honey bees to collect nectar from the workers.[1]
The tremble dance was first described by Karl von Frisch in the 1920s (who was also first to describe the waggle dance), but no light was shed on its function until 1993 when Wolfgang Kirschner discovered that, when performed, the dance stopped nearby workers from flying to gather more nectar.[2]
The tremble dance of the honeybee is similar to the waggle dance, but is used by a forager when the foraging bee perceives a long delay in unloading its nectar or a shortage of receiver bees, sometimes due to low numbers of receiver bees.[3] It may also spread the scent released during the forager's waggle dance.[4] Like the waggle dance, the tremble dance is likely one of two "primary regulation mechanisms" for regulating bee colony behavior at the group level, and one of four or five observed mechanisms known to be used by honeybees to change the task allocation among worker bees.[5] The consumption of ethanol by foraging bees has been shown to increase the occurrence of the tremble dance while decreasing the occurrence of the waggle dance.[6]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
^ Ratnieks, F. L. W. (2001) Are you being served? Supermarkets and bee hives. The Beekeepers Quarterly. Vol. 67, pp. 26-27. ^ Kirchner, Wolfgang H. (September 1993) Vibrational signals in the tremble dance of the honeybee, Apis mellifera. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology. Vol. 33, Number 3. pp. 169-172. ^ Thom, Corinna. (March 2003) The tremble dance of honey bees can be caused by hive-external foraging experience. The Journal of Experimental Biology. Vol. 206, pp. 2111-2116 ^ Thom C., Gilley D.C., Hooper J., Esch H.E. (September 2007) The scent of the waggle dance. PLoS Biology. Vol. 5, Issue 9. e228. pp. 1862-1867. ^ Anderson, Carl; Ratnieks, Francis L. W. (July 1999) Worker allocation in insect societies: coordination of nectar foragers and nectar receivers in honey bee (Apis mellifera) colonies. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology. Vol. 6, Number 2. pp. 73-81 ^ Bozic J., C. Abramson, M. Bedencic. (April 2006) Reduced ability of ethanol drinkers for social communication in honeybees (Apis mellifera carnica Poll.). Alcohol. Volume 38, Issue 3. pp. 179-183.
Sources and further reading [ edit ]Lakers power forward Pau Gasol has been out since Feb. 5 with a sore foot. (Robyn Beck / Getty Images )
ATLANTA — The trade deadline passed a few weeks ago, but the Lakers will add a significant player to their active roster next week.
Pau Gasol will return soon from torn plantar fascia in his right foot. The only game he ruled out was Friday at Indiana.
"Everything else is possible. I'm not going to hold myself back if I think I'm ready to play," Gasol said Wednesday. "There's not many games left in the season and every game will be valuable to us.
"We're keeping our options open. We're trying to see how I progress over the next few days."
After Friday, the Lakers play Sunday against Sacramento and Monday in Phoenix, each possible return dates, though their next game after that, March 22 against Washington, gives Gasol an extra three days of recovery time.The QWERTY layout is based on the keyboard design for the original typewriter. Photodisc/ Getty Images
In 1874 Remington & Sons manufactured the first commercial typewriter, called the Remington Number 1. This typewriter was designed by Christopher Sholes and used the "QWERTY" keyboard we are all familiar with.
This early typewriter used a mechanism with characters on the end of a bar. When a key was struck, a linkage would swing the bar into a tape coated with ink. When the character struck the tape, the impression of the character was transferred onto the paper, which was positioned behind the tape.
Sholes' original prototypes had a problem with the bars colliding with each other and jamming. So the story goes that he arranged the keys with the most common letters in hard to reach spots, to slow typists down and try to avoid this problem.
Whatever the reason for the QWERTY layout, it seems pretty unlikely that one of the first keyboard layouts invented would be perfect. The QWERTY keyboard is very different from the Dvorak keyboard layout. The Dvorak keyboard layout tries to minimize the distance traveled by the fingers. It also tries to make the typist alternate hands on consecutive letters as often as possible.
The Dvorak layout places all of the most commonly used letters in the home row so your fingers don't have to move at all to hit these keys. The left hand has all of the vowels and some consonants and the right hand has only consonants. So there are very few words in the English language that can be typed with only one hand on the Dvorak keyboard (two are "papaya" and "opaque"). Both "pumpkin" and "minimum" can be typed with one hand on a QWERTY keyboard -- give it a try.
This site shows the layout of the Dvorak keyboard. If I had typed this article on a Dvorak keyboard, my fingers would have traveled 30 meters versus the 54 meters they traveled on the QWERTY keyboard I use.
Some argue, however, the Dvorak keyboard is no more efficient than QWERTY. An independent study in 1956 showed that QWERTY typists and Dvorak typists had about the same rate of speed, and continued studies don't show a clear winner between the two [ref]. This may explain why QWERTY is still the standard.
If you want to see for yourself, you can switch your keyboard to a Dvorak configuration just by changing a setting on your computer's operating system. Depending on your keyboard, you may even be able to pry off the keys and rearrange them in the Dvorak layout.
For more information on keyboards and related topics, check out the links below.
Related HowStuffWorks Articles
More Great LinksImage copyright Leah-ashley Brown
A bus driver has been praised by passengers after he stopped to tie the shoelaces of an elderly man he spotted walking in an Edinburgh street.
Jackie Downie parked his Lothian Bus before helping the man, who was using a walking stick, whom he feared might trip and fall on his untied laces.
A passenger on the bus took a picture of the driver crouching down at the man's shoes.
Lothian Buses praised their driver's "initiative".
Leah-ashley Brown posted the photograph on to the company's official Facebook page and it reshared the post, writing: "Well done Jackie."
Alongside the photograph, Leah wrote: "Kudos to the driver on bus service number three for getting off to tie this elderly gentleman's shoe lace."
'Lovely man'
Facebook user Jennie Brown said: "Good to see. Only takes two minutes but I bet this gentleman appreciated for rest of his day."
Ryan Mcglone wrote: "Now that's the type drivers I like to see on every bus."
Greta Tiffney said: "Good on you. Still some good people in this world."
And Stephanie Laptucha wrote: "Well done to driver. Such lovely thing to do."
Leah-ashley Brown said of the bus driver: "He is a lovely man and on the route a lot.
"Recently I was on crutches and Jackie would wait until I sat down until he moved off.
"Same with the elderly gentleman, he is always so nice and patient with passengers."
Lothian buses said Mr Downie had been working for the company for 41 years.
A spokeswoman for Lothian buses said: "We're very proud of Jackie for taking the initiative to help this gentleman, he is a true asset to our business and it's great to see that his act of kindness didn't go unnoticed."Google intends to "spend more than $1 billion on a fleet of satellites to extend Internet access to unwired regions of the globe," the Wall Street Journal reported last night, citing anonymous sources. Google "will start with 180 small, high-capacity satellites orbiting the earth at lower altitudes than traditional satellites, and then could expand."
Google has been boosting its expertise in this area by hiring people from satellite companies. "Google's satellite venture is led by Greg Wyler, founder of satellite-communications startup O3b Networks Ltd., who recently joined Google with O3b's former chief technology officer," the Journal reported. "Google has also been hiring engineers from satellite company Space Systems/Loral LLC to work on the project."
Google is an investor in O3b, which is putting satellites into orbit 5,000 miles above the Earth, and says it will be able to provide gigabit per second data rates. O3b claims to "deliver latencies faster than long haul fiber with a round trip latency of less than 150 milliseconds."
By comparison, the satellites used by Internet provider HughesNet are 22,000 miles from the ground.
O3b's satellites weigh about 1,500 pounds each, but Google intends to build ones that weigh less than 250 pounds, according to the Journal report. Google's initial fleet of 180 satellites "could be launched for as little as about $600 million," but the project could end up costing up to $3 billion.
Separately, Google recently purchased drone maker Titan Aerospace, which it will reportedly integrate into "Project Loon," Google's attempt to provide Internet access to hard-to-reach areas from balloons.
While Google declined comment on its satellite plans, the Journal quoted satellite consultant Tim Farrar, who said he "expects Project Loon's balloons eventually to be replaced by Titan's drones. Drones and satellites complement each other, he said, with drones offering better high-capacity service in smaller areas, and satellites offering broader coverage in areas with less demand."
When contacted by Ars, Google said: "We don't have anything to add beyond the following statement, attributable to a Google spokesperson: 'Internet connectivity significantly improves people's lives. Yet two-thirds of the world have no access at all. It's why we're so focused on new technologies—from Project Loon to Titan Aerospace—that have the potential to bring hundreds of millions more people online in the coming years.'"Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Footage courtesy of British Ceremonial Arts
London 2012 star Jessica Ennis has been appointed CBE at Buckingham Palace, while Team GB cycling boss Dave Brailsford has been knighted.
Heptathlon winner Ennis said the Queen had told her "the summer was amazing" and asked how her training was going.
Other Olympians honoured included cyclist Jason Kenny (OBE) as well as long jumper Greg Rutherford, boxer Nicola Adams and cyclist Joanna Rowsell, who were all appointed MBE.
They were announced at the end of 2012.
Ennis, 27, said afterwards she was "feeling very excited, though it was nerve-wracking before - it's incredible to receive this".
Asked what the Queen had said, she replied: "She just said 'the summer was amazing, how's training going'? So it was very, very nice."
She said her achievement in the summer "still doesn't feel real, to be honest".
"It was just an amazing year for British athletics and British sport and to be part of that in such a big way was incredible."
'Quite humbling'
Brailsford, 48, masterminded British dominance in cycling at the Olympics and Paralympics and, as Team Sky boss, helped Bradley Wiggins - also knighted in the New Year Honours list - to win the Tour de France.
He said: "It means so much and is such a humbling experience. I'm very proud.
"The Queen congratulated me on my birthday, which is actually on the 29th, which made her chuckle.
Image caption Dave Brailsford said he and the Queen had discussed the Olympics' success
"We talked about the Olympics and how proud everyone was and what a great event it had been."
Long jumper Rutherford, 28, who along with Ennis and 5,000m runner Mo Farah helped Team GB to win three golds in an hour on "Super Saturday" in the Olympic Stadium, said his MBE was "extraordinary".
"You dream of doing well at an Olympics, especially a home Olympics, and then the things that come along after that are just absolutely out of this world," he said as he arrived at the palace.
"I don't think, truly, you can imagine these sorts of things happening and being awarded by the Queen."
Boxer Adams, 30, told reporters as she arrived that she was "over the moon - really excited".
Meanwhile, Cherie Blair, the wife of former PM Tony Blair, was appointed CBE for services to women's issues and charity.
She is patron of charities including Refuge, Scope and Breast Cancer Care.
Theatre and TV actor Adrian Lester became OBE.
And Glamorgan cricketer Robert Croft, who retired from first-class cricket last year aged 42, and Raymond "Jerry" Roberts, 92 - a codebreaker at Bletchley Park in World War II - were both appointed MBE at the investiture service.If you haven’t started thinking about your New Year’s resolution, here’s an idea: vow to take a yoga class once a week. Or a barre class, if that’s your thing. And if you prefer to spin, we suggest that, too.
Want to sign-up for all three of those classes? Now you can – with your iPhone! Just in time for the New Year, we’re excited to introduce the ClassPass Mobile App!
With your ClassPass membership and our new mobile app, you can try boutique fitness classes in your city – so there’s no limit to the different ways you can tone, strengthen and challenge your body (and your mind!).
Ready to download? Here are all the details you need to know:
You can now discover thousands of classes nationwide:
Within the app, you can browse by studio, workout, location, and time. View detailed information about classes, studios and how to get prepared for your next workout.
You can now reserve with a tap:
Book and confirm your reservation within minutes, directly from your phone. Stuck in a meeting at noon when lots of classes open for the following week? No sweat.
You can use our map to see what awesome class is down the street:
Don’t miss another workout. Discover new studios near you, at your convenience.
You can now manage everything, directly from your phone:
See all your upcoming reservations, past classes, and track your progress over time.
Visit the iTunes Store today to download now!
(And psst: if you’re not a ClassPass member already, sign-up now!)Former Guantanamo detainee David Hicks speaks with the World Socialist Web Site
By Richard Phillips
22 October 2011
David Hicks
In late 2001, Australian citizen David Hicks, 26, was captured in Afghanistan and subjected to beatings, death threats and other forms of abuse by American authorities. In January 2002, he was transported to Guantanamo where he was illegally held for over five years as an alleged terrorist, most of it in solitary confinement.
Hicks was finally repatriated to Australia in May 2007 after he accepted a back-room plea deal orchestrated by the then Australian government of Prime Minister John Howard and the Bush administration. Hicks was given an offer he could not refuse—plead guilty to “providing material support to terrorism” or spend the rest of his life in the Guantanamo Bay hell hole.
In October 2010 Hicks wrote Guantanamo: My Journey detailing his ordeal (see WSWS review). A month earlier, he lodged a formal complaint to the United Nations Human Rights Committee over Canberra’s refusal to secure his release from Guantanamo. As a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Australian government was obliged to make an official response within six months. It has still not done so.
In July this year the federal Labor government initiated legal action aimed at seizing Hicks’s earnings from Guantanamo: My Journey. While Hicks cannot comment on this case, he recently spoke with the World Socialist Web Site about his incarceration in Guantanamo and his ongoing demonisation by the Australian media.
* * *
Richard Phillips: Can you comment on how the mainstream media has responded to your book? None of the reviews seriously explore the crimes committed against you in Afghanistan and Guantanamo.
David Hicks: The media has mostly attacked my character, demonising me and going on and on about whether I am guilty or not. They’re just not interested in the important questions and how Australian citizens can be abandoned.
Julian Assange is a classic example of someone who might end up in the US hands and who will no doubt be treated unfairly. He could become the next political football for the Australian government, and if it’s not him it’ll be someone else, it’s only a matter of time.
It’s important that people are clear on the main issues: that the law was denied to me and it was politicians who kept me incarcerated, and politicians who set up the so-called plea deal, under the guise of a legal arrangement. I felt like a political prisoner in Guantanamo and I still feel like a political football.
RP: Former Attorney General Phillip Ruddock declared that the Australian government had no responsibility to protect you or demand your release. How would you answer this?
DH: My understanding of the law is that if an Australian citizen alleges that he’s being tortured then the government must investigate. They never did in my case. This was despite the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq and all the photographic evidence of torture.
The Howard government simply relied on US defense department investigations, which were whitewashes, and claimed I’d never been tortured. Julia Gillard has recently stated there’s no need for an independent investigation into my treatment because it was investigated by the American defense department in 2004.
Australian consular officials came to see me in Guantanamo, but not until after I’d been there for years. I told them everything—the beatings and the serious, ongoing psychological stuff and other stuff. I also complained about my back because it was deteriorating badly. It wasn’t just from the stress positions or being kicked in the back many times—but connected to the way I was being held in isolation without exercise for years. I hoped they’d do something to stop it from getting worse. They did nothing and it’s now badly damaged.
Detainees at Camp X-Ray, Guantanamo Bay
RP: Former Australian foreign minister Downer claimed there was no evidence you’d been tortured.
DH: One report said that I’d received some rough handling but had misinterpreted it. Ruddock was also questioned about sleep deprivation while I was in Guantanamo and claimed it wasn’t torture. This gives you some idea of how they treated these issues.
But it’s not a question of whether you believe me. The amount of evidence has been overwhelming, from America’s own documentation and what’s been called the “Torture Papers”, as well as statements from FBI and CIA whistleblowers disturbed by what they saw. This means the media and US and Australian politicians have to prove that I wasn’t tortured. They have to explain why the 700 or so other detainees in Guantanamo were tortured but I wasn’t.
RP: You dropped out of school in the late 1990s before getting a job in Japan as a horse trainer. During this time you saw NATO spokesman Jamie O’Shea on television calling for support for the Kosovo Liberation Army. Why did you get involved?
DH: I had no interest in politics but had already set myself the most outlandish, biggest, craziest goal I could. My plan was to get some money together in Japan and then travel the Old Silk Road by horse. I didn’t know whether I’d start at the Himalayan end or in Turkey but I’d mentally prepared myself to take this big step |
a trans woman as the submissive, yet no mention of Poe’s transness is ever made. Sure, you can physically see that Poe is transgender, but she isn’t treated any differently than a cisgender woman would be treated in the same position. The result is a film that normalizes and destigmatizes trans women’s bodies and sexualities.
It is a film that I as a trans woman could truly find a reflection of myself in.
This is the kind of porn that we need more of — a lot more of. We need more films that contain honest depictions of the various forms that trans women’s sexuality can take. We need more films made by trans women for trans women. We need more films that highlight the way that queer porn can create sites and models of desirability for trans women; films in which we can see ourselves reflected in the performers and wherein we can learn to see ourselves as attractive and deserving of affection.
In a society that doesn’t value the lives of trans women, where we face so much discrimination and hostility from our peers and from the current presidential administration, where we are told that we are ugly and unlovable, being able to see trans women enjoying their bodies and experiencing pleasure is revolutionary. Allowing us to control the ways in which our narratives are told, and how we wish to experience pleasure, works to directly subvert the ways in which our lives and our bodies are taken out of our hands by a transmisogynistic world that strips us of our agency.
We need more films that contain honest depictions of the various forms that trans women’s sexuality can take.
Personally, as a queer trans woman with submissive tendencies, being able to watch films like The Training of Poe allows me to see myself as attractive and desirable. It allows me to erase the shame around having culturally taboo forms of desire.
Queer porn allows us to envision a world wherein trans women are celebrated for all of the ways we relate to our bodies and to pleasure.
You can support The Establishment’s independent media work by purchasing a ‘Member of the Resistance’ tee or making a donation here.Please enable Javascript to watch this video
CROWN HEIGHTS, Brooklyn — The pre-celebration for the West Indian Parade took a violent turn early Monday when two separate incidents occurred, leaving one dead and two others in the hospital.
One man was stabbed and another shot about 2 a.m between Plaza Street East and Eastern Parkway, according to the NYPD.
A 24-year-old man died after being stabbed multiple times. The other man who was shot is in stable condition at New York Methodist Hospital.
There has been no arrests at this time and the investigation is ongoing.
The second incident occurred about 3:40 a.m. when a 43-year-old man was shot in the head at Bedford Avenue and Sullivan Street, according to the NYPD.
A large dispute broke out in a crowd when the shooting happened. That victim was identified by Gov. Andrew Cuomo as Carey Gabay, a staffer in Cuomo's administration. Gabay was hospitalized in critical condition.
The J'Ouvert Celebration kicks off the West Indian Parade that will start at 11 a.m. Monday. The pre-celebration starts from 2 a.m. and lasts until about 6 a.m. The celebration is often noted for the violence that occurs. Last year, three people were shot near the parade route, one fatally.Preliminary results of the 2011 census for England and Wales indicate that those of the population who were taught metric at school now comfortably outnumber those who were taught Imperial.
On 16 July 2012, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) issued preliminary results from the 2011 census for England and Wales. It says that the median age of the population – where half the population is younger and half is older – was 39, with the median age for men being 38 and for women 40:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18838540
We need to relate this to the changeover of teaching in schools to metric.
The impact of metrication on the syllabuses for primary and secondary schools was receiving consideration as early as 1968, and by Autumn 1974, the teaching in all primary schools in England and Wales had switched to metric. Everyone born in September 1969 or later should have been taught in metric throughout their school career. Higher education was quicker off the mark, with examinations for engineering subjects requiring solutions in SI units from 1971 onwards.
Using the chart of population by age and sex that accompanies the BBC report (and is included in the summary ONS report), and excluding children up to the age of eight who may have not yet been taught any measurement system, the sums look like this (totals in millions):
For the population taught metric
Total population in England and Wales 56.10
Hence population below the median age 28.05
Less children up to the age of 8 -5.53
Plus metric taught aged 39-42 inclusive 3.22
Total 25.74
For population taught Imperial
Population above median age 28.05
Less metric taught aged 39-42 inclusive -3.22
Total 24.83
The ONS data also shows that the number by which those taught metric in primary school exceeds the number taught Imperial, currently about 900 000, will increase each year by about 1.6 million. By the time the next census results are published in 2022, those born after September 1969 are likely to outnumber those born before by a ratio of 2 : 1.
Successive UK Governments have for many years sought excuses for postponing the metric changeover of road signs. In 2002, the Transport Minister put forward the argument that such a change would be confusing for drivers who had not received a metric education at school. This argument was not heard in Commonwealth countries making the transition to metric measures in the 1970s, and has fallen out of favour here. Conversely, because more than half of the population of England and Wales has not been taught the mysteries of the Imperial system, perhaps the Government will take steps to impose a cut-off date on its continuing use, not just on road signs but throughout the economy.
Metric Views advises that you don’t hold your breath.
( 0 ) Likes ( 0 ) DislikesPolitical memoirs are their own thing. There is inevitable self justification, sometimes outright delusion. There is record setting and score settling, foes touched up, fellow travellers flattered.
Some are stagey and allegorical, their true purpose all too transparent – the text is a bridge to life on the speaker’s circuit after politics, a crude marketing exercise. Some hold back, constrained by dull instincts, cramped rooms, cut lunches and wooden formulations. Some are gossipy and gonzo, like Bob Carr’s magnificently picaresque romp through the foreign affairs portfolio published earlier this year.
The best contributions tell the truth, or if not the truth (a vexatious and flexible concept, given history’s tendency to be somewhat in the eye of the beholder) – then at least truth according to the person providing the story. The reflections are authentic, and ring true. There is an attempt to interrogate events and emotions and experiences.
It should be noted that this process of self reflection and self analysis is actually quite hard for politicians. Ambitious and able politicians are wired to project outwards, to project their voices to the back row. They are people of action and perpetual motion, people of combat – conditioned to seek and land their various moments of opportunity, rather like the restless entrepreneurs of the business world.
Politics is not about stillness. Writing needs stillness and solitariness to find moments of truth and resonance. Meaningful reflection struggles in a maelstrom, and national affairs blows like a destructive typhoon. One of the other major problems with the batch of political books on the shelves this year, books providing different yet overlapping versions of the Rudd-Gillard period, is all these contributions are coming too soon. It’s all still too raw. The accounts, in my view at least, are not sufficiently sifted and leavened and tempered by time and distance. The long view can hardly be formed in only 12 months.
With all that preamble noted – and with a further declaration to readers that I’m currently about three quarters through My Story, not quite to the conclusion – Julia Gillard’s memoir provides real, detailed, forensic, and clinical insight into the government from her central, completely unique, vantage point.
Gillard occupied the office she quaintly terms the gumnut room. Before the “dream team” of Kevin and Julia fractured into mulish remonstrance, Gillard maintained sufficient trust to be able to wander in and out of Kevin’s gumnut room at will. As a consequence of her own leadership, and her window on Rudd’s, she can plunge the reader into government at a deeper level than most other protagonists of this historical period; and the memoir strives to not only recount first-hand experiences, but also analyse.
She certainly does not spare others but, when she can push herself past the basic forgiveness reflex that all humans possess, she does not spare herself either.
The best of the material comes in moments of reflection rather than juicy anecdote. I know that won’t be the Canberra view, but it is my view.
Gillard senses both strength and something of a blockage in her disciplined, structured, brief reading, alarm clock setting self, and tries to push both herself and the reader past it – not in over-egged bursts of psycho-babble, (“I’m no guru” p129), not for some manufactured bout of catharthis (she’s actually too balanced and self confident a person to require it) – but in an effort to find new some personal ground courtesy of her experience as a leader of a country intent on finding its way in the world.
In a chapter on resilience Gillard notes that her capacity to control her feelings set her up well for political leadership, particularly political leadership carried out in an environment of hyper partisan, punishing, and repulsively sexist nonsense. The viciousness and carping negativity of the period still unsettles people, it divides people, it plays out in the strong feelings voters still have about the complex events from 2010 to 2013; or perhaps more pertinently, how the events were construed by a hostile and jittery media that Gillard regards as largely having failed to do its job. (On this front, names are named. The critique isn’t passive aggressive, it’s direct.)
But like all complex human conditions, a general disposition towards discipline and restraint, and a phlegmatic temperament, can be a double edged sword. It can create a barrier. It can be a place to which you retreat, when you might be better placed venting, not out of pique, but out of an instinct to connect with human experiences that are universal. “In the middle of it all, it seemed to me as though if I gave an inch, if I let it hit me, then I would be drowning in the emotional reaction before I knew it,” Gillard says. “Better to keep running in front of the tidal wave and not look back.” (The exception to the general pattern of stiff upper lip, she notes, was the misogyny speech – a moment to give force to frustration. That small fury whipped around the world – the power of that universal experience – it opens the deep desire for sharing.)
Gillard wonders whether the instinct to prevail rather than yield to feelings she would regard as self indulgent, like fury about relentless negativity, meant she was “more defensive in public appearances, less confident than I might have been? Did it show in the tendency to appear more wooden, less open, less engaging than I am in casual situations?”
The she poses a really tough question to herself – one political leaders normally avoid. “Should I have let myself feel more?” It’s the question of the memoir in my view, not because it’s a womanly question, that interpretation would be truly ghastly – but because it’s a question politics doesn’t dare ask itself. Politics should ask itself this question. By cutting off empathy, by limiting opportunity for displays of natural human instinct, politics is gradually consigning itself to estrangement with the people it seeks to serve.
(The answer I think she provides, on balance, is yes, a little bit more, but not a whole lot more.) Gillard notes the “inner reserve” and the sense of purpose that drove her on in times when most normal people would have given up and walked off the field was a quality which grew stronger during the course of her prime ministership, “because it had to”. Existing in a “binary world of good women and bad women – the one dimensional portrayal meant it was impossible to be received as a full human being, with the normal complexity that comes with being neither perfect, nor evil. Living in the middle of all of this name calling and double standards, I had to harden my heart.”
It’s an insight, and an interesting one for a political character who was at once direct and plain speaking – yet often frustratingly enigmatic, a chameleon who would fade in and out of sight.
There are plenty of anecdotes and intrigues, running to 500 pages. Did Penny Wong really cry when she told Gillard she wouldn’t vote for her in the leadership ballot in 2013, and did she cry again because she couldn’t work out what Rudd wanted her to do with the first carbon pricing scheme – save it or sink it? Tony Burke was the first person Gillard told about her intention to challenge for the leadership – really? Gillard crying with John Faulkner before the confrontation with Rudd – her regret about toppling Kim Beazley in opposition. Was Rudd “completely spooked” by the politics of carbon pricing in 2009? Was Rudd in January 2010 really described by one of his senior staff as being in lodged in “funksville with no map about how to get out”? Did Women’s Weekly editor Helen McCabe stiff Gillard in a photo shoot because she seemed “strongly motivated by the desire to avoid disapproval from the Liberal party”? Was Andrew Wilkie really “increasingly transactional and disingenuous” – or was he just browned off when Gillard stiffed him on pokies reform?
These snippets will be contested and pored over and parsed in the days to come. Kevin Rudd, who is presented in this book as a man who systematically, comprehensively, cravenly, viciously, destabilised her and her government will have to explode at some point, surely. He’s already turned up in The Australian with his private campaign submission – virtually at least – characterising her as a backstabber driven by ambition. A leak, a shot across the bows on the day of her book launch. This could have been predicted.
She’s pitiless with him, even with the polite hat doffing on managing the global financial crisis and projecting Australian interests through the G20. Rudd is a man who on Gillard’s account traded an election photo in 2010 faking peace love and harmony for the foreign ministry. The thin-lipped contempt embedded in that allegation is palpable.
Only Julia Gillard can tell us the story of what it’s like to be Australia’s first female prime minister. For this reader, that’s an important story to tell, whatever its periodic stiffness, or rancour, or rhetorical limitations. Gillard takes us to the two places that most defined her period in the prime ministership – her move against Kevin Rudd, and the carbon “tax” promise.
Gillard stands by the Rudd decision. She doesn’t countenance the alternative scenario that many colleagues now openly countenance, at least in part in an effort to soothe their post-traumatic stress; the scenario where Rudd was not deposed as leader before facing his first opportunity for re-election.
It’s a foundation decision. It cannot be repudiated despite everything it cost her, and cost the Labor party. She can only explain the sum of the parts, she can only construct the events as rational in the face of the prevailing pressures of that time and that moment, and tell her own story after the fact – and she does that, from her perspective, in some depth. She shares her conflicted instincts, the personal frustration, the gritted teeth effort to stay afloat when the team was coming apart... a declaration a lot of women will recognise: “I felt I could hold things together.” The eventual decision that the show could no longer stay afloat. The things regretted. The things not regretted.
On Gillard’s account the entire battle is recast. She is not the aggressor. She is the rational actor. Events, not ambition forced her hand in 2010. Rudd by contrast is the man who wouldn’t accept his fate, who wouldn’t do the proper thing and accept his redundancy. He put his own interests above the interests of the group. He is the irrational and destructive player, not her. So just as these two figures once wrestled and jostled for the loyalty and fidelity of the party they led – I suspect they will now compete with versions of history that can likely never be reconciled.
The carbon reflection is interesting, too. This was her stuff-up. She doesn’t seek to implicate anyone else, or cast herself as caught in someone else’s relentless machinations. “I compounded my error in the election campaign of not qualifying my statement – there will be no carbon tax under a government I lead – by conceding the use of the incorrect term ‘carbon tax’. I did not fight the characterisation.” Gillard explains the context sitting behind the words, the sense of urgency – not enough time to war game and prepare, the imperative of bedding down her fledgling minority government. There is the reality of government – running at full tilt, weighted by complexity, buffeted by events, no time to plot things through.
As a final index of authenticity and honesty, this reckoning of a critical misstep meets the sniff test. “The circumstances help explain, but do not excuse it. The political responsibility for the error is absolutely mine.”Pittsburgh Steelers running backs coach Kirby Wilson interviewed with the Baltimore Ravens on Wednesday for their open offensive coordinator job and according to Ed Bouchette of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Wilson now has a second interview with head coach John Harbaugh set up for Friday.
It had been reported that Ravens wide receivers coach Jim Hostler was also being seriously considered for the job, but there is no way that Wilson should be ruled out as a serious candidate at this point.
The Ravens have an opening because of Jim Caldwell left to become the head coach of the Detroit Lions. In addition to looking for an offensive coordinator, the Ravens also in need of another running backs coach and a secondary coach, and they also may be in the market for a quarterbacks coach depending on who they hire as offensive coordinator.
Wilson has been on the Steelers staff since 2007.SAN FRANCISCO — A granite company owner is facing manslaughter charges in connection with the deaths of two employees who were killed on the job earlier this year.
Meng Peng, 66, of Hillsborough, was arrested Monday and charged with two counts of involuntary manslaughter and three violations of the labor code, the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office announced Thursday.
Peng allegedly violated workplace safety procedures that led to Philip Marich, 53, and Hector Vasquez, 46, being crushed to death by granite slabs they were removing from a shipping container on Feb. 7, according to prosecutors.
“Employers cannot simply send their workers into hazardous work conditions untrained and without the appropriate equipment,” District Attorney George Gascón said in a statement. “California employers must vigilantly assess employees’ conditions and work methods when requiring their workers to engage in dangerous tasks.”
A message left at Peng’s San Francisco-based business, Galaxy Granite, was not immediately returned.
The District Attorney’s Office said its investigation into the men’s deaths was conducted in collaboration with the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health.
Peng is currently free on $600,000 bail, according to prosecutors. He is scheduled to be arraigned Friday.
Contact Jason Green at 408-920-5006. Follow him at Twitter.com/JGreenMercNews.Kildare County Council is filling in the unsightly potholes at the entrance to the Plains housing estate.
Long time resident and campaigner for better road conditions for residents Ian Weir confirmed that the works were carried yesterday, November 9 and today.
“We finally got the results we desired as the road is finally being repaired” said long time resident and pot hole campaigner Ian Weir.
Last July Kildare County Council stated that the ongoing issue with unsightly potholes at the entrance to the Plains housing estate was not their responsibility.
At that time Mr Weir said the potholes had been deteriorating over the past two years but the council had done nothing about the situation as the estate has not been taken in charge.
According to Kildare County Council spokesperson Maura McIvor however they have since called in the bond and are currently carrying out works to facilitate the taking in charge of this estate.
The works include the wearing course at the entrance, upgrade of the two existing foul water pumping stations and the relaying of the rising main.
"We envisage that this work will be complete by mid December and are working towards taking this estate in charge in consultation with Irish Water," she said.Guaymar Cabrera-Hernandez (photo: Montgomery County Police Department) Guaymar Cabrera-Hernandez (photo: Montgomery County Police Department)
- A man caught by D.C. police after carjacking a woman in the Sibley Hospital parking lot on Wednesday is an illegal immigrant who had already been deported once. He also carjacked another woman earlier in the week in Potomac, Maryland minutes after getting out of jail.
On Monday, Guaymar Cabrera-Hernandez was released from the Montgomery County Detention Center where he has been since June. The charges against him for that arrest are unclear. He then showed up at an Islamic education center in Potomac and violently carjacked a 38-year-old woman.
“He was standing at the driver side door -- her window was down -- holding a knife in one hand and a brick in the other hand,” said Officer Rick Goodale, a Montgomery County Police Department spokesperson. “He reached in and put the knife to her neck in the car. He told her to get out of the car. She complied. Then he threw the brick at her.”
Police had hunch about the suspect because the Montgomery County Detention Center is nearby. Officer Goodale said officers went to the detention center and were told that Cabrera-Hernandez had been released just a half hour prior to the police receiving the call for the carjacking.
Cabrera-Hernandez had the victim’s car for Monday and Tuesday. He reappeared on Monday morning at the above-ground parking lot at the Sibley Hospital Medical Office Building.
The 68-year-old victim had just parked her Honda CRV on the fourth floor when Cabrera-Hernandez approached on the driver’s side. Her keys were still in the ignition. He brandished a green bottle and said to her, “Give me your keys.”
He then ran around the back of the car, according to court documents, and got into her car by the unlocked passenger side. He hit her on the arm with the bottle. The two struggled, and the elderly woman told police that he threw the bottle at her, and it went out the driver side window. She was then able to escape the car.
Cabrera-Hernandez took her car and broke through the parking security gate. He drove northbound back to Maryland. He ditched the car and took off by foot, back the way he came. He was found walking on the sidewalk at 47th Street and Massachusetts Avenue in Northwest. D.C. police arrested him and found the Honda car key.
After his arrest, D.C. police found that Cabrera-Hernandez had an outstanding warrant for armed carjacking in Montgomery County. On Friday, Montgomery County police announced that Cabrera-Hernandez was charged with armed carjacking, armed robbery and first-degree assault.
He is in D.C. jail pending a hearing on August 26.
Law enforcement sources say that Cabrera-Hernandez is from Guatemala. However, he told the District Court that he is a U.S. citizen and was born in Prince George’s County.
He claims to be 24 years old. However, he was first arrested in 2007 for being in the United States illegally. He was then arrested in 2011 for illegally reentering the country. He was deported in November 2011, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
A spokeswoman for ICE sent this statement: “Guaymar Cabrera-Hernandez was arrested in Montgomery County, Maryland, on June 05, 2015, on local charges. The crime for which Cabrera-Hernandez was arrested did not meet ICE’s civil immigration enforcement priorities; however, ICE is closely monitoring the outcome of his current legal proceedings.”
Already deported from the United States once, in and out of jail, it seems nothing can stop this alleged criminal from hurting innocent people.Recently in Spitzer Showing 1–20 of 105
Has Obama Already Lost the Debt Ceiling Negotiations?
Two Canny Strategies for Eliminating Stupid Debt-Ceiling Votes
The House Needs To Scrap the “Hastert Rule”
Enjoy the Perception of Victory. The Debt Ceiling Negotiations Are Going To Be Ugly.
The Four Most Important Political Lessons of 2012
Cerberus’ Exit From the Gun Industry Shows How Public Pressure Can Shame Companies To Do Right
It’s Time To Target Cerberus, the Private-Equity Firm That Dominates the Gun Industry
Actually, Today Is the Day for a Gun Control Debate
Fox News Fudges the Numbers on Right To Work
The Conservative Myth That Most New Jobs Are in Government
Mitch McConnell’s Debt-Ceiling Nonsense
America Desperately Needs Stimulus Spending, Not Budget Cutting
Today’s Republicans Won’t Even Support Protections for People With Disabilities.
Why Capital Gains Tax Should Go Up, and Go Up a Lot
Taxing Financial Transactions Would Solve Economic Crisis, Stop Reckless Trading
Murdoch’s British News Operation Has Now Been Fully Exposed. What About His American One?
Boehner Wants To Hold Obama Hostage on the Debt Ceiling Again. Here’s How to Stop Him.
Obama Can Accomplish a Huge Amount By Sidestepping Congress
Buffett Says the Rich Should Pay a 30 Percent Minimum Tax
After a Healthy Debate, the Good Guys Won the ElectionCalculated planning led up to the suspected murder-suicide of a family in Sydney's north as investigators traced the gas used in the tragedy to an order placed weeks ago.
As the Colombian family of Maria Claudia Lutz, 43, prepare to arrive in Australia to take their loved ones back home, police are slowly piecing together what led to their deaths.
Floral tributes gather outside the Sir Thomas Mitchell Drive home in Davidson after a suspected murder suicide. Credit:Nick Moir
It is understood Mrs Lutz's husband Fernando Manrique, 44, had set up an account with a gas company, that allowed him to order carbon monoxide in recent weeks.
It is also understood the gas was not delivered to his home but to another address. The tanks were then kept outside his property, although the family did not know the deadly purpose for which they were to be used.When we mention CSS in discussions we often speak of it as a dumbed down language. A declarative language, lacking logic and insight; but that isn’t the true reality. For years developers have been craving variables in standard CSS, having been spoiled by pre-processors such as LESS and Sass for so long. Not only are CSS variables a real and tangible option for developers, they can also be used in animation scenarios. Still skeptical? Follow along to find out more!
Variable Basics
CSS variables are stored values intended for reuse throughout a stylesheet. They’re accessible using the custom var() function and set using custom property notation.
Variables defined within :root are global, whereas variables defined within a selector are specific to that selector.
In the example above any div will accept the variable, but we could get more specific with naming using targeting methods such as class and id for example.
The var() function can also accept fallback values too.
This can be useful in situations when a variable isn’t yet defined or when working with custom elements and the Shadow DOM.
CSS variables aren’t quite ready for prime time, but the outlook for the future is very bright with many leading browsers already implementing the spec. It’s only a matter of time until they can be used without any worries, and that time is approaching fast.
Variables for Animation
There are many options for combining CSS variables with animation. Think about contexts such as audio visualizations, JavaScript event-driven scenarios, and even CSS driven events such as hover, focus and target. In theory, an Apple Watch could be connected to an API whilst using a CSS variable-based animation of a beating heart. Then we have accelerometers, device tilt APIs and even gamepad APIs, but why should we consider animating with CSS Variables at all? Here are some reasons:
Easily debuggable.
No excessive DOM manipulation.
DOM node independent.
Theming
Works with SVG.
Operations in CSS are really the key part to the whole puzzle with animations. CSS functions such as calc can accept a value at runtime and execute operators such as multiplication, division, addition, subtraction, mutating values into a new ones. This helps make CSS variables dynamic.
CSS Variables in JavaScript
Now that we know what CSS variables look like and what they can do it’s time to gain an understanding how JavaScript fits into all this.
The methods shown above are used to set, get and remove property values. They can be used for our typical CSS properties ( background-color, font-size etc), but they can also be used for CSS variables too. These options will set a new value for the globally defined property otherwise known as :root in CSS.
They’re also the true secret to animating with CSS variables because our JS methods can get, set or remove a variable at run-time dynamically!
You can also set a new value for a specific element if desired. In the example snippet above we’re manipulating a variable that is attached to a div selector versus being attached globally.
Demos In the Wild
There are plenty of awesome and extremely talented developers building and experimenting with these concepts of reactive and theme-based animations using CSS variables. Here are just a few pens to dive into and discover what’s going on under the hood.
Sunset/Sunrise
By David Khourshid.
This example shows the power of CSS variable animations used in a theme-based manner. It would generally be twice as much code to execute this demo without CSS variables and many times more if you desired to exceed two themes.
CSS Variables Animation
By GRAY GHOST.
Here’s another example using mouse events in JavaScript that drive the location of a circle.
Each time you move your mouse the JavaScript updates our declared variables, allowing the circle to move position in relation to your cursor.
Alex the CSS Husky
By David Khourshid.
Here’s the same principle demonstrated above, but used in another context.
Notice what happens when you move your mouse around? Pretty cool huh?
Animation with CSS Variables
By Wes Bos.
How about updating the values of variables in other ways? Let’s take a look at the following demo by Wes Bos using sliders to update the positions of a picture.
Move the sliders around at your leisure. Notice the coolness that ensues? Simple, but simply magical and all it’s doing is updating the variables for the transform position each time the sliders are adjusted. Suuuuhhhweeet!
Single Div Accordion (Animated with CSS Variables)
By Dan Wilson.
How about something a little different for the musicians out there? Check out this hip accordion by Dan Wilson.
Whoa! Watch those keys move! This might seem a bit intimidating to go through, but at the core it’s just JavaScript updating CSS variables. Nothing more, nothing less.
CSS Variables + Transform = Individual Properties (with Inputs)
By Dan Wilson.
In this demo, use the input ranges to modify each transform property and witness how smooth they are even if you change a property mid transition.
Side Effects of CSS Variables
As CSS variables are always inheritable properties, they can cause a style recalculation of children, adversely effecting performance in the process. This will be something you have to measure, as opposed to guessing depending on your context.
Huh, it seems modifying CSS variables on an element triggers a style recalculation for _all_ of its children. Ouch. pic.twitter.com/jvpDT5UB2h — Joni Korpi (@jonikorpi) May 18, 2017
Here’s a demo Shaw posted on the Animation at Work Slack group that was used for testing: CSS Variables Recalc Style Performance Test
During tests (Chrome 58. Mac 10.12) it was discovered that when the Set CSS Var button is triggered until the time the browser paints the background there’s 52.84ms of recalc time and 51.8ms rendering. Switching gears to the CSS Property test a very different result is discovered. From the time the Set CSS Property button is triggered until the background paints there’s roughly 0.43ms of recalc and 0.9ms rendering.
If you switch background out for color you’ll get equivalent measurements since currentColor might or might not exist in the children (shout out to David Khourshid). Any property that is inheritable will always cause a style recalc for any and all children. The property background-color is not inheritable, hence the tremendous difference with CSS variables which are always inheritable. Typically CSS properties that default to inherit will in most cases cause a large recalc of styles. It’s still important to note that changing CSS variables continually can be a performance drain. A good practice to avoid this is to animate CSS variables at the most specific level (or deepest level), in order to prevent a multitude of children affected. You can read more about reducing the scope and complexity of style calculations via Google’s Web Fundamentals page.
Conclusion
I encourage you all to dive in and test this demo for yourselves and make your own conclusion/changes/custom tests and share your results in the comments. The main takeaway in all of this is that CSS variables offer huge flexibility, but there will be performance implications for setting CSS variables on a parent with a vast amount children.
Special thanks to the gang in the Animations At Work Slack channel for the ongoing testing, feedback and discussions (David Khourshid, Joni Korpi, Dan Wilson and Shaw).
Resourcesby JAKE NUTTING
Gameday Information
Tampa Bay Rowdies at Jacksonville Armada FC
Saturday, June 11 at 4 p.m. ET
TV/Streaming: ESPN3
Referee: Mark Kadlecik
Jacksonville’s Last Five: L (1-0), L (2-0), L (1-0), D (1-1), D (0-0)
The Rowdies aren’t out of the Spring Season title race yet, but they sure do have a difficult road to getting hold of the trophy and the coveted spot in the postseason that comes with it. With 15 points under their belt, they can only pull even with the New York Cosmos at the top of the table with a win over Jacksonville and then hope to jump ahead in the title race through tiebreaker.
Trailing the Cosmos by five in both the first and second tiebreakers of goal differential and goals scored, only a six-goal win by a margin of five or more will see the Rowdies pull off the miraculous standings leap.
Indy Eleven and the Fort Lauderdale Strikers are also looking to spoil the party for the Cosmos through tiebreaker, but both are set to kick off after the Rowdies. So if by some miracle the Rowdies do pull off the rout on Saturday afternoon, they would still need to wait and see if Indy and Fort Lauderdale can somehow do the same.
Scouting Jacksonville
Of the three teams chasing the Cosmos for the top spot this weekend, the Rowdies have lucked out with the lowest team in the standings. Winless in their last seven matches in the league, Jacksonville occupies last place with a disappointing six points and only one win to hang their hat on.
In desperate need of goals for the spring title, though, the Rowdies could find a stiffer challenge than one might expect from the league’s cellar dweller. While Miguel Gallardo has certainly been suspect in moments, the rebuilt defense has been relatively steady.
Haitian international center back Mechack Jerome is away for the Copa America, but center backs Beto Navarro and Tyler Ruthven, as well as Shawn Nicklaw and Bryan Burke on the outside have remained solid. Jacksonville has conceded 10 goals through nine matches and has only allowed an opponent to tally multiple goals twice this year.
It’s on the attacking end where the Armada FC has truly struggled under first-year head coach Tony Meola. Despite having respectable offensive firepower on the roster, Jacksonville has shockingly only come up with four goals. The team’s leading scorer Matt Bahner (2) is out for Saturday due to a concussion and one of the only other scorers Pascal Millien is away on international duty. The only goalscorer available against the Rowdies is midfielder Junior Sandoval.
A player who recorded an impressive three goals against the Rowdies last year, Alhassane Keita, has been a total non-factor this season. Last year’s USL scoring champion Matt Fondy has been equally ineffective, recording a measly two shots on goal in eight appearances.
What to Watch For
Possible Changes: Why mess with a good thing? Kalif Alhassan has emerged in the midfield and is tied for second in the league with 16 scoring chances created. Joe Cole is likely to be fit for Saturday after exiting with a slight ankle knock last week and he should hopefully continue to do what he does, creating and relieving pressure in the midfield. Stuart Campbell is also unlikely to switch things up at forward after three quality showings from Georgi Hristov.
Going for it: Campbell is as competitive as they come, but it’s difficult to see him sacrificing the team’s normal structure and shape to chase goal differential from the outset. He’s more likely to push for it in the second half if the Rowdies find themselves within spitting distance of six goals. Tommy Heinemann would probably be the first pull from the bench to provide another target up top. Heck, Campbell might even throw total caution to the wind and give Freddy Adu his first minutes of the year just to see what happens. Sounds like fun.
Coastal Cup Factor: Jacksonville may be dead last in the NASL but they are the current leaders in this year’s Coastal Cup standings. They hold a slight lead over the Rowdies by virtue of having scored one more goal in the competition between all the NASL teams based in Florida. After a disastrous Spring Season, Jacksonville’s players might be extra motivated to finish with some pride and take an outright lead in the Coastal Cup.
Keep it Clean: With one more match to go, Matt Pickens has |
public about why investigations unfold the way they do.
The first step in that process is having Jonnie meet with the missing persons unit, which will take place in the coming days, according to Michalyshen.
Const. Jason Michalyshen said Jonnie's letter reminded the force they must do a better job of educating the public about why investigations unfold the way they do. (CBC)
A meeting with Clunis is in the works, too, he said, and it could happen as early as this week.
In the letter, Jonnie drew comparisons between the length of time it takes the WPS to send out a public notice about a missing non-indigenous person and a missing indigenous person.
"Tina Fontaine was reported missing on August 9, 2014. According to media, a WPS request for the public's help was submitted August 13th. Nora Leah Rae was reported missing on August 6, 2014 and the WPS appealed for help on August 22nd. Jaylene Amos was reported missing on January 4, 2016 and a request for help was issued on January 15th," she wrote.
"Cooper Nemeth however, had his image in the paper the next day; Thelma Krull was in online reports less than 24 hours after her disappearance and Alissa Voetberg, the next day."
But Michalyshen said the time it takes for police to send a missing person's notice does not indicate whether the case is a priority.
"News releases should not be a gauge of importance," he said, calling it a matter of "perception."
"The consensus is we need to do a better job of educating and providing a better and more accurate perception with respect to why investigations unfold the way they do."
He acknowledged, however, Jonnie's letter raised questions that must be answered.
"It was incredibly well-written," he said.
"A very compelling letter from a 14-year-old girl."O Falha de Cobertura mais uma vez demonstrou ser o maior oráculo do esporte brasileiro quando declarou há alguns dias que “quem nasce no Iraque não vai ter medo de Gabigol”. E foi o que aconteceu.
No programa de hoje, Craque Daniel e Cerginho da Pereira Nunes mergulham sem medo no mar de depressão dos 180 minutos sem gols da Seleção Brasileira masculina de futebol nas Olimpíadas até agora: o semblante triste de Gabriel Jesus; os inúteis aplausos motivacionais do goleiro Weverton; a malandragem confusa de Rogério Micale; o aquecimento europeu de Rafinha filho do Mazinho.
Após tentarem compreender a situação do Brasil através de análises totalmente racionais, nossos cronistas se viram na obrigação de inaugurar o quadro DESESPERO, um retrato audiovisual cru das cicatrizes abertas do futebol brasileiro. Forte abraço!Man beheaded as school fete turns violent
Updated
Police in Papua New Guinea are hunting for a notorious criminal after violence at a school fete left eight people dead and a severed head hanging from a power pole.
According to local media, an armed gang attacked villagers gathered at the fete in Kainantu district last Friday, and killed four people.
One report said the gang's leader interrupted a speech by a local magistrate, produced a gun and shot him dead.
The villagers retaliated by killing three of the gang members. One was beheaded and the head hung on a power pole.
Another suspected gang member was killed the next day.
The gang's leader, Patrick Sira, is wanted by police over a string of murders, rapes and robberies.
He was able to escape but may have been shot in the leg.
Police have been unavailable for comment.
Topics: murder-and-manslaughter, law-crime-and-justice, crime, unrest-conflict-and-war, papua-new-guinea
First postedJonathan chats with Mark about good and bad reasons to leave a church, and offers principles for leaving well once the decision has been made. (Listen on iTunes.)
SHOW NOTES:
– There are wise ways and unwise ways to leave a church. What should we look for in a church? (1:30)
– What about those who leave for unwise or immature reasons? (2:20)
– Do you ever forbid people from leaving? (2:50)
– What about those who leave for a church that denies the gospel? Roman Catholic? Prosperity gospel? Same-sex affirming? (5:25)
– What advice do you give to a person who’s thinking about leaving their church? (10:50)
– Should you talk to the pastor? (13:30)
– How do you leave well, once you decide? (14:20)
– What are things people do to divide the body as they leave? (15:30)
– How do you deal with strained or broken relationships as you leave? (17:20)
* * * * *
Listen to the other episodes of Pastors’ Talk here.Pelosi Excommunicates Cordileone
Washington, DC––In an astonishing move today, Minority Leader of the House of Representatives and Mouthpiece of God in the United States Nancy Pelosi has excommunicated San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone.
The move comes just a day after Pelosi sent Cordileone a letter asking him not to attend the National Organization for Marriage march in Washington D.C., calling the event “venom masquerading as virtue.” In response to the letter, Cordileone issued a response saying that the March for Marriage “is not anti-LGBT, but rather, it is a pro-marriage march.”
The letter of excommunication begins with Pelosi regretfully informing the San Francisco bishop that, due to actions displaying disdain and hate towards LGBT persons, “I, Nancy Pelosi, Mouthpiece of God Almighty, Secretary of Defense Against Bigotry, Director of the Office of Tolerance, and Ambassador to the Alpha and the Omega, hereby impose a ferendae sententiae, excommunicating you from my Catholic Church. I ask you to ‘evolve’ and to mend your bigot ways.”
“We separate him, together with his accomplices and abettors, from the precious Body and Blood of the Lord and from the society of all Christian people,” Pelosi told EOTT as she stroked the point of her long red tail. “We exclude him from our Holy Mother the Church in Heaven and on earth; we declare him excommunicate and anathema; we judge him damned, with the Devil and his angels, to eternal fire until he shall recover himself from the toils of the Devil and return to amendment and to penitence. So be it!”
At press time, Pelosi’s uncle, Screwtape, is very proud of her.We should always be wary of over-interpreting the commonalities between different countries’ politics. As the current convulsions in the US demonstrate in ghastly technicolour, every democracy has its own unique political culture.
Nevertheless, it is at least worth considering whether the Dutch people’s overwhelming rejection of a new treaty between the EU and Ukraine in a referendum yesterday offers any clues to our own referendum outcome on June 23rd.
One aspect of the Dutch referendum that may provoke jitters among Remain campaigners is turnout, which barely surmounted the 30% threshold required for the vote to be valid. Many opponents of Brexit are nervous about whether too much pro-EU opinion is too soft, especially amongst young people who are less likely to vote. Jeremy Corbyn has shown little inclination thus far to use his significant appeal to young voters to the Remain campaign’s advantage, although he is expected to make a big speech on the referendum next week.
Since those who did vote yesterday were by a significant margin (61.1% against 38%) opposed to the Ukraine treaty, it might give some ballast to the idea that the Europe issue only really engages a very small number of people, and those people are more likely to be eurosceptics.
But the key difference between the two votes is that where the British vote is existential, the Dutch vote was about a somewhat arcane aspect of foreign policy. That, plus the fact that the Dutch vote is officially non-binding, surely goes a long way to explaining the minuscule turnout. Still, it would be naïve to imagine that those who voted yesterday had all read a 2,135-page trade deal and returned a diligent verdict – many will have seen it simply as a conduit for expressing their broader frustrations with the European Union.
The other possible lesson for our campaign is about negative tactics. I have written before about the peculiar denigration of ‘Project Fear’, which helped the Better Together campaign win the 2014 Scottish referendum. Perhaps yesterday’s vote should give me pause for thought. The Dutch pro-EU campaign was remorselessly negative. Voters were told explicitly that a vote against the treaty with Ukraine was a vote for Putin. Geert Wilders, the leading anti-EU politician, was accused of cosying up to the Russian strongman. For Dutch people, Putin does not represent an abstract threat: 193 of the passengers on Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, shot down over Ukraine, were from the Netherlands.
And yet the anti-European sentiment of an eager minority was enough to trump hostility towards the Russian leader. Of course, the Netherlands has form: it rejected a draft EU Constitution in a 2005 referendum (with far higher turnout), only to see the same agreement essentially imposed as the Lisbon Treaty shortly afterwards. The Remain campaign will be hoping today that Dutch politics really is sui generis.Muslims Against Crusades (MAC) hit the headlines in November 2011 after the Home Secretary, Theresa May, proscribed the organisation on the eve of Remembrance Sunday.
The year before, MAC caused public outrage when they burned two large poppies outside the Royal Albert Hall. MAC was founded in 2010 by Abu Assadullah and acts under the guidance of former solicitor Anjem Choudary.
MAC was officially founded in 2010 but its true origins can be traced back to 1983 when Omar Bakri Mohammed, a radical Islamist cleric, founded Al-Muhajiroun (AM) in the wake of an internal schism of the pan-Islamic organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT). Upon Bakri’s expulsion from Saudi Arabia he moved to England in early 1986 where he became the British leader of HT.
He simultaneously fostered Al-Muhajiroun until deciding to officially declare it as an independent organisation in 1996 with British born co-founder Anjem Choudary. Whereas HT only desired to establish the Khilafah (the creation of an Islamic state under sharia law) in Muslim countries, Bakri and Choudary wanted to establish it worldwide by twinning Daw’ah (the call to Islam) and Jihad (struggle).
Al-Muhajiroun pursued these aims by spreading hate on the streets of Britain and aiding terrorism both domestically and around the world.
Anjem Choudary, raised in a semi-detached house in Welling, Kent, turned from his life as a solicitor to embrace radical Islam. His infamous reputation grew when he came to public attention in 1999 after The Daily Telegraph identified his role in recruiting British Muslims to fight abroad for groups like the International Islamic Front. In 2003 Al-Muhajiroun gained worldwide notoriety when they publicly advertised a conference called “The Magnificent 19” to celebrate the second anniversary of 9/11. In response to international condemnation Choudary said
“Those individuals are Muslims, they were carrying out their Islamic responsibility and duty, so in that respect they were magnificent, […].”
The following year, under new anti-terrorism laws, the government proscribed the organisation and it soon disbanded.
Despite the Home Office’s best attempts to stifle Al-Muhajiroun, the organisation has continually re-emerged under different aliases. Ahl ul-Sunnah Wa al-Jamma, Al Ghurabaa and The Saviour Sect all emerged in 2005 as splinter groups, only to be proscribed by then Home Secretary John Reid in 2006. In 2008 Choudary launched Islam4UK, which caused widespread disgust with its attempt to hold a protest in Wootton Bassett (where military funeral repatriations took place) in 2010. The march was subsequently cancelled and days later the organisation was also proscribed.
After Muslims Against Crusades (MAC) was proscribed in 2011, Choudary and his followers immediately established a new group, Izhar Ud-Deen-il-Haq.
While it is easy to dismiss Al-Muhajiroun and its related groups as irrelevant, its actions feed anti-Muslim sentiments in the press and it acts as a conveyor belt for terrorism.
Al-Muhajiroun: Terrorist Links
Several Al-Muhajiroun (AM) activists have been involved in terrorism, with one estimate claiming that 18% of Islamist-related convictions in Britain in the last decade have had links with supporters of the group or one of its successors.
They include:
Royal Wootton Bassett bomb plot. Three men were convicted for plotting to bomb Royal Wootton Bassett. Richard Dart (Ealing), Jahangir Alom (Stratford), Imran Mahmood (Northolt) were jailed for between six and nine years. Dart was radicalized by Anjem Choudary and involved in Al-Muhajiroun.
TA bomb plotters. Zahid Iqbal, Mohammed Sharfaraz Ahmed, Umar Arshad, Syed Farhan Hussain, all from Luton, were convicted at Woolwich Crown Court for plotting to bomb a TA centre using remote controlled car. They were jailed for between five and eleven years. They were well known in Al-Muhajiroun circles in Luton.
The London Stock Exchange Bomb Plot Four men (Mohammed Chowdhury, Shah Rahman, Gurukanth Desai and Abdul Miah) pleaded guilty in January 2011 for their part in a plot to blow up a variety of targets including, the London Stock Exchange, two Rabbi’s, the US Embassy and London Mayor Boris Johnson. The group was inspired by the recently killed US-born radical extremist Anwar Al-Awlaki, whose inflammatory lectures are available to download on Al-Ghurabaa’s website (a successor group of Al-Muhajiroun). All four of the men had formal links with Al-Muhajiroun and are known to have attended Islam4UK and Muslims Against Crusades (MAC) demonstrations.
7/7 bombers Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the group behind the 7/7 London underground bombings, which killed 52 people, was linked to Al-Muhajiroun. He also used Al-Muhajiroun safe houses before carrying out the bombing.
The Fertilizer Bomb Plot In 2004 the police foiled a plot by five terrorists to blow up a shopping centre, a night club and the gas network with a huge bomb made of 1,300 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. Four of the convicted terrorists had strong links with Al-Muhajiroun. Omar Khyam, leader of the foiled plot, was first introduced to extreme political Islam by Bakri Mohammed. He became involved with Al-Muhajiroun while studying for his A-levels and was reportedly sent by the group to fight in Kashmir in 2000.
Mike’s Place Suicide Bombing In April 2003 three died and 50 were injured when Asif Muhammad Hanif blew himself up in a suicide attack in a bar in Tel Aviv, Israel. A second bomb, strapped to Derby-born Omar Khan Sharif failed to detonate. Just two weeks before leaving for Israel, Omar Khan Sharif was seen on the streets of Derby leafleting for Al-Muhajiroun.
Bilal Mohammed Believed to be Britain’s first suicide bomber, Bilal was responsible for the killing of nine people in Kashmir on Christmas Day 2000. Bakri Mohammed admitted that Al-Muhajiroun was engaged in sending British fighters to Kashmir and proudly announced that Bilal had been one of his recruits.
Amer Mirza Mirza was the first Al-Muhajiroun supporter to be convicted of an Islamist-related terrorism offence. In March 1999 he was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for petrol-bombing a West London Territorial Army base in protest at the resumed American bombing campaign in Iraq.
Al-Muhajiroun Key PoliticsFunding from Ottawa will help UVic maintain network of observatories
The University of Victoria has received $7.2 million to maintain its monitoring network that helps scientists study the behaviour of southern resident killer whales. Photo courtesy of University of Victoria.
New funding from the federal government will help University of Victoria researchers maintain efforts to monitor Canada’s ocean and coasts, including endangered southern resident killer whale habitat.
Fisheries and Oceans Canada Wednesday announced $7.2 million for UVic’s Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) initiative. Money comes from the Oceans Protection Plan, a fund of $1.5 billion. ONC will use the funding to to augment its current network of oceanographic radars and underwater hydrophones in key coastal locations.
“ONC’s innovative technologies and expertise in cabled observatories, interactive sensors and big data management enables informed, evidence-based decision-making for good ocean management, disaster mitigation and environmental protection,” says UVic President Jamie Cassels. “It also helps keep Canada at the technological forefront of a sector that creates economic benefits and good-paying jobs for Canadians.”
Established in 2007, ONC operates ocean observatories that collect data on physical, chemical, biological, and geological data about about the oceans over long time periods, supporting research in variety of fields.
Data about sea-surface currents informs maritime navigation and emergency responses that range from distressed ships to oil spills. Acoustic data measuring underwater noise in specific marine mammal habits meanwhile will provide a vital compilation of data over time and help inform any mitigation strategies needed to protect marine mammals such as killer whales from underwater noise.
“Ocean Networks Canada is excited to be working with Fisheries and Oceans Canada to deliver products that align with the Ocean Protection Plan objectives,” says ONC President and CEO Kate Moran.Jon Bilous / Shutterstock.com
A new study finds that gentrification improves Philadelphia neighborhoods, but its ripple effects hurt the most vulnerable.
There is no more hotly debated issue among urbanists than gentrification and displacement. To its opponents, gentrification amounts to the colonization of poor, minority neighborhoods by affluent whites. For others, gentrification is little more than a natural process of neighborhood transformation and change. The reality, however, is that the connection between gentrification and displacement is more complex and nuanced than we like to think. (In fact, I wrote about the complicated link between the two just last month.) A new study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia provides important evidence of the pros and cons of gentrification. The study—by Jackelyn Hwang of Princeton University (whose research we’ve covered here before) and Lei Ding and Eileen Divringi of the Federal Reserve—uses new detailed data on the economic condition of residents to provide a closer look at who gentrifies and who gets displaced, as well as the overall effects of gentrification on neighborhoods and residents.
The authors track gentrification in Philadelphia neighborhoods from 2002 to 2014—the period spanning the economic crisis—when gentrification and the back-to-the-city movement accelerated. (This timeline is important because most existing studies have only tracked gentrification up until 2000, when it was less widespread and housing pressures on urban neighborhoods were not as severe as today.) To measure gentrification, the study uses Census data for 1980, 1990, and 2000, along with the American Community Survey’s five-year estimates for Philadelphia census tracts from 2009-2013. Neighborhoods or tracts are considered “gentrifiable” if their median household income was below that of the city in 2000, while gentrifying tracts had a median household income and median increase in college-educated residents above that of the city between 2000 and 2013. The researchers include measures of violent crime and public school quality to gauge the effects on neighborhood quality of life. Even more interestingly, the study employs unique data on the economic and financial situation of a random sample of more than 50,000 residents based on credit profiles collected by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Consumer Credit Panel and Equifax (along with more detailed data from Philadelphia). This enables the researchers to closely track the economic and financial situation of people who move into and out of gentrifying neighborhoods, as well as the neighborhoods in which displaced residents end up.
The geography of gentrification Overall, about 15 percent of the city’s neighborhoods (56 of 365) and 30 percent of its gentrifiable areas (56 of 184) actually gentrified from 2000 to 2013. Not surprisingly, these neighborhoods (highlighted in pink on the map below) are mainly located in the Center City district around previously gentrified neighborhoods in West and South Philadelphia, or near the University of Pennsylvania or Temple University. (Previous research, including my own, has indicated the role of universities and knowledge institutions as anchors for gentrification.) Other areas like Society Hill have long been gentrified, and remain so to this day. The study also separated neighborhoods into the following categories based on the stage and intensity of gentrification: “old gentrification” (neighborhoods with median household incomes above the citywide median), “continued gentrification” (those that were gentrifiable in 2000 and gentrifying from 2000 to 2013), “stalled gentrification” (those that were non-gentrifying from 2000 to 2013), as well as weak, moderate, and intense gentrification based on the pace of gentrification and the rise in rents and housing prices (see the map below). Cities are changing fast. Keep up with the CityLab Daily newsletter. The best way to follow issues you care about. Subscribe Loading... Median home values ranged from $238,049 in neighborhoods undergoing intense gentrification, $178,044 to $126,374 in continued and moderately gentrifying neighborhoods, and just $70,316 in weakly gentrifying areas. As you can see from the map below, gentrification appears to occur in phases, with areas of continued gentrification cropping up around areas of intense gentrification, and areas of moderate and weak gentrification slightly further afield. All of these areas are surrounded by much larger non-gentrified or non-gentrifiable regions. These findings line up with my own map of class-divided Philadelphia, which shows the creative class in and around Center City and Manayunk-Roxborough (areas that were partially gentrifying from 1980 to 2000, according to the map above). Surprisingly, the study found that gentrifying neighborhoods do not lose residents at a substantially higher rate than other neighborhoods. In fact, residents of gentrifying neighborhoods are less than 1 percentage point more likely to move out than those in non-gentrifying ones. Residents of the most intensely gentrified neighborhoods are less than 4 percentage points more likely to move. And the majority of affluent residents that moved from gentrifying neighborhoods ended up leaving the city for the suburbs or elsewhere. Residents of gentrifying neighborhoods also tend to benefit from gentrification across the board, experiencing an average increase of 11 points in their credit scores—and roughly 23 in neighborhoods with intense gentrification—compared to non-residents. This is partly because residents of gentrifying neighborhoods are better off to begin with, and also because these neighborhoods tend to be more advantaged.
That said, gentrification tends to divide the city into areas of concentrated advantage and disadvantage. From 2000 to 2013, the median household income increased by 42 percent in gentrifying neighborhoods, but decreased by almost 20 percent in non-gentrifying ones. Poverty rates also declined slightly in gentrifying neighborhoods, while increasing slightly in non-gentrifying ones. Vulnerable residents are hit hardest But the study finds—and this is a hugely important contribution—that gentrification ultimately hits hardest at the least advantaged and most economically vulnerable. Even though these most vulnerable residents (which the study defines as longer-term, less affluent residents without mortgages and with credit scores of 580 or below) are not any more likely than others to leave gentrifying neighborhoods, when they do move they are much more likely to end up in lower-income neighborhoods with more crime and worse schools. Roughly a fifth (21 percent) of all residents who moved to a different area ended up in a neighborhood with a lower median income than where they were previously, and this share was higher for low-income movers from gentrifying neighborhoods in particular. Related Story The Complicated Link Between Gentrification and Displacement The ultimate effects of displacement are less clear. Moving to a lower-income neighborhood takes an additional toll on residents, with their credit risk scores declining by an average of 15 points after three years. Gentrification also increases housing costs, thereby pricing out low-income residents. And this shift is taking place in Philadelphia, which has experienced nothing close to New York or San Francisco’s extreme gentrification, and where housing remains much more affordable. Ultimately, the study shows how gentrification’s effects ripple through a city and its neighborhoods. The most advantaged residents inhabit the best neighborhoods with the best schools, lowest crime, and the highest quality of life. Middle- and working-class residents either stay where they are and benefit slightly from gentrification or move to more affordable, but still high-quality neighborhoods nearby or in adjacent suburbs. Meanwhile, the most vulnerable groups are shunted into the most disadvantaged neighborhoods across the city.
A focus on urban policy The real task of urban policy, then, is not to try and stop the market forces that are leading to the comeback of cities and urban neighborhoods, but to improve the housing options, economic opportunities, and neighborhood conditions of those being pushed further behind in its wake. This means developing people-oriented policies that enable less advantaged groups to move to better neighborhoods, with better schools and greater economic opportunity. But it also means developing place-based strategies that improve the conditions of less advantaged neighborhoods and create more inclusive economic development for these residents. The status quo will no longer do. The pressure on urban housing markets and neighborhoods created by the burgeoning back-to-the-city movement is just too great. While increased housing development is necessary, it is also wholly insufficient on its own, as most new housing is snatched up by affluent, younger, and more educated urbanites, while housing costs continue to increase across the board. From Bill de Blasio to Eric Garcetti, mayors and urban leaders across the country are already developing new strategies for affordable housing and economic opportunity. But the real task lies in revamping federal housing and urban development policy to meet the needs of this new era of rapid re-urbanization. Top image: Jon Bilous / Shutterstock.comNew preface to Charles Kindleberger, The World in Depression 1929-1939
Bradford DeLong, Barry Eichengreen
The parallels between Europe in the 1930s and Europe today are stark, striking, and increasingly frightening. We see unemployment, youth unemployment especially, soaring to unprecedented heights. Financial instability and distress are widespread. There is growing political support for extremist parties of the far left and right.
Both the existence of these parallels and their tragic nature would not have escaped Charles Kindleberger, whose World in Depression, 1929-1939 was published exactly 40 years ago, in 1973.1 Where Kindleberger’s canvas was the world, his focus was Europe. While much of the earlier literature, often authored by Americans, focused on the Great Depression in the US, Kindleberger emphasised that the Depression had a prominent international and, in particular, European dimension. It was in Europe where many of the Depression’s worst effects, political as well as economic, played out. And it was in Europe where the absence of a public policy authority at the level of the continent and the inability of any individual national government or central bank to exercise adequate leadership had the most calamitous economic and financial effects.2
These were ideas that Kindleberger impressed upon generations of students as well on his reading public. Indeed, anyone fortunate enough to live in New England in the early 1980s and possessed of even a limited interest in international financial and monetary history felt compelled to walk, drive or take the T (as metropolitan Boston’s subway is known to locals) down to MIT's Sloan Building in order to listen to Kindleberger’s lectures on the subject (including both the authors of this preface). We understood about half of what he said and recognised about a quarter of the historical references and allusions. The experience was intimidating: Paul Krugman, who was a member of this same group and went on to be awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in international economics, has written how Kindleberger's course nearly scared him away from international macroeconomics. Kindleberger's lectures were surely “full of wisdom", Krugman notes. But then, “who feels wise in their twenties?" (Krugman 2002).
There was indeed much wisdom in Kindleberger’s lectures, about how markets work, about how they are managed, and especially about how they can go wrong. It is no accident that when Martin Wolf, dean of the British financial journalists, challenged then former-US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers in 2011 to deny that economists had proven themselves useless in the 2008-9 financial crisis, Summers's response was that, to the contrary, there was a useful economics. But what was useful for understanding financial crises was to be found not in the academic mainstream of mathematical models festooned with Greek symbols and complex abstract relationships but in the work of the pioneering 19th century financial journalist Walter Bagehot, the 20th-century bubble theorist Hyman Minsky, and "perhaps more still in Kindleberger" (Wolf and Summers 2011).
Summers was right. We speak from personal experience: for a generation the two of us have been living – very well, thank you – off the rich dividends thrown off by the intellectual capital that we acquired from Charles Kindleberger, earning our pay cheques by teaching our students some small fraction of what Charlie taught us. Three lessons stand out, the first having to do with panic in financial markets, the second with the power of contagion, the third with the importance of hegemony.
First, panic. Kindleberger argued that panic, defined as sudden overwhelming fear giving rise to extreme behaviour on the part of the affected, is intrinsic in the operation of financial markets. In The World in Depression he gave the best ever “explain-and-illustrate-with-examples” answer to the question of how and why panic occurs and financial markets fall apart. Kindleberger was an early apostate from the efficient-markets school of thought that markets not just get it right but also that they are intrinsically stable. His rival in attempting to explain the Great Depression, Milton Friedman, had famously argued that speculation in financial markets can’t be destabilising because if destabilising speculators drive asset values away from justified, or equilibrium, levels, such speculators will lose money and eventually be driven out of the market.3 Kindleberger pushed back by observing that markets can continue to get it wrong for a very, very long time. He girded his position by elaborating and applying the work of Minsky, who had argued that markets pass through cycles characterised first by self-reinforcing boom, next by crash, then by panic, and finally by revulsion and depression. Kindleberger documented the ability of what is now sometimes referred to as the Minsky-Kindleberger framework to explain the behaviour of markets in the late 1920s and early 1930s – behaviour about which economists otherwise might have arguably had little of relevance or value to say. The Minsky paradigm emphasising the possibility of self-reinforcing booms and busts is the organising framework of The World in Depression. It then comes to the fore in all its explicit glory in Kindleberger’s subsequent book and summary statement of the approach, Mania, Panics and Crashes.4
Kindleberger’s second key lesson, closely related, is the power of contagion. At the centre of The World in Depression is the 1931 financial crisis, arguably the event that turned an already serious recession into the most severe downturn and economic catastrophe of the 20th century. The 1931 crisis began, as Kindleberger observes, in a relatively minor European financial centre, Vienna, but when left untreated leapfrogged first to Berlin and then, with even graver consequences, to London and New York. This is the 20th century’s most dramatic reminder of quickly how financial crises can metastasise almost instantaneously. In 1931 they spread through a number of different channels. German banks held deposits in Vienna. Merchant banks in London had extended credits to German banks and firms to help finance the country’s foreign trade. In addition to financial links, there were psychological links: as soon as a big bank went down in Vienna, investors, having no way to know for sure, began to fear that similar problems might be lurking in the banking systems of other European countries and the US. In the same way that problems in a small country, Greece, could threaten the entire European System in 2012, problems in a small country, Austria, could constitute a lethal threat to the entire global financial system in 1931 in the absence of effective action to prevent them from spreading.This brings us to Kindleberger’s third lesson, which has to do with the importance of hegemony, defined as a preponderance of influence and power over others, in this case over other nation states. Kindleberger argued that at the root of Europe’s and the world’s problems in the 1920s and 1930s was the absence of a benevolent hegemon: a dominant economic power able and willing to take the interests of smaller powers and the operation of the larger international system into account by stabilising the flow of spending through the global or at least the North Atlantic economy, and doing so by acting as a lender and consumer of last resort. Great Britain, now but a middle power in relative economic decline, no longer possessed the resources commensurate with the job. The rising power, the US, did not yet realise that the maintenance of economic stability required it to assume this role. In contrast to the period before 1914, when Britain acted as hegemon, or after 1945, when the US did so, there was no one to stabilise the unstable economy. Europe, the world economy’s chokepoint, was rendered rudderless, unstable, and crisis- and depression-prone. That is Kindleberger’s World in Depression in a nutshell. As he put it in 1973:
“The 1929 depression was so wide, so deep and so long because the international economic system was rendered unstable by British inability and United States unwillingness to assume responsibility for stabilising it in three particulars: (a) maintaining a relatively open market for distress goods; (b) providing counter-cyclical long-term lending; and (c) discounting in crisis…. The world economic system was unstable unless some country stabilised it, as Britain had done in the nineteenth century and up to 1913. In 1929, the British couldn't and the United States wouldn't. When every country turned to protect its national private interest, the world public interest went down the drain, and with it the private interests of all…”
Subsequently these insights stimulated a considerable body of scholarship in economics, particularly models of international economic policy coordination with and without a dominant economic power, and in political science, where Kindleberger’s “theory of hegemonic stability” is perhaps the leading approach used by political scientists to understand how order can be maintained in an otherwise anarchic international system.5
It might be hoped that something would have been learned from this considerable body of scholarship. Yet today, to our surprise, alarm and dismay, we find ourselves watching a rerun of Europe in 1931. Once more, panic and financial distress are widespread. And, once more, Europe lacks a hegemon – a dominant economic power capable of taking the interests of smaller powers and the operation of the larger international system into account by stabilising flows of finance and spending through the European economy. The ECB does not believe it has the authority: its mandate, the argument goes, requires it to mechanically pursue an inflation target – which it defines in practice as an inflation ceiling. It is not empowered, it argues, to act as a lender of the last resort to distressed financial markets, the indispensability of a lender of last resort in times of crisis being another powerful message of The World in Depression. The EU, a diverse collection of more than two dozen states, has found it difficult to reach a consensus on how to react. And even on those rare occasions where it does achieve something approaching a consensus, the wheels turn slowly, too slowly compared to the crisis, which turns very fast.
The German federal government, the political incarnation of the single most consequential economic power in Europe, is one potential hegemon. It has room for countercyclical fiscal policy. It could encourage the European Central Bank to make more active use of monetary policy. It could fund a Marshall Plan for Greece and signal a willingness to assume joint responsibility, along with its EU partners, for some fraction of their collective debt. But Germany still thinks of itself as the steward is a small open economy. It repeats at every turn that it is beyond its capacity to stabilise the European system: “German taxpayers can only bear so much after all”. Unilaterally taking action to stabilise the European economy is not, in any case, its responsibility, as the matter is perceived. The EU is not a union where big countries lead and smaller countries follow docilely but, at least ostensibly, a collection of equals. Germany’s own difficult history in any case makes it difficult for the country to assert its influence and authority and equally difficult for its EU partners, even those who most desperately require it, to accept such an assertion.6 Europe, everyone agrees, needs to strengthen its collective will and ability to take collective action. But in the absence of a hegemon at the European level, this is easier said than done.
The International Monetary Fund, meanwhile, is not sufficiently well capitalised to do the job even were its non-European members to permit it to do so, which remains doubtful. Viewed from Asia or, for that matter, from Capitol Hill, Europe’s problems are properly solved in Europe. More concretely, the view is that the money needed to resolve Europe’s economic and financial crisis should come from Europe. The US government and Federal Reserve System, for their part, have no choice but to view Europe’s problems from the sidelines. A cash-strapped US government lacks the resources to intervene big-time in Europe’s affairs in 1948; there will be no 21st century analogue of the Marshall Plan, when the US through the Economic Recovery Programme, of which the young Charles Kindleberger was a major architect, extended a |
margin in history (more than 3 million). On November 12, 2016, Trump chose controversial alt-right figure Stephen Bannon to be his White House Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor. Bannon was the chairman of conspiracy-theory peddling Breitbart News LLC, is openly supportive of the White Nationalist movement, and is an accused anti-Semite. A spokesman for U.S.Senator Harry Reid stated the day after Bannon's appointment that Trumps selection of Bannon “signals that White Supremacists will be represented at the highest levels in Trump's White House.” 250 scholars of the Holocaust from around the United States signed a statement calling on Americans to, “resist attempts to place vulnerable groups in the crosshairs of nativist racisms,” and condemning the, “hateful and discriminatory language and threats,” that were the centerpieces of Trump's Presidential run. The statement, which criticized the “the racial, ethnic, gender-based, and religious hatred,” that Donald Trump spouted throughout his campaign, was published in the Jewish Journal. At the article's conclusion, American Jews were urged to “mobilise in solidarity” against the discrimination put forth by Trump and his supporters of Muslims, Immigrants, and other vulnerable minority groups. U.S. - Israel Relationship “We will move the American embassy to the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem - and we will send a clear signal that there is no daylight between America and our most reliable ally, the state of Israel. The Palestinians must come to the table knowing that the bond between the United States and Israel is unbreakable.”
(AIPAC, March 21, 2016)
“He's been the worst thing that's ever happened to Israel. Israel is so important. What Obama has done to Israel is a disgrace... When I become president, the days of treating Israel like a second-class citizen will end on Day One.”
(Times of Israel, March 2, 2016)
“We have a President who is much more committed to Iran than he is to Israel.”
(Fox News, January 19, 2016)
“They (Israelis) actually think Obama hates Israel. I think he does. Israel is safe with this one. Safe, safe! We will save Israel. Nothing, nothing bad is going to happen to Israel.”
(Jewish Insider, October 29, 2015)
Prior to the 2013 Israeli election, Trump released a video on YouTube in which he endorsed Benjamin Netanyahu for Prime Minister. “Vote for Benjamin - terrific guy, terrific leader, great for Israel.”
(Times of Israel, August 8, 2015)
“I think President Obama is one of the worst things that’s ever happened to Israel. I think he’s set back [Israeli] relations with the United States terribly, and for people and friends of mine who are Jewish, I don’t know how they can support President Obama. He has been very bad for Israel.”
(JNS, July 1, 2015)
“The rest of them are all talk, no action. They’re politicians. I’ve been loyal to Israel from the day I was born. My father, Fred Trump, was loyal to Israel before me. The only one that’s going to give Israel the kind of support it needs is Donald Trump.”
(JNS, July 1, 2015)
“President Obama's steady support of Israel throughout this crisis helped stop the war. He did a good job”
(Donald Trump's Twitter, November 21, 2012)
Trump led the 40th annual Salute to Israel parade on New York's Fifth Avenue on May 23, 2004. Iran “This is one of the worst deals ever made by any country in history. The deal with Iran will lead to nuclear problems. All they have to do is sit back 10 years, and they don't have to do much. And they're going to end up getting nuclear. I met with Bibi Netanyahu the other day. Believe me, he's not a happy camper.”
(First Presidential Debate, September 26, 2016)
“You [Hillary Clinton] started the Iran deal, that's another beauty where you have a country that was ready to fall, I mean, they were doing so badly. They were choking on the sanctions. And now they're going to be actually probably a major power at some point pretty soon, the way they're going.”
(First Presidential Debate, September 26, 2016)
“We will totally dismantle Iran's terror network. Iran has seeded terror groups all over the world...including in the Western hemisphere very close to home.”
(AIPAC, March 21, 2016)
“My number one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran. I have been in business a long time. I know deal-making and let me tell you, this deal is catastrophic - for America, for Israel, and for the whole Middle East.”
(AIPAC, March 21, 2016)
“We (America) have a bunch of babies negotiating. We don’t have good negotiators. They have great negotiators, and they’re making us look like fools.”
(JNS, July 1, 2015)
“The whole deal is a terrible deal. There’s no way the Iranians are going to adhere to any deal we make. And if you don’t have onsite inspections anytime, anywhere, they (the P5+1 nations) shouldn’t make the deal”
(JNS, July 1, 2015)
“I would double-up and triple-up the sanctions, and I would make them (the Iranians) want to make a deal. Right now they’re just toying with us.”
(JNS, July 1, 2015)
“He makes that deal, Israel maybe won’t exist very long. It’s a disaster and we have to protect Israel.”
(Official Campaign Announcement Speech) Hamas and the Situation in Gaza “Meanwhile, every single day, you have rampant incitement and children being taught to hate Israel and hate the Jews... In Palestinian society, the heroes are those who murder Jews - we can't let this continue. You cannot achieve peace if terrorists are treated as martyrs. Glorifying terrorists is a tremendous barrier to peace.”
(AIPAC, March 21, 2016) Israeli-Palestinian Conflict “I am going to try and make that deal just because - man, would that be a beauty - if you like deals. I like deals. I do deals. That would be great. Very hard - a lot of my Jewish friends say, 'You will never be able to make the deal' - because there are so many years of hatred, especially on the other side. You know, they grow up as young children hating, hating, hating Israel. I think the deal can be made. But we got to be smart and we got to use our best people; gotta use me, but we got to use our best people. And I know the best people.”
(Haaretz, May 1, 2016)
“When missiles are being shot into your country, I don’t know what ‘disproportionate force’ is supposed to mean. Israel is being attacked to an extent that is very rarely seen, and so obviously you have to use very strong force.”
(Algemeiner, April 14, 2016)
“If I win, I don't want to be in a position where I'm saying to you [my choice] and the other side now says, 'We don't want Trump involved...' Let me be sort of a neutral guy. I have friends of mine that are tremendous businesspeople, that are really great negotiators, [and] they say it's not doable.”
(The Hill, February 17, 2016)
“You understand a lot of people have gone down in flames trying to make that deal. So I don't want to say whose fault it is - I don't think that helps. A lot of people say an agreement can't be made, which is OK, sometimes agreements can't be made [and they are] not good. I will give it one hell of a shot. I would say if you can do that deal, you can do any deal. You have one side in particular growing up and learning that 'these are the worst people, these are the worst people, etc., etc.”
(MSNBC Town Hall, Charleston SC, February 17, 2016)
“If you think walls don't work, all you have to do is ask Israel.”
(Fourth Republican Debate)
“President Obama's steady support of Israel throughout this crisis helped stop the war. He did a good job”
(Donald Trump's Twitter, November 21, 2012) ISIS “President Obama and Secretary Clinton created a vacuum the way they got out of Iraq, because they got out - what, they shouldn't have been in, but once they got in, the way they got out was a disaster. And ISIS was formed. So she talks about taking them out. She's been doing it a long time. She's been trying to take them out for a long time. But they wouldn't have even been formed if they left some troops behind, like 10,000 or maybe something more than that. And then you wouldn't have had them.”
(First Presidential Debate, September 26, 2016)
“The decision to overthrow the regime in Libya, then pushing for the overthrow of the regime in Syria...without plans for the day after, have created space for ISIS to expand and grow.”
(Speech, June 13, 2016)
“I have a simple message for [ISIS]. Their days are numbered. I won't tell them where and I won't tell them how. We must, as a nation, be more unpredictable.”
(Speech, April 27, 2016)
“We really have no choice...We have to knock the hell out of [ISIS]...I'm hearing numbers of 20,000 to 30,000 [U.S.] troops [necessary to defeat ISIS].”
(Presidential Debate, March 10, 2016) Key Staff and Advisors Chuck Laudner: Iowa state director
Corey Lewandowski: Campaign manager
Daniel Scavino: Director of social media
Ed McMullen: South Carolina state director
Hope Hicks: Communications director
Justin McConney: Director of new media
Katrina Pierson: National campaign spokesperson
Michael Glassner: Deputy campaign manager
Ryan Keller: Iowa deputy state director
Sam Clovis: Co-chair and policy advisor
Sarah Huckabee: Sanders Senior advisor
Stuart Jolly: National field director
Walid Phares: Foreign policy advisor
Carter Page: Foreign policy advisor
George Papadopoulos: Foreign policy advisor
Joe Schmitz: Foreign policy advisor
Ret. Gen. Keith Kellogg: Foreign policy advisorDo you every find yourself thinking, "There is no way I can work out after such a long day at work!". You are not alone. This is the biggest and most frequent reason I hear for not exercising. I don't blame them either. It is really hard to work up the energy to exercise when you are drained from a long work day, and thinking about spending an hour on the treadmill is too much. To those patients, I recommend changing what you think about exercising. Tell yourself you only need 10 minutes...Just 10 little minutes....
Do you every find yourself thinking, "There is no way I can work out after such a long day at work!". You are not alone. This is the biggest and most frequent reason I hear for not exercising. I don't blame them either. It is really hard to work up the energy to exercise when you are drained from a long work day, and thinking about spending an hour on the treadmill is too much. To those patients, I recommend changing what you think about exercising. Tell yourself you only need 10 minutes...Just 10 little minutes....
There is a difference between being mentally tired and physically tired. Doing something physical, like exercise, can actually help combat the mental fatigue. Try telling yourself you aren't going to do more than ten minutes of exercise (ten minutes is better than nothing, right!?). Often, once you get moving it isn't hard to continue the work out. The hardest part is usually just getting going. In studies preformed at Northern Arizona University, they found that doing ten minutes of moderate exercise, was enough to improve moods and fatigue levels.
Try having your route home from work take you past the gym. Capitalize on the fact that you are already out and next to the gym, you haven't already parked it in front of the TV. Also, plan ahead for ways to exercise at home. Plan on taking the dog for a walk, or playing catch with your kids. Have work out DVDs next to the TV and ready to go. Have a yoga mat on hand and ready to be used. Anything you can do to make those ten minutes not so painful and you are much more likely to get some kind of work out in. Remember, ANY work out is better than NO work out. You can do THIS!
Found this a long time ago...not sure who to credit, sorry!
How do you get moving after a long day at work? Share in the comments section below!
Hope you got your daily dose of nutrition today, and thanks for reading! If you enjoy the blog, please share using the buttons below, or in the box to the right. Also, we would love to have you join us! Join this site in the "followers" box to the right. "Like" the blog on facebook, and follow me on twitter (@jennasteprd) and pinterest using the the boxes on the right. Thanks, and have a great day! ~jennaShaming Male High School Students: Aussie Style
This is a true story, it happened recently at a government high school in an Australian state capital city, and similar scenarios play out across the country on a regular basis.
Good morning class, today we have invited Ms. Hatesmenalot from the local Violence Against Women Service to host a discussion with you about “Healthy Relationships.”
But first whilst you (pure pristine) girls stay in this room, we want all you (bad nasty) boys to move into the next room and we will all fill in this questionnaire highlighting the ways men abuse women in relationships. We will then meet together again to discuss your answers (shame the boys), how’s that sound!
You can see images of the survey here (CLICK HERE FOR ORIGINAL IMAGE)
Whilst reading the questionnaire may engender a feeling of disbelief, in reality this is just another example of the pervasive ideological feminist governance that saturates our education and social service systems, part of the ongoing narrative of gender stereotyping intended to shame and further marginalize our boys and young men.
Unlike the false and misleading disclaimer in the box at the top of the questionnaire “that most domestic violence occurs by men to women” the professional literature on dating violence in teens is clear:
In teen dating relationships females are as physically abusive or more physically abusive than males.
As Ms. Misogyny Gillard would say, let that sink in!
In teen dating relationships females are as physically abusive or more physically abusive than males.
The Australian National Crime Prevention Survey (2001) [1] reported on a sample of 5000 Australian teens. The key findings were that one in three females and males say they have experienced at least one type of physically violent behavior from a girlfriend or boyfriend – this includes children as young as 12. Although both boys and girls reported similar rates of victimization, girls were more likely to slap, kick or bite, compared to boys who were more likely to push, grab, shove, threaten, physically control and try to force their partner to have sex.
In 2008 renowned violence researcher Murray Straus published the results of the International Dating Violence Study (Dominance and symmetry in partner violence by male and female university students in 32 nations. Children and Youth Services Review 30 (2008) 252–275.) The key finding of this study was that that almost one-third of the female as well as male students reported physically assaulting a dating partner in the previous 12 months, and that the most frequent pattern was bidirectional, i.e., both were violent, followed by “female-only” violence. Violence by only the male partner was the least frequent pattern according to both male and female participants. For the Australian cohort the violence rate was 20% overall and of these cases, in 14 % of the violence was male only perpetrated, in 21% female only perpetrated and bidirectional in 65%.
Critically the paper concluded that prevention and treatment of partner violence (PV) could become more effective if the programs recognize that most PV is bidirectional and act on the high rate of perpetration by women and the fact that dominance by the female partner is as strongly related to PV as dominance by the male partner.
University of Georgia researcher Pamela Orpinas has overseen a large ongoing longitudinal study that found that nearly one in three middle and high school students who date say their relationships include violence. Girls were more likely to perpetrate violence than boys but were also more likely to be the victims of sexual violence or incur injuries.[2]
Several papers on Teen Dating Violence were presented at the recent American Psychological Association’s annual convention.
A new study, by Michele Ybarra at the Centre for Innovative Public Health Research in San Clemente, reported on a survey of 1,058 young people aged 14 to 20. She found that 35 % of girls reported perpetrating abuse, 41 % said they were victims, and 29 % said they were both victims and perpetrators. For boys and men, the numbers were 29%, 37% and 24%, respectively. Females were more likely to say they were victims of sexual violence and perpetrators of physical violence. Males reported committing more sexual violence.
In another study of 635 students interviewed 5 times over 6 years from middle school to high school, Low and Espelage found that bullying at a younger age can increase dating violence among young Americans in later years. Those who reported higher levels of bullying in the earlier surveys were seven times more likely to report being physically violent in relationships at the conclusion of the study.
The remarkable thing about the research on partner abuse is the consistency of the findings of bi-directionality and gender symmetry of perpetration across the demographic spectrum. This had been confirmed as well by conclusions drawn from the largest domestic violence research data base?with summarizes some 1,700 peer-reviewed studies the Partner Abuse State of Knowledge project (PASK).
Returning to the Australian High School incident, the school at which the incident occurred (as indeed most Australian schools), gives a commitment to stamping out bullying and promoting an environment of equality and non-discrimination. They proudly promote a zero tolerance of bullying and link to the Australian Government Anti-Bullying Takeastandtogether website.
On the “Take a stand together website” you will find this definition of harassment:
“Harassment is behaviour that targets an individual or group that offends, humiliates, intimidates or creates a hostile environment. This could be because they belong to a specific race, religion, gender or gender-orientation group or have a disability, for example.”
There is no doubt that some of the boys in the class felt targeted, offended and intimidated simply because of their male sex. Indeed when objections were voiced the hostility of the environment became clear, they were silenced, accused of being disruptive and threatened with disciplinary action.
The research on bullying and the approach to remedying it does not single out males because it is well known that females bully each other and males and vice versa, albeit that the preferred techniques differ. Boys being more likely to physically bully and girls more likely to emotionally bully. A link between bullying and partner violence has been established and the partner violence literature conclusively demonstrates gender symmetry in perpetration.
Given these facts why would a school allow gender ideologues to breach their own policies on non-discrimination by peddling false and counterproductive feminist propaganda to impressionable students? By doing so they not only breach their duty of care to their students male and female, but miss an important opportunity to significantly impact on actually reducing future incidents of partner violence.
Relationships are exactly that a 2 way street with give and take, regardless of whether they be family, work, school, dating or initiate relationships. Helping our young people negotiate the joys and pitfalls of relationships is a valid endeavor for our schools. But we do our girls no favors by suggesting to them that within dating and intimate relationships they represent passive individuals lacking in agency, simply waiting to be abused by a violent male, and instructing them as to best place to seek assistance if this prophecy comes to past – your local feminist violence against women service of course.
We do our boys no favors by falsely telling them that all relationship problems will be averted if they can simply control a mythical but supposedly ubiquitous tendency to abuse.
We do our future generations no favors by not alerting our boys and girls to the tyranny of false allegations of abuse, family breakdown, biased family law courts and parental alienation.
Of course this is exactly what the DV grievance industry wants, an ongoing source of female victims, ensuring ongoing funding for their services and ongoing employment for their graduate gender ideologues.
Until our boys and girls are treated as true individuals, in a sex and sexual orientation inclusive way, without gender profiling the partner abuse merry go round with continue to wreck it’s havoc on all, just as planned.[3]
[1] National Crime Prevention 2001, Young people and domestic violence: national research on young people’s attitudes to and experiences of domestic violence, Crime Prevention Branch, Commonwealth Attorney-General’s Department, Canberra. As reported in the Australian Domestic Violence Clearinghouse Thematic Review 4 available at http://www.adfvc.unsw.edu.au/PDF%20files/Thematic%20Review_4.pdf [2] Dating Norms and Dating Violence Among Ninth Graders in Northeast Georgia : Reports From Student Surveys and Focus Groups?Patricia M. Reeves and Pamela Orpinas?J Interpers Violence 2012 27: 1677 originally published online 26 December 2011?DOI: 10.1177/0886260511430386 The online version of this article can be found at: http://jiv.sagepub.com/content/27/9/1677 [3] At the time of writing 2 written requests to the school for further information regarding the identity of the organization providing the “Healthy Relationships” instruction and a request for an interview had been ignored.It seems drivers are not getting the message about drinking and driving.
According to a report, Ontario provincial police laid more than 35 impaired driving related charges in the GTA since Friday morning, as part of “Operation Impact.” That’s an increase from 29 over last Thanksgiving weekend.
OPP Sgt. Kerry Schmidt told the CBC one of the impaired drivers was a Blue Jays fan. He stressed the importance of designated drivers to anyone hosting a Jays viewing party.
#GoJays #BlueJays If you were the one drinking during the game…you are NOT the one driving home! Call a cab #ItsNotWorthIt @RIDEcheck — Sgt Kerry Schmidt (@OPP_HSD) October 12, 2015
In Durham Region, police said seven people were arrested for impaired driving over the long weekend, which is down from 15 from last year. York regional police said they laid 14 impaired driving charges.
Toronto police have not yet released their numbers from the holiday weekend.
Drunk driving was the alleged cause of at least one crash on GTA highways over the weekend.
Arti Vyas, 60, from Mississauga, died after the vehicle she was riding in was rear-ended on Highway 400, near Finch Avenue West, early Sunday morning. Three other people were injured.
Jonathan Ian Brown, 25, of Brampton, is facing multiple charges including impaired driving causing death, and possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose.
Earlier in the week, a first-year student at University of Western Ontario, died after she was struck by a minivan on campus on Wednesday night.
Andrea Christidis, 18, from Scarborough, died of her injuries in hospital on Friday.
A visitation is being held on Tuesday. The funeral is scheduled for Wednesday at St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church in Toronto.
Jared DeJong, 24, from London, is charged with dangerous driving causing bodily harm, impaired operation causing bodily harm and having in excess of 80 milligrams of alcohol per 100 millilitres of blood.
With files from The Canadian PressWe wonder if President Donald Trump still thinks Michael Flynn is a “very good person.”
Shortly after news of his guilty plea became public, ABC News is reporting that the former National Security Advisor is prepared to testify that during the 2016 campaign, the President “directed him to make contact” with the Russians.
According to ABC’s Brian Ross, the network was told by a Flynn confidant that the former National Security Advisor will testify against Trump.
“[Flynn] feels he has been abandoned by President Trump,” Ross told anchor George Stephanopoulos. “And he is now prepared to testify about President Trump.”
ABC News further reports that that Flynn will also tesitfy, “against members of the Trump family, and others in the White House.”
Reuters is reporting that the order to contact Russia came from an unidentified senior member of the Trump team during the transition, not the campaign.
This story is currently breaking and will be updated as more information becomes available.
Watch above, via ABC News.
[featured image via screengrab]
——
Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.comBritain is heading for another parliament of pain. None of the main parties denies this truth: all speak with appropriate solemnity about the “tough choices” to come. In his Autumn Statement, George Osborne sought to turn economic failure into political success by arguing that only the Conservatives could be trusted to finish the job of eliminating the deficit. Labour’s slogan of choice is “Big reform, not big spending”, an attempt to redefine itself for these straitened times. The Liberal Democrats seek, as ever, to split the difference by vowing to cut the deficit faster than the opposition but in a fairer way than the Tories.
Here the truth-telling largely ends. No party is prepared to itemise the next dose of austerity. Labour and the Conservatives respectively target the wealthy and welfare for further fiscal tightening. But seeking to raise more from these popular sources is the politics of easy choices, not hard ones.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) estimates that £12bn of additional consolidation will be required merely to maintain departmental spending cuts at their current level: a gap no party has come close to bridging. Some are more guilty than others – the Conservatives’ promise to cut taxes by £7.2bn, avoid further tax rises and eliminate the deficit by the end of the next parliament being the most egregious – but none is innocent. Divided on much else, the parties are united in a conspiracy of silence about the pain ahead.
After the 2010 general election, this was supposed to be impossible. The weekend before that contest, David Cameron declared that any future cabinet minister who proposed “front-line reductions” in services would be “sent straight back to their department to go away and think again”. During the campaign, he said that his party had “absolutely no plans” to raise VAT, that he “wouldn’t means-test” child benefit, that Sure Start centres would not be closed and that the Education Maintenance Allowance would remain in place. Each one of these promises was broken before the year was out. Never again, it was said, would any political leader be able to deceive the electorate so shamelessly. But the truth of Britain’s fiscal situation is now being hidden. In an election as tight as this one, no party wants to break ranks.
This absence of candour is not a new phenomenon. The IFS calculates that governments make tax cuts worth an average of £2.2bn in the year before an election and tax rises worth an average of £7.5bn the year afterwards. In his pre-poll Budget in 1992, Norman Lamont, then chancellor, announced net tax cuts worth £5.5bn. Later, he reflected: “Not a very good Budget. But it did help us to win the 1992 election.” Conversely, he described his Budget the following year, in which he unveiled tax rises worth £23bn, as having “helped to lose the 1997 election for the Conservatives”.
By revealing their pre-election sweetener – a pledge to raise the personal allowance to £12,500 and the 40p tax threshold to £50,000 – at this year’s conference, Osborne and Cameron moved earlier than most expected. This was partly born of a desire to “do something” (in the words of one Tory MP) to erode Labour’s stubborn poll lead, as well as an awareness that the 2015 Budget could not be harnessed for this purpose. The Lib Dems regard the Autumn Statement as the coalition’s last major “fiscal act”. By next year, as they prepare to decouple from the Tories, it will be too late for deal-making.
The expectation in Westminster is that the Tories’ sweetener will be followed by a post-election sting. Osborne insists that he can eradicate the remainder of the deficit through spending cuts alone. But rather than issuing a “read my lips”-style pledge on tax rises, he has merely stated that he has “no plans” to increase the burden: the exact formulation used before the 2011 VAT rise. “George will conveniently discover that things are worse than he thought and raise taxes after the election,” one Conservative told me. With the Tories unlikely to win a majority, Lib Dems suggest that Osborne will blame any new measures, potentially including a mansion tax, on them.
One of the ironies of the duel between Osborne and his shadow, Ed Balls, is that the former has recently appeared as a hyper-Keynesian, spraying around unfunded commitments, while the latter has remained disciplined, rejecting any proposal that is not fully costed. This apparent role reversal reflects contrasting political fortunes. Osborne’s aides believe his reputation for fiscal rectitude gives him licence to indulge in giveaways, while Balls needs to combat Labour’s image as a party addicted to debt.
Yet the budgetary dividing line between the two men endures. Unlike Osborne, Balls has left room to borrow for investment and has avoided matching his promise of an overall surplus by 2020. But because of Labour’s reputation for profligacy, it is terrified of stating as much. “You won’t hear the word pass our lips,” a shadow cabinet minister says of “borrowing”. But with the exception of minor savings produced by Balls’s zero-based spending review, Labour has done little to set out how austerity would proceed under its laxer timetable.
Britain and its public services have absorbed the cuts better than most forecast. The civil insurrection that the left dreamed of and that the right feared never materialised. While believing that Osborne’s reductions have been unfair and premature, the voters have never stopped believing that they are necessary. But if austerity can be sold easily in times of stagnation, as an act of national belt-tightening, it is harder to sell in times of expansion. Having already trimmed Whitehall of fat, the next government will be forced to cut into bone. It should not be surprised when the voters ask why they weren’t better warned.After a four-year absence from theaters, Ang Lee will return this fall with a searing film about young American war heroes that may land him in the Oscar race. But the movie, billed as a cinematic leap forward because of the digitally radical way it was shot, has faced a major question.
Because few commercial theaters have projection systems that are technologically advanced enough, will anyone even be able to see “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” with all of Mr. Lee’s bells and whistles?
At the very least, New Yorkers will.
The New York Film Festival said on Monday that it would host the world premiere of Mr. Lee’s film on Oct. 14 in a theater — a relatively small one, with just 300 seats — rigged with projectors capable of playing the film in 3-D, 4K ultra-high-definition and at the extremely fast speed of 120 frames a second. No film has ever been shown publicly that way before, according to the festival and Sony Pictures, which will release “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” nationally on Nov. 11.
It may sound like techno-babble, but Mr. Lee’s blend of visual formats is a major departure for movie exhibition, particularly when it comes to the speed. Films have been presented almost exclusively at 24 frames a second since the 1920s. To a degree, that rate gives cinema its otherworldly quality — the blur when cameras pan from side to side, for instance.SEATTLE -- Louisville Cardinals coach Rick Pitino says high school athletes should have the right to enter the NBA draft.
"I'm very much in favor of high school kids going pro," said Pitino, who will lead Louisville against Northern Iowa in a round-of-32 NCAA tournament matchup Sunday, during his pregame comments Saturday. "I had six young men commit to me out of high school that didn't go to college, that went to the pros. I'm very much for that because they didn't want college. They wanted to go to the NBA. And if they go to the [NBA Development League], that's fine with them. But the six-, seven-month education, online classes second semester. I don't know what that does for a young person."
Rick Pitino is all for high school players being eligible for the NBA draft, something he knows Kentucky rival John Calipari doesn't favor. Ray Carlin/Icon Sportswire
Pitino added: "Now, I'm different than, probably, the coach of Kentucky, who is having so much success with that."
Kentucky, which is 36-0 after defeating Cincinnati on Saturday, has been led by multiple freshmen throughout John Calipari's tenure. Calipari is 7-1 against Pitino since he was hired in 2009.
Calipari has previously expressed support for a two-year requirement before players can declare for the draft.
Pitino has rarely relied on freshmen to carry his teams. But he has lost multiple star recruits, including Sebastian Telfair, to the NBA.
Spartans coach Tom Izzo said he would welcome a one-and-done talent to Michigan State but added that he is worried about those advised to make the jump to the pros.
"Like everything else in the world, smoking cigarettes was cool, then after research of years and years and years, it develops lung cancer," Izzo said at a news conference Saturday. "So we change our thoughts. We have not researched where a large majority of these guys that come out early [are].... Some day, 10 years from now, there's going to be a study of how many kids came out and ended up on the streets. That's the crime of this whole thing."
Izzo said if he was a kid in that situation he would enjoy the college experience.
"I would take a completely different approach -- not what's best for the NBA, not what's best for the college, what truly is best for the kid and how can we work around it," he said.
The current rules -- that a player must be 19 years old to enter the NBA draft -- could change once the NBA and National Basketball Players Association enter negotiations for the next collective bargaining agreement in 2017. Commissioner Adam Silver has said that he is in favor of an age limit of 20 years old for potential draftees.
Pitino disagrees with the age limit, which essentially forces elite athletes to attend college for a season or compete overseas for a year if they desire advanced competition.
"College is not for everybody," Pitino said. "So if a kid doesn't want to go to college, let him go to the pros. Let him go into the [D-League]. And if someone does want to go to college, let them go. We're still going to have great basketball teams."
Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said the decision is out of the hands of college coaches.
"It really doesn't matter what I would want. It's what the players' union and the NBA would decide on," Krzyzewski said.
Information from The Associated Press contributed to this report.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.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Fight Back! Sign up for Take Action Now and we’ll send you three meaningful actions you can take each 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 we’ll send you three meaningful actions you can take each week.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Travel With The Nation Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits. Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
Here is how little the Republicans care about the increasingly harrowing situation of the poor: they can’t even be roused to blame President Obama for it—because to do so they’d have to acknowledge that it matters. Ad Policy
The news recently has been full of stories of mounting desperation in America. In The New Yorker, Ian Frazier reported that there are now more homeless people in New York City than at any time since the concept of “modern homelessness” arose in the 1970s. Nationwide, new Education Department data reveal that the number of homeless schoolchildren has hit a record high of 1.2 million. Meanwhile, on November 1, the benefits of every food stamp recipient in the country were cut by an average of 7 percent and already overburdened food banks prepared to ration distributions or turn people away. “It is too bad we have come to this in our country,” the head of the Ohio Association of Foodbanks told the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
In a minimally functioning political system, there would be a debate about potential solutions to these unfolding disasters. After all, conservatives once claimed they had superior answers to the problems of poverty. Richard Nixon lambasted welfare for encouraging family breakups and penalizing work, but he sought to replace it with a guaranteed minimum income. Poverty obsessed 1996 vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp, who used to call himself a “bleeding-heart conservative.” George W. Bush dubbed himself a “compassionate conservative” and made the channeling of public funds to religious charities a signature issue. There was much to criticize in conservative approaches to poverty, but they at least emerged from a modest political consensus that the suffering of the poor was real and |
. During this time, the pH of the reaction mixture was maintained between 4 and 6 by careful addition of hydrochloric acid mixed with methanol (1:1 mixture). The solution was then adjusted to pH 2 with concentrated hydrochloric acid, stirred for 1 h, diluted with water (80 ml) and then extracted with dichloromethane (2 × 40 ml) and the combined organic phases discarded. The aqueous phase was separated and washed with further dichloromethane (3 × 80 ml) and again the organic phases were discarded. The aqueous layer was basified with 30% NaOH and then extracted with dichloromethane (3 × 80 ml), the organic fractions were combined, dried over magnesium sulphate and concentrated in vacuo. The oil was dissolved in isopropanol (5 ml) and precipitation of the product occurred after adding a few drops of concentrated hydrochloric acid followed by diethyl ether addition. Filtration and drying afforded the required compounds as white/grey solids.
3,4-Methylenedioxy-N-hydroxyamphetamine (MDOH), which differs from MDMA in that the methyl group of the primary amine has been replaced by a hydroxyl group ( ), was an extremely weak inhibitor of specific monoamine transport and reduced the inhibitory potency of MDMA by almost 13- and 6-fold at NET and SERT, respectively ( ).
2,5-Dimethoxy-4-bromophenylethylamine (2CB) differs from MDMA in that the 3,4-methylenedioxy bridge has been replaced by a methoxy group at both positions 2 and 5 of the phenyl ring as well as a bromo substituent at position 4 ( ). However, in spite of the para substitution of a metabolically resistant bromo group on the phenyl ring, the reduction of the amphetamine side chain from three to two carbon atoms, combined with the di-methoxy substitution of the phenyl ring (as seen with DMMA) appears to have abolished the inhibitory potency of MDMA at NET ( ; ). In contrast, 2CB proved to be a much more effective inhibitor of SERT, but the Hill slope for 2CB at SERT was significantly different from −1, indicating that 2CB was not a competitive inhibitor of 5-HT at SERT ( ; ).
In contrast, BDB is almost identical in potency to MDMA at SERT and demonstrates a very similar inhibitory profile with comparable threshold, IC 50 and maximal inhibition values ( ; ). MBDB is significantly less potent than MDMA at SERT ( ). However, the decrease in MBDB inhibitory potency at SERT is only twofold when compared to MDMA, as opposed to the eightfold decrease in comparison to MDMA at NET ( ). These data suggest that MBDB may possess greater inhibitory potency at SERT than NET. Neither MBDB nor BDB had Hill slopes significantly different from −1 and the calculated K i values for each of these compounds are shown in.
3,4-Methylenedioxyphenyl-N-methyl-2-butanamine (MBDB) is the α-ethyl homologue of MDMA and therefore consists of a side chain containing an extra methylene group ( ). From both and, it is clear that this simple addition to the amphetamine side chain significantly reduced the inhibitory potency of MDMA at NET. This was also true for BDB, the N-demethylated derivative of MBDB ( ). BDB, although capable of reducing [ 3 H]NA uptake to levels equal to that of nonspecific transport (albeit at a concentration of 250 μM BDB; ), was approximately six times less potent than MDMA at inhibiting [ 3 H]NA transport. MBDB was incapable of inducing maximal inhibition of NET-specific [ 3 H]NA transport even at a concentration as high as 400 μM ( ) and was almost eight times less potent than MDMA at NET ( ).
2,3-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, HMMA, HMA, DMMA and 2CB all carry a modification to the methylenedioxy bridge at positions 3 and 4 of the phenyl ring of MDMA ( ). As can be seen from, a shift of the methylenedioxy bridge from positions 3 and 4 to positions 2 and 3 of the phenyl ring (2,3-MDMA) did not affect the potency of MDMA at NET ( ; ). However, 2,3-MDMA was significantly less potent than MDMA at SERT, this time demonstrating a twofold decrease in inhibitory potency ( ; ). In contrast, compounds in which the 3,4-methylenedioxy bridge was replaced by either a hydroxy or methoxy substitution at positions 3 and 4 of the phenyl ring (such as HMA, HMMA and DMMA) were all significantly less potent inhibitors of monoamine transport at both NET and SERT when compared to MDMA ( ). The N-demethylation of HMMA, resulting in HMA ( ) did not alter its inhibitory potency. DMMA, in particular, showed itself to be a very weak inhibitor of [ 3 H]NA uptake. 2,5-Dimethoxy-4-bromophenylethylamine was also significantly less potent than MDMA at both NET and SERT. None of these compounds, with the exception of 2CB at SERT, had Hill slopes significantly different from −1, which is indicative of competitive inhibition. The calculated K i values for HMA, HMMA and DMMA are shown in.
The IC 50 values for inhibition of 10-μM [ 3 H]NA and 10-μM [ 3 H]5-HT uptake were determined from log concentration–response curves generated at both NET and SERT using a concentration range of 1 nM–0.4 mM MDMA ( ). The IC 50 value for inhibition of [ 3 H]NA transport by MDMA was 6.6±1.1 μM, whereas the value for MDMA-mediated inhibition of [ 3 H]5-HT transport was 34.8±1.1 μM ( ). At a substrate concentration of 1 μM ([ 3 H]NA) or 100 nM ([ 3 H]5-HT), the potency of MDMA inhibition increased, resulting in a characteristic shift of both IC 50 curves to the left. At NET, the MDMA IC 50 value decreased approximately fourfold from its value at 10 μM [ 3 H]NA to 1.7±0.9 μM at 1 μM [ 3 H]NA. Similarly at SERT, the MDMA IC 50 value decreased approximately 15-fold from its value at 10 μM [ 3 H]5-HT to 2.2±1.2 μM at 100 nM [ 3 H]5-HT (results not shown). Hill slope values for MDMA at both NET and SERT were not significantly different from −1 and the calculated affinity constants (K i ) were 0.6 (NET) and 2.5 μM (SERT). These data are consistent with MDMA acting as a competitive inhibitor of [ 3 H]NA transport in PC12 cells and of [ 3 H]5-HT transport in the T-REx SERT HEK 293 cell line.
Discussion
The structural analogues of MDMA tested in this study, many of which have been identified in so-called ‘ecstasy' tablets, are all inhibitors of either noradrenaline and/or 5-HT transport. All of the analogues tested, with the exception of 2CB at SERT, displayed Hill slopes that were not significantly different from –1 and indicates that they are all competitive inhibitors of each transporter. It is probable, therefore, that the inhibitory potency of these compounds for either transporter would be greater at a physiological concentration of the substrate (that is, in the nanomolar range) than was observed under the saturating substrate conditions selected for these experiments. This was noted to be the case for MDMA, as its IC 50 was approximately 15-fold lower at 100 nM [3H]5-HT than at 10 μM.
One of the main findings of this study is that both SERT and NET possess very different requirements for inhibition of uptake and that certain common structural motifs confer greater inhibitory potency at one, but not the other transporter. For instance, modifications to the amphetamine side chain α-methyl group significantly reduce inhibitory potency at NET, but not at SERT. MBDB and BDB were notably less potent than MDMA at inhibiting [3H]NA uptake via NET, yet both are very effective inhibitors of 5-HT uptake at SERT, where they share a very similar inhibitory profile to that seen with MDMA. These results support the findings of Pifl et al. (2005), which showed that replacement of the α-methyl group with a 3,4-methylenedioxybenzyl group greatly inhibited inhibitory potency at NET, but not SERT. MBDB has recently been listed as a controlled substance in the United States and France due to its highly addictive and unique empathogenic properties and its abuse has been noted throughout Europe and the United States (Nagai et al., 2002). In addition, it is often sold in place of MDMA and is a common contaminant of illegal ‘ecstasy' tablets (Furnari et al., 1998; Van Aerts et al., 2000; Freudenmann and Spitzer, 2004). Like the ‘entactogen' MDMA, MBDB can be clearly distinguished from psychostimulants, such as amphetamine, and hallucinogens (for example, mescaline, 2,5-dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine) in rat discrimination studies. However, it is also known to cause less euphoria and to lack the stimulant properties that are commonly associated with MDMA (Oberlender and Nichols, 1988, 1990; Van Aerts et al., 2000). Although MBDB is known to stimulate little or no DA release and is a weak inhibitor of DAT (Steele et al., 1987; Van Aerts et al., 2000), this is unlikely to be the reason behind its apparent reduction in MDMA-like effects, because dopamine release is more commonly associated with the reinforcing qualities of amphetamines and not the stimulatory properties (Van Aerts et al., 2000). Therefore, since increases in extracellular NA are thought to contribute significantly to amphetamine-induced stimulatory action (Pifl et al., 1999; Rothman et al., 2001), it is more likely to be the weak inhibitory potency of MBDB at NET that is responsible for its modest stimulatory and euphoric effects.
3,4-Methylenedioxyphenyl-2-butanamine (BDB) is the N-demethylated derivative of MBDB and has been found in the urine of MBDB abusers (Kronstrand, 1996; Kintz, 1997). In 1978, Shulgin (1978) demonstrated that N-methylation of hallucinogenic phenylethylamine derivatives resulted in a decrease in hallucinogenic activity. This finding was later confirmed by Bronson et al. (1995) when examining the increased hallucinogenic properties demonstrated by BDB in comparison to MBDB. In this study, BDB was also shown to be significantly more potent than MBDB via the demonstration of a greater inhibitory potency of [3H]5-HT uptake at SERT. Given the association of hallucinogenic manifestation with the activation of 5-HT 2 receptors (Titeler et al., 1988), our data support a role of SERT inhibition and subsequent increases in extracellular 5-HT in the manifestation of hallucinogenic episodes.
During the preparation of this manuscript, Nagai et al. (2007) published comparative data on the inhibition of monoamine transport in crude synaptosomes by a range of amphetamine derivatives, including BDB and MBDB. Direct comparison of their results and ours is difficult, since the experimental systems are not the same. The much lower IC 50 values quoted by Nagai et al. (2007) for these compounds in crude synaptosomes reflects the fact that these are competitive inhibitors and both [3H]NA and [3H]5-HT were employed at a considerably lower concentration than the saturating dose of 10 μM selected for our experiments. Nagai et al. (2007) show that BDB and MBDB were equipotent in their inhibition of synaptosomal [3H]NA and [3H]5-HT uptake, which is the same result as we obtained in our experiments (although we have deliberately not compared potencies of the drugs to each transporter, because different cell lines were used for each). We also agree that both compounds are less potent than MDMA as inhibitors of [3H]NA transport. However, although Nagai et al. concluded that BDB and MBDB were both less potent than MDMA as inhibitors of [3H]5-HT uptake, we show that MDMA and BDB are equipotent.
2,5-Dimethoxy-4-bromophenylethylamine (2CB) is similar to MBDB and BDB in that it too carries a modification of the α-methyl group on the amphetamine side chain. In this case, the α-methyl group has been removed resulting in a two-carbon, as opposed to a three-carbon, amphetamine side chain. In addition, the substitution pattern on the phenyl ring of 2CB is very different to that of the other analogues tested, that is, a methoxy group at positions 2 and 5 and a bromo substituent at position 4. Interestingly, these modifications result in a greatly reduced inhibitory potency at NET, but not at SERT and are in sharp contrast to DMMA and HMMA (which also carry modifications to the phenyl ring, although at positions 3 and 4), which were extremely weak inhibitors of both NET and SERT. It should be noted that 2CB was the only analogue analysed that did not demonstrate competitive binding at SERT. This suggests that 2CB binds to the transporter independently of the substrate site. Structural motifs that are relevant for competitive binding at SERT may be less important if the inhibitor binds at a different site on the transporter.
2,5-Dimethoxy-4-bromophenylethylamine is an illicit, synthetic schedule 1 hallucinogen and is thought to be active in humans at levels as low as 0.1–0.2 mg kg−1, thus rendering this compound approximately 10 times more potent than its three-carbon amphetamine analogues (Shulgin and Carter, 1975). Severe hallucinogenic properties of this compound at higher doses have been recorded (Giroud et al., 1998; Munehiro and Hitoshi, 2002). 2CB is typically regarded as a 5-hydroxytryptaminergic agent as it is a known agonist of 5-HT 2 receptors (Glennon et al., 1988). Our results support the view that 2CB targets the 5-HT system, as 2CB was a potent inhibitor of 5-hydroxytryptaminergic, but not noradrenergic, neurotransmission when compared at the level of the two transporters.
A second observation drawn from this study, in regard to analogue recognition at the NA and 5-HT transporters, is that while the positioning of the methylenedioxy group may not be a strict requirement for substrate affinity at NET, alternative positioning of the 3,4-methylenedioxy bridge on the MDMA phenyl ring significantly reduces analogue or drug-binding affinity at SERT. For instance, 2,3-MDMA and MDMA are equipotent at NET, whereas MDMA is clearly twice as potent as 2,3-MDMA in inhibiting [3H]5-HT uptake at SERT. However, removal or replacement of the 3,4-methylenedioxy bridge with alternative substituents (HMMA, HMA and DMMA) greatly diminishes MDMA inhibitory potency at both NET and SERT. This suggests that while the methylenedioxy functionality is a requirement for inhibitory potency at both NET and SERT, NET permits greater flexibility with regard to the actual positioning of the methylenedioxy bridge on the phenyl ring.
Other findings indicate that the hydroxylation of the primary amine in the MDMA analogue MDOH ( ) severely decreases its inhibitory potency at both NET and SERT ( ). In fact, the simple substitution of a hydroxyl group for a methyl group at the primary amine reduced the inhibitory potency of MDMA by a factor of 13 and 6 at NET and SERT, respectively ( ). Previous studies involving amphetamine discriminative analysis in rats have shown that MDOH possesses even less of an amphetamine-like component of action than MDMA itself (Glennon and Misenheimer, 1989). Taken together, these findings suggest that MDOH is a surprisingly weak mediator of MDMA-like effects.
In summary, this study demonstrates the following in vitro structure–activity relationships (SAR) at rat NET and SERT using, among others, the previously unknown MDMA analogue, 2,3-MDMA: (1) MDMA methylenedioxy functionality is a requirement for effective MDMA inhibitory action at both SERT and NET; (2) the actual positioning of the methylenedioxy bridge on the phenyl ring is a more significant requirement at SERT than NET; (3) alterations to the amphetamine side chain significantly reduce inhibitory potency at NET, but have little effect on transporter recognition of MDMA at SERT; and (4) MDMA metabolites (HMA and HMMA) are less potent than the parent compound MDMA at inhibiting NA and 5-HT transport. In addition, we provide new information regarding the pharmacological activities of the common MDMA contaminants 2CB, MBDB and BDB (Giroud et al., 1998; Kintz and Samyn, 1999; Vaiva et al., 2001b) at NET and SERT. The data presented in this report provide crucial information with regard to the mode of action of previously unknown MDMA analogues, all of which have a high-risk potential for abuse among the global youth of today. Further studies will determine the carrier-mediated releasing properties and the toxicity of these compounds in vitro.It’s hard to measure water from a fire hose while it’s hitting you in the face. In a sense, that’s the challenge of analyzing streaming data, which comes at us in a torrent and never lets up. If you’re on Twitter watching tweets go by, you might like to declare a brief pause, so you can figure out what’s trending. That’s not feasible, though, so instead you need to find a way to tally hashtags on the fly.
Computer programs that perform these kinds of on-the-go calculations are called streaming algorithms. Because data comes at them continuously, and in such volume, they try to record the essence of what they’ve seen while strategically forgetting the rest. For more than 30 years computer scientists have worked to build a better streaming algorithm. Last fall a team of researchers invented one that is just about perfect.
“We developed a new algorithm that is simultaneously the best” on every performance dimension, said Jelani Nelson, a computer scientist at Harvard University and a co-author of the work with Kasper Green Larsen of Aarhus University in Denmark, Huy Nguyen of Northeastern University and Mikkel Thorup of the University of Copenhagen.
This best-in-class streaming algorithm works by remembering just enough of what it’s seen to tell you what it’s seen most frequently. It suggests that compromises that seemed intrinsic to the analysis of streaming data are not actually necessary. It also points the way forward to a new era of strategic forgetting.
Trend Spotting
Streaming algorithms are helpful in any situation where you’re monitoring a database that’s being updated continuously. This could be AT&T keeping tabs on data packets or Google charting the never-ending flow of search queries. In these situations it’s useful, even necessary, to have a method for answering real-time questions about the data without re-examining or even remembering every piece of data you’ve ever seen.
Here’s a simple example. Imagine you have a continuous stream of numbers and you want to know the sum of all the numbers you’ve seen so far. In this case it’s obvious that instead of remembering every number, you can get by with remembering just one: the running sum.
The challenge gets harder, though, when the questions you want to ask about your data get more complicated. Imagine that instead of calculating the sum, you want to be able to answer the following question: Which numbers have appeared most frequently? It’s less obvious what kind of shortcut you could use to keep an answer at the ready.
This particular puzzle is known as the “frequent items” or “heavy hitters” problem. The first algorithm to solve it was developed in the early 1980s by David Gries of Cornell University and Jayadev Misra of the University of Texas, Austin. Their program was effective in a number of ways, but it couldn’t handle what’s called “change detection.” It could tell you the most frequently searched terms, but not which terms are trending. In Google’s case, it could identify “Wikipedia” as an ever-popular search term, but it couldn’t find the spike in searches that accompany a major event such as Hurricane Irma.
“It’s a coding problem — you’re encoding information down to compact summary and trying to extract information that lets you recover what was put in initially,” said Graham Cormode, a computer scientist at the University of Warwick.
Over the next 30-plus years, Cormode and other computer scientists improved Gries and Misra’s algorithm. Some of the new algorithms were able to detect trending terms, for example, while others were able to work with a more fine-grained definition of what it means for a term to be frequent. All those algorithms made trade-offs, like sacrificing speed for accuracy or memory consumption for reliability.
Most of these efforts relied on an index. Imagine, for example, you are trying to identify frequent search terms. One way to do it would be to assign a number to every word in the English language and then pair that number with a second number that keeps track of how many times that word has been searched. Maybe “aardvark” gets indexed as word number 17 and appears in your database as (17, 9), meaning word number 17 has been searched nine times. This approach comes closer to putting the most frequent items at your fingertips, since at any given moment, you know exactly how many times each word has been searched.
Still, it has drawbacks — namely that it takes a lot of time for an algorithm to comb through the hundreds of thousands of words in the English language.
But what if there were only 100 words in the dictionary? Then “looping over every word in the dictionary wouldn’t take that long,” Nelson said.
Alas, the number of words in the dictionary is what it is. Unless, as the authors of the new algorithm discovered, you can break the big dictionary into smaller dictionaries and find a clever way to put it back together.
Small Data
Small numbers are easier to keep track of than big numbers.
Imagine, for example, that you’re monitoring a stream of numbers between zero and 50,000,000 (a task similar to logging internet users by their IP addresses). You could keep track of the numbers using a 50,000,000-term index, but it’s hard to work with an index that size. A better way is to think of each eight-digit number as four two-digit numbers linked together.
Say you see the number 12,345,678. One memory-efficient way to remember it is to break it into four two-digit blocks: 12, 34, 56, 78. Then you can send each block to a sub-algorithm that calculates item frequencies: 12 goes to copy one of the algorithm, 34 goes to copy two, 56 goes to copy three, and 78 goes to copy four.
Each sub-algorithm maintains its own index of what it’s seen, but since each version never sees anything bigger than a two-digit number, each index only runs from 0 to 99.
An important feature of this splitting is that if the big number — 12,345,678 — appears frequently in your overall data stream, so will its two-digit components. When you ask each sub-algorithm to identify the numbers it has seen the most, copy one will spit out 12, copy two will spit out 34, and so on. You’ll be able to find the most frequent members of a huge list just by looking for the frequent items in four much shorter lists.
“Instead of spending 50 million units of time looping over the entire universe, you only have four algorithms spending 100 units of time,” Nelson said.
The main problem with this divide-and-conquer strategy is that while it’s easy to split a big number into small numbers, the reverse is trickier — it’s hard to fish out the right small numbers to recombine to give you the right big number.
Imagine, for example, that your data stream frequently includes two numbers that have some digits in common: 12,345,678 and 12,999,999. Both start with 12. Your algorithm splits each number into four smaller numbers, then sends each to a sub-algorithm. Later, you ask each sub-algorithm, “Which numbers have you seen most frequently?” Copy one is going to say, “I’ve seen a lot of the number 12.” An algorithm that’s trying to identify which eight-digit numbers it’s seen most frequently can’t tell if all these 12s belong to one eight-digit number or, as in this case, to two different numbers.
“The challenge is to figure out which two-digit blocks to concatenate with which other two-digit blocks,” Nelson said.
The authors of the new work solve this dilemma by packaging each two-digit block with a little tag that doesn’t take up much memory but still allows the algorithm to put the two-digit pieces back together in the right way.
To see one simple approach to how the tagging might work, start with 12,345,678 and split it into two-digit blocks. But this time, before you send each block to its respective sub-algorithm, package the block with a pair of unique identifying numbers that can be used to put the blocks back together. The first of these tags serves as the block’s name, the second as a link. In this way, 12,345,678 becomes:
12, 0, 1 34, 1, 2 56, 2, 3 78, 3, 4
Here the number 12 has the name “0” and gets linked to the number named “1.” The number 34 has the name “1” and gets linked to the number named “2.” And so on.
Now when the sub-algorithms return the two-digit blocks they’ve seen most frequently, 12 goes looking for a number tagged with “1” and finds 34, then 34 goes looking for a number tagged with “2” and finds 56, and 56 goes looking for a number tagged with “3” and finds 78.
In this way, you can think of the two-digit blocks as links in a chain, with the links held together by these extra tagging numbers.
The problem with chains, of course, is that they’re only as strong as their weakest link. And these chains are almost guaranteed to break.
Building Blocks
No algorithm works perfectly every time you run it — even the best ones misfire some small percentage of the time. In the example we’ve been using, a misfire could mean that the second two-digit block, 34, gets assigned an incorrect tag, and as a result, when it goes looking for the block it’s supposed to be joined to, it doesn’t have the information it needs to find 56. And once one link in the chain fails, the entire effort falls apart.
To avoid this problem, the researchers use what’s called an “expander graph.” In an expander graph, each two-digit block forms a point. Points get connected by lines (according to the tagging process described above) to form a cluster. The important feature of an expander graph is that instead of merely connecting each point with its adjoining blocks, you connect each two-digit block with multiple other blocks. For example, with 12,345,678, you connect 12 with 34 but also with 56, so that you can still tell that 12 and 56 belong in the same number even if the link between 12 and 34 fails.
An expander graph doesn’t always come out perfectly. Sometimes it’ll fail to link two blocks that should be linked. Or it’ll link two blocks that don’t belong together. To counteract this tendency, the researchers developed the final step of their algorithm: a “cluster-preserving” sub-algorithm that can survey an expander graph and accurately determine which points are meant to be clustered together and which aren’t, even when some lines are missing and false ones have been added.
“This guarantees I can recover something that looks like the original clusters,” Thorup said.
And while Twitter isn’t going to plug in the expander sketch tomorrow, the techniques underlying it are applicable to a far wider range of computer science problems than tallying tweets. The algorithm also proves that certain sacrifices that previously seemed necessary to answer the frequent-items problem don’t need to be made. Previous algorithms always gave up something — they were accurate but memory-intensive, or fast but unable to determine which frequent items were trending. This new work shows that given the right way of encoding a lot of information, you can end up with the best of all possible worlds: You can store your frequent items and recall them, too.
This article was reprinted on Wired.com.Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Destiny is its mystery. So many questions waiting to be answered. We spoke to Bungie's head of art Dave Dunn about that mystery: how is it made? And what does Bungie sacrifice in order to create it?
The awe that Halo inspired in players was hardly a mistake, but accidents often happen. Accidents that result in a complete shift in focus; that transform and redefine the direction of a project in development.
For Halo it was as simple as a single strip on the horizon.
"We learned an interesting lesson way back on the first Halo," explains Bungie's Dave Dunn. "Just putting a little strip that went up and over made people really believe they were on that ring."
The sense of place — the inherent strangeness — compounded. No exposition needed. Just an image, a first person perspective. An unseen virtual neck stretching backwards towards the sky.
"We've invest a lot into this," says Dave. "You make people ask questions. That's where the mystery comes from."
Bungie's latest video game, Destiny, is all about those questions and reinventing that sense of mystery.
A strangely shaped object in the distance. It curves and stretches above the ruins of human architecture, it's clearly alien. Where did it come from? Why is it here? What is its purpose?
Below that weird skyscraper, a tattered factory, with a faded logo representing some unknown company. What is this company? What does that company make? What role will they play in the story of Destiny as it unfolds?
"Oh, the colony ships!" Laughs Dunn. "The story behind that is awesome."
Jesse van Dijk is a lead concept artist at Bungie. He is looking at images of what will become some sort of colony ship in Destiny. It doesn't quite work for him; for some reason it doesn't 'pop'. So he gets to work. He invents something a little bit crazy and sets about convincing the Art Director that these strange shapes are important to Destiny.
"Most concept artists would have stopped there," says Dunn.
But Van Dijk didn't stop. Despite being a concept artist by trade he learned some modelling, he started adding animations. He began working backwards, thinking intensely about the ship he had designed. How does it work? How would something like this launch? Before he knew it, Van Dijk's colony ship had developed its own sense of place and history.
This is how Bungie makes video games.
"We set out to do this from the very, very beginning," explains Dave. "It's about world building. You want to make your world mysterious so that people will want to explore."
Now, about that faded logo.
"You'll see a lot of this kind of thing in Destiny," says Dave.
Destiny has an Art Director obsessed with graphic design. You might recall that Destiny's E3 walk through was dotted with invented brands stamped on old buildings. A few concept artists and Art Director Christopher Barrett have a thing for old-fashioned swiss design. This was the result.
"They're basically going through and branding every destination in relation to what corporation was there, what did they do? What are they doing now?"
And according to Dave Dunn, the deeper the team goes, the more questions gamers will ask — it's that mystery thing again. "People will be wearing the names of these companies on t-shirts," he laughs.
As the Head of Art, Dave Dunn has been at Bungie for over 16 years, and currently oversees nine different art teams. He has some stories.
Like the time one of Bungie's mission designers, who studied to be an actual rocket scientist at MIT, sat down with the writers and spent a day trying to work out the precise speed at which the Halo rings would have to turn to be plausible in the game's fiction.
"I was just like, 'what are you guys doing'," laughs Dave.
Or the line Dave regularly tries to impress upon new artists and designers coming to work at Bungie: "you may think you're just working on a boulder but if you have to think about that boulder!"
Again, this is how Bungie creates video games.
"It takes time," admits Dave, "and it takes commitment."
I ask: for every question that could possibly be asked about Halo or Destiny, would there be some sort of answer to that question?
Affirmative.
"There would be an answer somewhere," he says. "Someone would have thought about the answer to that question."
And that's how mysteries are made....of America. An international study conducted by YouGov-Cambridge shortly before the American embassies attacks, finds that the US has a poor reputation
Only a tiny number of people have attacked American embassies across the Arab world; but an international study conducted shortly before the attacks finds that the US has a poor reputation among many millions of people who have not played – and, one hopes, never would play – any part in such violence.
The survey was conducted by YouGov-Cambridge, YouGov’s partnership with Cambridge University. Initial results were published last week by The Guardian, YouGov-Cambridge’s media partner.
Want to receive Peter Kellner's commentaries by email? Subscribe here
A range of questions demonstrate the awkward truth about America’s reputation; but the following table sums up the mood among four different international communities. We asked how much people trusted each of a range of countries and institutions to ‘act responsibly in the world’. The figures below show how many trust each ‘a lot’ or ‘a little’, versus those who ‘do not trust [them] much’ or ‘do not trust at all’.
Do you trust the following to act responsibly in the world?
Views of people in… Britain % Germany % Middle East / North Africa % Pakistan % United States Trust 50 42 27 18 Do not trust 41 49 63 78 European Union Trust 38 56 44 44 Do not trust 51 36 42 50 China Trust 13 14 38 91 Do not trust 77 77 49 6 Russia Trust 10 10 32 42 Do not trust 79 81 56 49
Whereas Britons and Germans are fairly evenly divided, clear majorities of people across the Middle East and North Africa distrust the US; further east, in Pakistan, in the front line of the battle against Al Q’aeda, those who distrust the US outnumber those who trust America by more than four-to-one.
That news is bad enough for Washington, given the scale of US economic aid to the very people that so distrust the US. It would seem that its role in removing Col Gaddafi from Libya and so helping the country move towards democracy has not erased its reputation for propping up autocratic regimes for so many years in Egypt and other countries, or for invading Iraq nine years ago. (Although our overall sample across the Middle East and North Africa was more than 2,200, the figures from individual countries are too small to allow reliable analysis. But in general there seem to be relatively small differences by country, although the Libyans are perhaps more favourably disposed towards the US than people in other Arab countries, despite the fact that it was Chris Stevens, America’s ambassador to Libya, who was assassinated last week.)
The bad news doesn’t end there. Compare attitudes to the US with those to Russia and China. Far fewer Britons trust either country than trust the US. But across the Middle East, trust in both is higher – and in Pakistan massively so. Whereas just 18% of Pakistanis think the US acts responsibly, 42% apply that label to Russia, and as many as 91% to China. Other results tell much the same story. For example, 66% of Pakistanis say the US can’t be trusted – but only 3% say the same of China. In fact, Pakistanis dislike the US almost as much as they dislike India.
Perhaps India provides a clue to the views of Pakistanis. For different reasons, both China and Pakistani have been at odds with India for many years. Maybe many Pakistanis feel about China as many Britons felt about ‘Uncle’ Joe Stalin’s Russia during the Second World War: my enemy’s enemy is my friend.
Some people are plainly hostile to the US because they are hostile to the West as a whole. But this is not the whole explanation. If it were, then people across the Muslim world would be as hostile to Europe as they are to the US. But they’re not. The table shows that many more trust the European Union to act responsibly in the world than trust the US. Indeed, across North Africa, the Middle East and Pakistan, trust in the EU’s role in the world is higher than it is in Britain. The table above shows the figures for the EU; we also asked about the main western European countries. The Muslim world trusts France and Britain to roughly the same extent as it trusts the EU – and trusts Germany rather more.
For all that, there are things about the US that command widespread respect across the Muslim world. It comes high up the league table of countries where people in |
be used in many different ways.Finebits AppPack provides full access to the Finebits app library and many additional opportunities. You get access to the following: • PRO versions of all apps by Finebits; • PRO versions of new Finebits products free of charge! • Early access to new apps at beta phase; The Metro Commander file manager became one of the first apps in the Windows Store five years ago. From then onward, the software developed by Finebits has always been one of the most popular and sought after, and this is not a coincidence. The software addresses issues we face every day. Put together, all programs perfectly interact with each other and are of help to any user. • 8 Zip Pro archiving utility; • Files&Folders Pro and Metro Commander Pro file managers; • Torrex Pro torrent client; • Internet Browser Pro, an Xbox browser; This set will be supplemented with new essential tools soon. Of course, all these apps can be bought separately, but if you purchase the general license, you will save no less than 20%! Important note: It is evident that the price of such app will increase with the release of each new tool. The earlier you buy it, the cheaper the license set will be.UPDATE Nov. 15, 2012: Fieri released a follow-up statement to E! News saying he "wholeheartedly" disagrees with the Times' critique of his restaurant.
"At my restaurants, we always try to live by a very simple notion: that food brings people together. I've learned that not everyone agrees with my style. The Times' critic, Pete Wells, clearly did not enjoy his experience. I normally do not respond to reviews or critics, however, given the tone of Pete's piece, it's clear to me that he went into my restaurant with his mind already made up," said the culinary master. "That's unfortunate. I take comments from patrons, fans and visitors very seriously, and if there is ever a problem with our service, we'll fix it."
Fieri argued that despite the negative portrait Wells paints for readers of Guy's American Kitchen & Bar, the reality in his view is much different.
"We've only been open a short while, but I've seen countless people come to my restaurant—families, fans, tourists, and yes, even New Yorkers—looking to get away for an hour or two, and they've had a great experience and a meal that they enjoyed," he added. "Like the thousands of diners, drive-ins and dives I've featured on my show, I've incorporated my passion and love for food into my restaurants. I'm proud of the food we put out, and always will be."
—Additional reporting by Baker Machado
________
Can you say harsh?
After his latest eatery, Guy's American Kitchen & Bar in New York's Times Square, earned one of the most scornful restaurant reviews to hit the pages of The New York Times, Guy Fieri is firing back hard, suggesting that the reviewer may have had an ulterior motive.
"I just thought it was ridiculous," Fieri told Savannah Guthrie on Thursday morning's Today show. "I mean, I've read reviews. There's good and bad in the restaurant business. But that, to me, went so overboard, it really seemed like there was another agenda. The tone, the sarcasm, the question style."There are no concrete answers as to why Auburn University alum "Spirit" flew into a window at this past weekend's game against Mississippi State. As such, Harvey Updyke Jr. could have slipped it a roofie, but that would be treasonous, would it not?
The money shot comes at the 0:19 mark.
"We don't know why Spirit made contact with the window, or what he saw and what he didn't see," said raptor specialist Marianne Hudson. These were tenuous days for Alabama's raptor specialists as a result. "I wish he could tell me what he saw or what he was thinking. The windows are reflective so I think that's just a hypothesis, but we'll never know for sure," said Jamie Bellah, Director of the Southeastern Raptor Center. After taking a plunge into the glass window, Spirit gathered himself and continued his flight to midfield. "Birds are only coming to us on the field for food. We reward them for their flight," said Hudson. Once spirit was safely on the ground, he was immediately x-rayed for broken bones. "Because he continued to fly down to the field, we wanted to make sure his bones were okay, and to make sure he didn't have severe injuries," said Bellah.
AU's "Spirit" is back in action after crashing into window [WLTZ] (H/T Christopher P.)Some people set out to hike the Appalachian Trail or traverse the Rocky Mountains. Warren County native Mike Helbing wants to walk around New Jersey.
An avid hiking enthusiast, Helbing plans to complete a several hundred mile journey around the perimeter of the state this year.
Helbing works for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and is a chairman for the Warren County Board of Recreation. He began leading group hikes in 1997 at the age of 17 and he continues to lead 15-mile hikes almost every weekend.
Many of Helbing's journeys led him along the various county and state parks that line New Jersey's borders. Eventually he got the idea to follow the state boundary all the way around.
Helbing has completed over 100 hikes along the state borders and he has 18 more planned in 2015 that will complete the perimeter.
"It's something that's never been done before," Helbing said. "It's about seeing different places. I've always been about seeing what's off the beaten path."
For each leg of the journey, Helbing keeps a detailed map of his start and end points to make sure doesn't miss a step and follows the boundaries as closely as possible.
New Jersey's border with New York is about 103 miles and its border with Pennsylvania is about 150 miles. Walking the coastline along the Delaware Bay and the Atlantic Ocean is harder to calculate since the hikes follow the contour of the multiple inlets and estuaries but the journey will likely be more than 500 miles in total.
When private property abuts the border, Helbing does detailed research to make sure he follows as close to the outskirts as possible on public land.
Helbing is also the founder of Metrotrails, a nonprofit organization that assists in the planning, development, maintenance, and promotion of local trail systems.
Helbing, with machete and pruning clippers in hand, has been instrumental in developing the Warren Highlands Trail. His work has expanded the trail that starts near the Northampton Street bridge in Phillipsburg and goes across much of Warren County.
Matthew Davis is a freelance photographer from Washington who has gone on many hikes with Helbing.
Helbing does more than just walk. He will stop and point out interesting natural features or historical tidbits about a farmhouse or railroad, Davis said.
"He's the best that I've found as far as being knowledgeable about the trails," Davis said. "He never makes it boring."
Helbing believes he will be the first person to walk the entire state perimeter and he hopes that his accurate and detailed record keeping of the journey can be used as a resource for others who would like to take the hike.
"I hope that my hikes can showcase some of the great open spaces we have and pave the way to show other people they can do it too," Helbing said.Every year, lots of holiday shoppers pledge to “keep it local” but many still wind up sitting in mall traffic or clicking their way to a last-minute online buying spree. I’ve been there myself more than a few times, and it always seems like one of the drags on shopping local is the convenience factor.
Enter Marie Millares and her network of vendors at San Jose Made, which is producing the San Jose Craft Holiday Fair this weekend at the blue-and-white tent formally known as the San Jose McEnery Convention Center’s South Hall.
On Saturday and Sunday, there will be more than 120 makers, designers, food producers and artists selling goods. Team San Jose is adding a pop-up cafe and a craft-beer and wine garden, and there will be live screenprinting available for apparel and paper goods. It’s like you’ve got everything you’d want in a holiday shopping experience wrapped up with a nice artisan bow.
The craft fair will be open 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. both days, and there’s a list of participating vendors — plus a convenient layout of the space so you can see where everyone is — on the San Jose Made website.
TWELVE DAYS OF CONCERTS: St. Joseph Cathedral Basilica again is hosting the “Season of Hope” series, showcasing a fantastic lineup of choirs, orchestras, dancers and musicians. Performances began Monday night with the San Jose Jazz All-Star Big Band, conducted by Aaron Lington, and continue through Dec. 23 when Verlene Schermer brings the Celtic harp players of Harpers Hall to close things out. One of the highlights this year should be, “One Voice, When Jesus Was Born,” a performance by the Jewish, Muslim, Christian Community Choir on Dec. 15.
Every performance begins at 7:30 p.m., they’e all free and the historic cathedral is a wonderful venue in itself. Get the full lineup online at www.stjosephcathedral.org.
GOOD SPORTS: The 49ers and Sharks are definitely headed in different directions in the standings of their respective sports, but the two organizations had winning moves outside the game last week.
The 49ers partnered with Convoy of Hope, a humanitarian-relief organization, to bring more than 1,000 people from Bay Area social-service agencies and schools to a holiday resource fair last Monday at Levi’s Stadium. They received warm clothes, groceries, holiday gifts, health and dental screenings, haircuts and even family portraits. Several players, coaches and team execs were on hand, including tight end Vance McDonald, who traveled to Haiti with Convoy of Hope last year, and wide receiver Torrey Smith, who was just nominated for the Walter Payton Man of the Year award.
The Sharks, meanwhile, linked up with Healthy Start Family Resource Center to surprise 40 underserved San Jose families on Tuesday with a celebration at Solar4America Ice. Players mingled with the families at the Sharks Foundation’s Holiday Assist Party, and they were also treated to free ice skating on the rink, where mascot S.J. Sharkie showed off his skills, too.
EXTENDED BIRTHDAY WISHES: Anyone who gets to be 95 deserves as many birthday celebrations as they can handle, and that’s pretty much what Empire Broadcasting President Bob Kieve got last week. Kieve was serenaded with “Happy Birthday” and presented with a birthday cake Wednesday by the Rotary Club of San Jose. There was another song Thursday night — this time by the 800 or so people at the San Jose Silicon Valley Chamber of Commerce’s Legends & Leaders dinner. And then Friday — his actual birthday — Kieve got a surprise celebration at the Silicon Valley Capital Club, attended by many of his employees from KLIV-AM as well as several from KARA-FM, the station he used to own.LWN.net Weekly Edition for November 3, 2016
One of the frustrations of computer programming (almost certainly shared with other engineering disciplines) is that, often, a simple, elegant, and general design doesn't work as well as an ugly hack. Such designs still have value as they are more maintainable and more extensible, so it is not uncommon to need to find a balance between simple elegance and practical efficiency. The story of futex support in Linux could be seen as a story of trying to find just this balance. The latest episode adds a new special case, but provides impressive performance improvements.
Some futex history
The original design of futexes — a kernel interface to support Fast User-space muTEXes — introduced a four-byte memory location that would always be updated atomically. A key aspect of the design was that the kernel needed only the simplest understanding of a futex's contents; a comparison with a value provided by user space was all that was ever needed. All updates were handled by user-space code and, if a program ever found that it needed to wait for the value to change, such as to wait for a lock to be released, it would use the futex() system call to ask the kernel to wait for that change. When some other thread changed the value, it would tell the kernel to wake up some number of sleeping processes, and they could examine the new value and act accordingly.
This design is simple and elegant, but imperfect. The kernel has minimal knowledge of what user space is doing, and user space has little access to relevant information that the kernel maintains, so they are limited in the extent to which they can work together. This disconnect has required a number of extensions over the years, three that are in the mainline now, and one that is on the horizon.
The first extension was needed to optimize the implementation of pthread_cond_signal(), which sometimes needs to send a wakeup on one futex (a condition variable), unlock a mutex (represented by another futex), then possibly send a wakeup on that second futex. At the same time, another thread might be waiting on the first futex and will immediately try to lock the mutex, which could require waiting on the second futex. Having this second thread wake up and go straight back to sleep leads to measurably poor performance. Neither the documentation nor the changelogs make it clear why the wakeups cannot both be performed after the mutex is unlocked, but they do assert that this is racy and so a new futex operation was created.
FUTEX_WAKE_OP is given two futexes and instructions on how to unlock the second. It will perform that unlocking, wake up waiters on the first futex, then conditionally wake up waiters on the second as well. It does all this atomically with respect to any other operations on either futex. This was the first time that the kernel needed to modify the value of the futex itself; Jakub Jelinek came up with a fairly generic mechanism to describe the unlock operation. Five different operations are provided to combine an operand with the current value of the futex, and then one of six different comparisons can be performed against a second operand to decide if the second wakeup should happen. This seems fairly powerful and suitably general, but was probably wasted effort. Only a single operation (set to zero) is ever used by glibc, and only a single comparison (greater than one). It is unlikely that the other options will ever be used, in part because of the subsequent extensions that impose structure on the value.
It is possible for a thread to be killed before it makes an expected change to a futex that other threads are waiting for. Only the user-space code knows which thread "owns" the lock (or even what sort of locking is being used) and only the kernel knows when a process dies unexpectedly. To allow those waiting threads to discover that something is wrong, some extra communication was needed. This gave rise to "robust futexes" that allow a thread to register a linked list of futexes whose waiting threads need to be woken up if the thread ever dies.
The use of robust futexes significantly reduced the flexibility of futexes. The four-byte memory location now has a fully defined meaning: 30 bits provide the thread ID of the owner of the futex, one bit records if any other threads are waiting on the futex, and one bit indicates if the previous owner died. This means that robust futexes cannot be used to create counting semaphores, or reader/writer locks. They can only be used for binary mutual-exclusion locks. It also means that most of the operations provided for FUTEX_WAKE_OP are of no value for robust futexes.
The more flexible, non-robust futexes could still be used as private futexes between threads in a single process and never shared between processes. In that context, an unexpected failure will kill the whole process rather than a single thread, so no recovery handling is needed.
The third extension of interest was to support priority inheritance. If it is possible for threads of different priorities to claim a lock then, when a low-priority process holds the lock and a high-priority process is waiting for it, any medium priority process that prevents the low-priority process from running will indirectly interfere with the high-priority process, which is not desirable. This "priority inversion" is usually addressed using priority inheritance, which causes the low-priority process to run with the priority of the highest-priority process that is waiting for it. Linux has priority-inheritance mutex locks internally, so the priority-inheritance (PI) extension to futexes allocates one of those whenever a PI futex is contended, and uses it to manage priority.
This extension was the first to introduce the verbs "lock" and "unlock" (and "trylock") into the futex interface. Previously the interfaces only talked about "waking" and "waiting" with the implication that a variety of different services could be built on that. For priority-inheritance locks, at least, that pretense in now gone. It really is just a lock.
What's next for futexes
In the kernel, one of the improvements that has been made to mutexes in recent years is to add adaptive spinning. The theory is that sometimes a mutex is only held for a short period of time and, in those cases, it is more efficient to busy-wait for the lock to be free than to go to sleep and then be woken up. If the busy-wait doesn't look like it will be successful, only then is the thread put to sleep. Making a choice between spinning and sleeping is the adaption included in the name.
It should be no surprise that this optimization should be useful for user-space locking using futexes. Waiman Long has found that, for a particular micro-benchmark, standard (wait/wake) futexes can achieve a mere 35 million operations in ten seconds, while adaptive spinning can increase that to over 54 million. This technique had been tried before by Darren Hart, though his reported results weren't quite so impressive, probably because modern processors have many more cores and high core counts can tip the balance towards spinning over sleeping. While micro-benchmark results should be treated with caution, a 50% improvement deserves some attention.
The user-space code could, of course, simply spin for, say, 20 microseconds before giving up and asking the kernel to put it to sleep. While simple, this approach is far from ideal. If the process holding the lock is sleeping, busy-waiting for it is a waste of power and could possible increase the total wait time. It only makes sense to busy-wait if the process owning the lock is itself busy.
Here again, the separation between user space and kernel space is a problem. Only the kernel knows which processes are busy or sleeping. Either we need to tell user space when the owner of a futex is sleeping, or tell the kernel that it should spin for a while before taking the lock. Both of these are probably possible, but moving the whole locking operation into the kernel is probably easiest, matches the approach that PI futexes use, and is the approach that Long is exploring.
The patchset
Long's latest patchset adds the FUTEX_LOCK and FUTEX_UNLOCK operations to the futex() system call; they work in a similar fashion to FUTEX_LOCK_PI and FUTEX_UNLOCK_PI, but without the priority inheritance. They use a regular mutex to help implement the locking, but in a slightly different way than the PI extension's use of an rt_mutex.
The first time the futex() system call is made, there are two processes interested in the lock. One already holds the lock, while the other wants to acquire it. The PI extension initializes a new rt_mutex in a locked state and makes it appear that the thread that owns the futex also owns this rt_mutex. There is substantial complexity in making this work in a race-free way, but in essence, that is what happens. The second process then waits for the mutex in a fairly normal way.
The new adaptive spinning extension (called "throughput optimized", which describes the goal rather than the implementation) uses a mutex only to arbitrate between the different threads that might be waiting, not to arbitrate between them and the thread that owns the lock. Whichever thread manages to claim this mutex is the "top waiter" and gets to decide whether to busy-wait for the current owner to release the lock, or to go to sleep to be woken by the usual futex wakeup mechanism.
Long did originally try to follow the same model as PI mutexes but found that the performance wasn't close to what he wanted, as too many unlock requests still went through the kernel. Futexes only need the kernel to be involved when there is contention; the kernel only gets involved when there is one lock owner and at least one lock waiter. Additionally, if there is only one waiter, when the owner releases the lock and that waiter becomes the owner, the kernel no longer needs to be involved. When that new owner drops the lock it should be able to complete without involving the kernel. With PI mutexes, the rt_mutex stays allocated until completely unlocked (i.e. until there are no more owners). This means that last unlock goes through the kernel. Long claims that this extra kernel involvement reduces throughput significantly.
Another benefit from maintaining control of the busy-waiting separately from the kernel mutex is that the benefits of lock stealing can be realized; this sacrifices some fairness for performance. There is a small window between the moment when the owning thread unlocks a futex and when the top waiter locks that futex. If another thread tries to claim the lock during that window it can successfully steal the lock. This is seen as a good thing, presumably because that new thread has its working set of memory in cache and will likely make progress quickly. Long's patches explicitly allow this stealing, but also put a limit on it. If the top waiter is woken up after sleeping and fails to get the lock, it sets a flag asking that the next time some thread unlocks the lock, that they perform a handoff instead and explicitly give the lock to that top waiter, thus avoiding further theft. Long provides numbers that seem to suggest that this improves throughput (the main goal) and also improves fairness.
Responses
The reception to the patch set so far has been cautious. The results appear encouraging, but there are some questions, including whether the code might be driven too much by that one benchmark. Two comments that reveal Thomas Gleixner's concerns are first:
I'm not really happy about these heuristics. The chosen value fits a particular machine and scenario. Now try to do the same on some slow ARM SoC and the 1024 loops are going to hurt badly.
and later:
So the benefit of these new fangled futexes is only there for extreme short critical sections and a gazillion of threads fighting for the same futex, right? I really wonder how the average programmer should pick the right flavour, not to talk about any useful decision for something like glibc to pick the proper one.
Given that adaptive spinning has made its way into the in-kernel mutexes, it would be surprising if a way cannot be found to make them work well for user space too. Of course, it would also be surprising if the first attempt at providing such a feature would have found the right balance between the various competing needs. We don't have efficient adaptive spinning for futexes yet, but if it really brings value, it shouldn't be too far away.
Comments (1 posted)
The Turris Omnia router is not the first FLOSS router out there, but it could well be one of the first open hardware routers to be available. As the crowdfunding campaign is coming to a close, it is worth reflecting on the place of the project in the ecosystem. Beyond that, I got my hardware recently, so I was able to give it a try.
A short introduction to the Omnia project
The Omnia router is a followup project on CZ.NIC's original research project, the Turris. The goal of the project was to identify hostile traffic on end-user networks and develop global responses to those attacks across every monitored device. The Omnia is an extension of the original project: more features were added and data collection is now opt-in. Whereas the original Turris was simply a home router, the new Omnia router includes:
1.6GHz ARM CPU
1-2GB RAM
8GB flash storage
6 Gbit Ethernet ports
SFP fiber port
2 Mini-PCI express ports
mSATA port
3 MIMO 802.11ac and 2 MIMO 802.11bgn radios and antennas
SIM card support for backup connectivity
Some models sold had a larger case to accommodate extra hard drives, turning the Omnia router into a NAS device that could actually serve as a multi-purpose home server. Indeed, it is one of the objectives of the project to make "more than just a router". The NAS model is not currently on sale anymore, but there are plans to bring it back along with LTE modem options and new accessories "to expand Omnia towards home automation".
Omnia runs a fork of the OpenWRT distribution called TurrisOS that has been customized to support automated live updates, a simpler web interface, and other extra features. The fork also has patches to the Linux kernel, which is based on Linux 4.4.13 (according to uname -a ). It is unclear why those patches are necessary since the ARMv7 Armada 385 CPU has been supported in Linux since at least 4.2-rc1, but it is common for OpenWRT ports to ship patches to the kernel, either to backport missing functionality or perform some optimization.
There has been some pressure from backers to petition Turris to "speedup the process of upstreaming Omnia support to OpenWrt". It could be that the team is too busy with delivering the devices already ordered to complete that process at this point. The software is available on the CZ-NIC GitHub repository and the actual Linux patches can be found here and here. CZ.NIC also operates a private GitLab instance where more software is available. There is technically no reason why you wouldn't be able to run your own distribution on the Omnia router: OpenWRT development snapshots should be able to run on the Omnia hardware and some people have installed Debian on Omnia. It may require some customization (e.g. the kernel) to make sure the Omnia hardware is correctly supported. Most people seem to prefer to run TurrisOS because of the extra features.
The hardware itself is also free and open for the most part. There is a binary blob needed for the 5GHz wireless card, which seems to be the only proprietary component on the board. The schematics of the device are available through the Omnia wiki, but oddly not in the GitHub repository like the rest of the software.
Hands on
I received my own router last week, which is about six months late from the original April 2016 delivery date; it allowed me to do some hands-on testing of the device. The first thing I noticed was a known problem with the antenna connectors: I had to open up the case to screw the fittings tight, otherwise the antennas wouldn't screw in correctly.
Once that was done, I simply had to go through the usual process of setting up the router, which consisted of connecting the Omnia to my laptop with an Ethernet cable, connecting the Omnia to an uplink (I hooked it into my existing network), and go through a web wizard. I was pleasantly surprised with the interface: it was smooth and easy to use, but at the same time imposed good security practices on the user.
For example, the wizard, once connected to the network, goes through a full system upgrade and will, by default, automatically upgrade itself (including reboots) when new updates become available. Users have to opt-in to the automatic updates, and can chose to automate only the downloading and installation of the updates without having the device reboot on its own. Reboots are also performed during user-specified time frames (by default, Omnia applies kernel updates during the night). I also liked the "skip" button that allowed me to completely bypass the wizard and configure the device myself, through the regular OpenWRT systems (like LuCI or SSH) if I needed to.
Notwithstanding the antenna connectors themselves, the hardware is nice. I ordered the black metal case, and I must admit I love the many LED lights in the front. It is especially useful to have color changes in the reset procedure: no more guessing what state the device is in or if I pressed the reset button long enough. The LEDs can also be dimmed to reduce the glare that our electronic devices produce.
All this comes at a price, however: at $250 USD, it is a much higher price tag than common home routers, which typically go for around $50. Furthermore, it may be difficult to actually get the device, because no orders are being accepted on the Indiegogo site after October 31. The Turris team doesn't actually want to deal with retail sales and has now delegated retail sales to other stores, which are currently limited to European deliveries.
A nice device to help fight off the IoT apocalypse
It seems there isn't a week that goes by these days without a record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Those attacks are more and more caused by home routers, webcams, and "Internet of Things" (IoT) devices. In that context, the Omnia sets a high bar for how devices should be built but also how they should be operated. Omnia routers are automatically upgraded on a nightly basis and, by default, do not provide telnet or SSH ports to run arbitrary code. There is the password-less wizard that starts up on install, but it forces the user to chose a password in order to complete the configuration.
Both the hardware and software of the Omnia are free and open. The automatic update's EULA explicitly states that the software provided by CZ.NIC "will be released under a free software licence" (and it has been, as mentioned earlier). This makes the machine much easier to audit by someone looking for possible flaws, say for example a customs official looking to approve the import in the eventual case where IoT devices end up being regulated. But it also makes the device itself more secure. One of the problems with these kinds of devices is "bit rot": they have known vulnerabilities that are not fixed in a timely manner, if at all. While it would be trivial for an attacker to disable the Omnia's auto-update mechanisms, the point is not to counterattack, but to prevent attacks on known vulnerabilities.
The CZ.NIC folks take it a step further and encourage users to actively participate in a monitoring effort to document such attacks. For example, the Omnia can run a honeypot to lure attackers into divulging their presence. The Omnia also runs an elaborate data collection program, where routers report malicious activity to a central server that collects information about traffic flows, blocked packets, bandwidth usage, and activity from a predefined list of malicious addresses. The exact data collected is specified in another EULA that is currently only available to users logged in at the Turris web site. That data can then be turned into tweaked firewall rules to protect the overall network, which the Turris project calls a distributed adaptive firewall. Users need to explicitly opt-in to the monitoring system by registering on a portal using their email address.
Turris devices also feature the Majordomo software (not to be confused with the venerable mailing list software) that can also monitor devices in your home and identify hostile traffic, potentially leading users to take responsibility over the actions of their own devices. This, in turn, could lead users to trickle complaints back up to the manufacturers that could change their behavior. It turns out that some companies do care about their reputations and will issue recalls if their devices have significant enough issues.
It remains to be seen how effective the latter approach will be, however. In the meantime, the Omnia seems to be an excellent all-around server and router for even the most demanding home or small-office environments that is a great example for future competitors.
Comments (17 posted)
Page editor: Jonathan Corbet
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly EditionAfter two more states and the District of Columbia nullified the marijuana prohibition regimes of the United Nations and the federal government, the UN blasted the move as not being “compatible” with what the dictator-dominated organization likes to describe as “international law.” The UN’s drug czars said the same thing after Colorado and Washington State nullified federal statutes and UN agreements in 2012, when voters in those states became the first in America to end the decades-old ban on the controversial substance. The UN even called on Obama to quash the measures in defiance of the U.S. Constitution and the will of voters.
However, for now at least, the widely ridiculed UN still has no power to enforce its demands even if they were legitimate. Beyond that, legal analysts and UN critics said the real issue is not marijuana or even prohibition. Instead, it is the ongoing and increasingly aggressive attacks on the U.S. Constitution and the accelerating inference in the domestic affairs of the United States by an international body dominated by autocracies. Regardless of one’s views on marijuana, then, the UN has exactly zero business meddling in the decisions and governance of the American people.
The fact that the UN is already deeply unpopular in the United States and has no authority here, though, does not mean its legions of overpaid bureaucrats plan to allow states to brazenly defy global prohibition without speaking out. “I don't see how [ending marijuana prohibition] can be compatible with existing [UN drug] conventions,” complained former Soviet diplomat Yury Fedotov, who currently serves as executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). “[O]f course, such laws fall out of line with the demands of these conventions.”
Fedotov said the UN “Commission on Narcotic Drugs,” another globalist bureaucracy, shared his views. Speaking to reporters, the UN drug czar and former operative for the brutal communist regime ruling the Soviet Union said it appeared to be part of a growing trend that the UN was monitoring. Asked whether there was anything the agency he runs could do about it, however, Reuters reported that Fedotov promised merely to “raise the problem” with Obama’s State Department and other UN outfits next week.
As The New American reported last month, the rabidly pro-UN Obama administration’s State Department has already been begging the UN for a “flexible interpretation” of its controversial drug regime. “Things have changed since 1961,” said William Brownfield, the assistant secretary at the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. “We must have enough flexibility to allow us to incorporate those changes into our policies.” Some analysts say the U.S. government will likely be forced to withdraw from the UN drug regime, which considers the Islamic dictatorship in Iran to be a stellar example of enforcing prohibition.
Attorney General Eric Holder, meanwhile, acknowledged in congressional testimony this year that the federal government does not necessarily have the power to coerce states into criminalizing substances or anything else. The admission was celebrated as obvious by proponents of the Constitution, states’ rights, and state-level nullification of unconstitutional statutes — even among many who believe marijuana prohibition should continue. Of course, despite all of the huffing and puffing, the UN has even less business interfering with the decisions of state governments and voters than Holder does.
The latest round of UN denunciations came after midterm-election voters in Alaska, Oregon, and Washington, D.C., joined Colorado and Washington State in completely overturning marijuana prohibition — even for recreational use. Due to unconstitutional federal statutes and regulations purporting to criminalize the plant nationwide, the move was widely viewed as an example of nullification. Other states have nullified everything from UN Agenda 21 to unconstitutional federal attacks on gun rights.
About half of the states so far have also nullified U.S. statutes against the use of medical marijuana, with more expected to do the same in the years to come as the trend spreads. Other states have decriminalized possession of the plant but stopped short of full legalization. As nullification of unconstitutional federal decrees surges in prominence and legitimacy, experts expect the trends to continue on mairjuana and a broad range of other issues.
In addition to unconstitutional federal prohibition, a series of decades-old unconstitutional agreements by the UN and its largely autocratic member regimes also purports to prohibit the substance around the globe. However, because the federal government has no constitutional power to ban substances — that is why alcohol prohibition, for example, required an amendment to the Constitution — the U.S. government cannot legitimately expand its authority merely by signing a UN treaty. This was made clear by the Founding Fathers and even the Supreme Court more recently. Still, the UN has been slamming the developments for years.
As The New American reported in 2012, in response to decisions by voters in Colorado and Washington State, UN International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) boss Raymond Yans called on Holder to ignore state laws, the U.S. Constitution, and the will of voters by “challenging” the successful referendums. “These developments are in violation of the international drug control treaties, and pose a great threat to public health and the well-being of society far beyond those states,” argued the UN’s Yans. Holder never did, perhaps sensing an impending defeat in court, or perhaps due to the administration’s own tacit support for the marijuana trends.
The next year, when the South American nation of Uruguay ended marijuana prohibition, the UN drug bureaucrats similarly went into a frenzy, denouncing the country for defying the global drug war without UN permission. “Just as illicit drugs are everyone’s shared responsibility, there is a need for each country to work closely together and to jointly agree on the way forward for dealing with this global challenge,” Fedetov complained in a statement cited on the UN “News” Center.
But for critics, the issue of UN interference in domestic affairs goes far beyond marijuana. “The UN is notorious for authoring and flogging treaties that address everything from free speech to gender equality, but the thing they’re best at is ignoring state sovereignty as it is defined in the Constitution,” observed American attorney Amy Miller at Legal Insurrection. “Their premise is that there exists an international norm that the states are flaunting, and it’s the administration’s job to get those states in line with the prescribed norm.”
The UN’s outlandish and increasingly aggressive efforts to dictate policy in the United States are the real problem here, she continued. “Whether you support legalization or not, this issue is a hill to die on,” Miller concluded. “If it were just about pot, I’d say we should ignore the UN and let voters choose to either welcome or reject their new stoner overlords; but this isn’t just about pot. This is about an international organization attempting to pierce the protection of the Constitution and insert itself into state-level governance.”
“That’s the stuff downfalls are made of,” she added.
Other critics of the UN’s anti-American |
ky became unavailable and I was introduced to Phil Foglietta by Ed Savitz & Jerry Sandusky. Foglietta was introduced to us as Coach Phil who coached youth football in NYC. Foglietta agreed to pay $200.00 for child sex and followed us back to a Philadelphia hotel, myself (sic)ad another child prostitute then engaged coach Phil in child sex.'
Though Bucceroni says he never enrolled in the Second Mile due to an altercation between himself and Savitz, his accusations link Sandusky to well beyond the reach of just his own State College confines.
There are many more details to the story not pertaining to Sandusky which you can check out over at the NYDN, but you might be just as tired of all of this as we are.
[NY Daily News]
Photo via GettyProtesters calling for Travellers to be recognised as a minority ethnic group in Irish society in 2009
Protesters calling for Travellers to be recognised as a minority ethnic group in Irish society in 2009
THERE HAVE BEEN calls for a District Court judge to resign after he described Travellers as being “Neanderthal men… abiding by the laws of the jungle”.
Mr Justice Seamus Hughes, a former Fianna Fáil TD, is reported as criticising a defendant who appeared before Athlone District Court, saying:
Nobody has indicated it to me, but I suspect he comes from a certain ethnic background that would give him even more form given the type of behaviour in which some of them engage… As I’ve described it before, they are like Neanderthal men living in the long grass, abiding by the laws of the jungle.
Pavee Point, an advocacy group for Travellers, said that it would be difficult for Travellers to believe that they could get a fair trial under Judge Hughes following the comments.
“Judge Hughes should resign with immediate effect as he is bringing the judicial system into disrepute,” Pavee Point said in a statement condemning the comments.
“[His comments] reflect a prehistoric mind-set that has no place in modern Irish society. Everyone is entitled to a fair trial irrespective of your ethnic origin or the charges you face”.
The group called on the legal profession and the government to speak out about the issue and to identify ways to ensure that it does not happen again.
Judge Seamus Hughes previously made the the news in July 2011 when he said that recipients of social welfare should be given food vouchers to stop them from spending money on drink and drugs.
The judge also previously sentenced a man to climb Croagh Patrick for verbally assaulting a garda.
Originally from Mayo, Seamus Hughes served as a Fianna Fáil TD from 1992 to 1997.Rick Santorum has taken the lead nationally in the Republican presidential race for the first time, a new poll showed.
Less than a week after besting Romney in primary contests in three states, Rick Santorum has a 15-point lead on the former Massachusetts governor, according to a national poll released Saturday by Democratic firm Public Policy Polling. Recent polls had shown Romney up about 10 points on Newt Gingrich, his nearest rival.
ADVERTISEMENT
Santorum leads Mitt Romney 38 percent to 23 percent in the new poll, while Gingrich is in third place with 17 percent. Ron Paul comes in last with 13 percent.
This is the first major national poll to show Santorum in the lead. The closest he had come previously was after his surprise win in Iowa the first week of January, but even then, Romney performed 10 points better than Santorum nationally.
But Santorum has been riding a wave of momentum since his surprise performance on Tuesday, when he defeated the front-runner not only in Minnesota and Missouri, but also in Colorado, a supposed Romney stronghold. Santorum's campaign has said he has raised more than $2 million since Tuesday, and he was the biggest attraction on Saturday when about 10,000 activists packed the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington.
Some of Santorum's success in the new poll may be attributed to declining support for both Romney and Gingrich. Romney's favorability rating has declined substantially in PPP's polling and now stands at 44 percent — just one percentage point higher than the 43 percent who say they disapprove. Santorum remains highly popular, with 64 percent saying they approve and just 22 percent viewing him negatively. Gingrich's numbers are almost identical to those of Romney.
Santorum is also besting Romney and the others with key demographic groups, including self-described very conservative voters, Tea Party voters and evangelicals.
"It's important to keep in mind, though, that fewer than half of his voters are firmly committed to him," said Dean Debnam, the polling firm's president. "When he comes under attack in the coming days, his lead could evaporate just as quickly as it was created."
The survey of 656 Republican primary voters was conducted Feb. 9-10 using automated telephone interviews and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.If you are a writer, or just a human being who finds the iPhone Notes app particularly uninspired, a good notebook is key. I fall into the former category by trade, which also means I’ve been gifted a lot of notebooks in my day. (What better gift for a writer?) At present, I have a library of Moleskines, a calf-leather Smythson engraved with my initials (corporate gift), and a journal gold-calligraphed with Write (a present from my niece). They’re all completely blank.
This spring, a friend turned me on to bullet journaling — and Delfonics Rollbahn notebooks. I’m not diligent enough for bulleting, but the notebook was a revelation. Rollbahns come in four sizes (I like the large’s 5.8- by 7.2-inch dimensions because they’re small enough for a purse, but big enough to write in without getting crampy hands), and in more than a dozen colors, but the basics are remarkably consistent. All Rollbahns are spiral-bound, so they lie completely flat. Muji makes a great spiral-bound notebook, too, but the binding coil is too tiny to slide in even the slimmest pen. The Rollbahn’s spiral, on the other hand, is wide enough for even my Sharpie Extra Fine Point Permanent Markers and Marvy Uchida Le Pens.
The thing’s durable, too. Its strong coated-cardboard front won’t crease or crinkle. It can even be sponge-cleaned if, strictly hypothetically, a smoothie bowl were to leak in your bag. (A tight elastic band also ensures the pages remain sealed and protected.) The paper stock is thick enough that felt-tip pens don’t bleed through, but not so luxe to feel precious, like you’re jotting your Time Warner account number onto the Magna Carta. Every Rollbahn notebook also has five full-page plastic pockets in the back — one of those features you don’t know you need until you have it. I fill mine with everything from stamps to dry cleaning receipts to weird business cards from Uber drivers.The Wrestling Observer Newsletter is reporting that AXS TV and TV-Asahi have reached a major, multi-year agreement to continue airing New Japan Pro Wrestling on Friday nights.
Technically in it's second season, the third season will run from August 14 through December 11, with a break being taken over Thanksgiving weekend. There will also be a month's worth of programming featuring matches from this year's Wrestle Kingdom 9.
The Observer reports that both parties are thrilled with viewership thus far, as the program has averaged 200,000 viewers for a Friday night broadcast of shows that have sometimes been a year or two. The report also notes that the companies hope to reduce the lag between the matches actually happening and when they air.
The NJPW block will also likely be increased to two hours, with a repeat of the previous week's show airing at 8 pm, with a new edition running at 9.
We've reached out to AXS TV for comment, and will keep you updated on any additional information. This week we interviewed NJPW color commentator Josh Barnett, which will be up soon.
Source: Wrestling Observer Newsletter
Subscribe to The Wrestling Observer by clicking here. Each issue has coverage and analysis of all the major news, plus history pieces. New subscribers can also receive free classic issues.I make no secret - nor apology - for my obsession of American sports.
In fact, each and every off-season I try to visit the United States to catch some of my favourite sports in person.
The NFL in particular, was a love that grew on me once I was an adult. Before then I was devoted to the NBA, whilst March consumed my life as the madness of the NCAA basketball tournament rolled around.
The NFL is the most well-run, successful sporting competition in the world and it won another lifelong fan in me, thanks to its blend of on-field brilliance and competitiveness and off-field fan engagement and insightfulness.
Josh Jenkins: AFL should introduce bonus points
Like the NFL, what we have here in the AFL is a remarkably good product. We operate at a superior level to other sporting codes in the country, and almost all professional and amateur competitions use the AFL to measure themselves against. That is something we can be extremely proud of but as I have continually stated, just because we are onto a good thing, it does not mean we lay idle on trying to improve the game, its operations and the way we market and entertain our fans.
Like most AFL clubs, at the Crows we have a large portion of the playing and coaching group who watch the NFL (very few will be up at 3am watching four games at once like me however!) and a few who love the competitiveness of playing fantasy NFL even more than watching the games.
A major influence in sparking the interest of even the most casual fan is the Hard Knocks television series on HBO. For those who have never seen Hard Knocks, the NFL has an agreement with HBO which allows full, unprecedented, uncensored access to an NFL team as it prepares for its season. Cameras and crew members are given unlimited access to the team, its players, coaches, front office staff, family members and fans in an effort to provide those of us outside the walls of an NFL team with the day-to-day happenings of a team.
As viewers we see everything! From players being cut after just a few training sessions to NFL superstars playing family man and dressing their kids for a day at school. The only complaint I have against Hard Knocks is the fact that there are only five episodes each year.
Currently, we in the AFL world cannot create entertainment of that quality because clubs are very restrictive of what messages and information comes out of the club. To an extent that is fair enough - there are dozens of sponsors and partners the club must look after. But instead of looking at player commentary with extreme caution, AFL clubs should look at exposing players and their personalities as arguably the greatest tool in the ongoing chase of ultimate fan engagement.
What can the AFL learn from the NFL draft?
The key aspect that is missing from the AFL is access.
Access to AFL players and clubs is sheltered at best. Before every player steps in front of a camera he is buttered up with specific lines to use and what to look out for from the awaiting interviewers. Ask veteran footy journalists like Adelaide's Michelangelo Rucci or Croc Media's Craig Hutchison (an openly major supporter on the NFL-style access concept) what it is like today trying to get useful, entertaining information out of players who have been pre-warned about what not to say to reporters, and I'm sure they'll just shake their heads.
The beauty of Hard Knocks - and most of what the NFL makes available for its fans - is the raw footage of what actually happens within a sporting team. The in-house jokes between players, the conversations between coaches and players as well as insight into the daily lives of a professional footballers.
What I am proposing should not come as a shock and while I expect many players to be initially gun-shy, in the end it will be an incredibly positive shift in the way we view our favourite players and teams. Throw a microphone on a few different players and coaches and we can forever document, recall and view the game's most memorable moments.
A former athlete who benefitted remarkably from wearing a microphone is ex-Sydney and Adelaide forward Ryan Fitzgerald. Today, 'Fitzy' is the award-winning breakfast radio host and television personality who is the hilarious bloke-next-door who we would all love to buy a beer for. Fitzgerald was once protected by the insulated walls of an AFL club. He played 23 games with Sydney and Adelaide but injuries won that battle and his career was cut devastatingly short.
Michael Voss and Ryan Fitzgerald at the 2015 ASTRA Awards. Brendon Thorne/Getty Images for the ASTRA Awards
Unless you missed the phenomenon that was Big Brother in its early days, then you will know that the big fella actually rose to fame with the help of a microphone and camera being thrust upon him 24 hours per day for 83 days straight. Before that - and after his AFL career ended in 2002 - Fitzy tried his hand as a sales assistant at a printing company as well as a barman at his local South Adelaide Panthers pub.
While Fitzgerald did not win the battle for Big Brother's prize money, (he came fourth in the 2004 edition), he certainly won the war as the raw footage that was beamed back into Australia's lounge rooms ensured Fitzgerald instantly became 'Fitzy' to his new legion of adoring fans. Had we thrown on microphone on Fitzgerald when he was forging a footy career at the Swans, we may have learned about his fun-loving, hilarious ways years earlier and not needed a reality show to see his'real' side.
Thankfully, 'Fitzy' is a Crows fan and I was lucky enough to have a chat to him about his time in the Big Brother house and what being able to expose his real self did for his now-unstoppable media career. I had a bunch of questions lined up but typically, he just wanted to have a yarn about the Crows and whether we could beat the Eagles that upcoming weekend. As I said, he's the bloke next door who you simply have to love. So, once I remembered I was on the phone to help me construct a column, I asked him about my idea of throwing microphones on AFL players.
"In Big Brother I was wary for two weeks (of what I said), then I completely forgot about it," he said. "In the AFL, it has to get to a point where guys who are mic'd forget all about it and be their true self."
Fitzgerald's comments are spot on - unless players learn to just be themselves, the introduction of microphones would be a waste of time but just as he did in the Big Brother house, you eventually just be yourself - and the viewing public will either love you for that.... Or they won't...
Before I had the chance to raise it, 'Fitzy' made mention of Hard Knocks, saying "it's brilliant. It should be the preface for every sporting show in Australia. That is true raw emotion."
'Fitzy' noted, as only he could, "the mic in the Big Brother house taught my parents more about me in three months than they ever learned in 24 years of my life."
Recently, superstar Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers spoke about how he disliked being mic'd up and felt that it actually placed him at a competitive disadvantage. I am too far removed from the NFL to know whether he is correct in that opposing defences and coaches are gaining information from him wearing a mic or he just simply does not like wearing it. But what I will say is that the competitive authenticity should never be altered for entertainment purposes. In the end, the spirit of the contest is worth more than any microphone or camera.
So I hear what Rodgers is saying but what he fails to remember is that the microphones, added cameras and insightful access to teams is a major reasons why the NFL is the dominant force it is today. Therefore helping tip $22 million into Rodgers' pockets each year!
Kansas City wide receiver Eddie Kennison takes the camera during a Hard Knocks filming session in 2007. David Eulitt/Kansas City Star/MCT via Getty Images
Call me biased but NFL Films - an extension of the NFL Network - is the single greatest video archive in sporting history.
Think about any of the great moments in AFL history... then imagine if there had been a microphone fitted to a player's guernsey and a camera crew sneakily filming everything. Your favourite memory would no longer just be a memory - it would become immortalised with audio and video evidence, all documented for all to watch forever ever and a day.
On introduction, AFL clubs, players and officials will likely dismiss the introduction of microphones on its players and coaches. But, eventually, once we start producing some sensational and ever-lasting videos, everyone will soon be on board.
Especially once we all realise it will actually be putting money in the coffers of the league and its teams.IDW's new comic book fills in the gap between the finale of the original Fox series and this summer's miniseries revival.
Even before Jack Bauer returns to TV screens in Fox’s 24: Live Another Day, the former CTU agent will have his hands full in a new comic book series that picks up right where the final season of the original 24 left off.
IDW Publishing’s 24: Underground teams writer Ed Brisson with artist Michael Gaydos to tell the story of what happened between Bauer fleeing the country at the end of the hit show’s eighth season and the character’s reappearance in the upcoming miniseries, which begins May 5 on Fox.
STORY: ’24: Live Another Day’ London Set Revealed (Exclusive)
“Ed burst onto the comics scene with the sci-fi thriller Comeback, which was heavy on plot and adventure, a style that fits nicely with an established property such as 24,” editor Denton J. Tipton said about the writer, who has also written for Marvel’s covert Secret Avengers series. Tipton also praised Gaydos’ work, saying that his “draftsmanship and storytelling skills are second to none.”
24: Underground will be released in comic book stores and digitally in April.LSU offensive coordinator Cam Cameron locked up a commitment from Florida's Feleipe Franks last summer, and now he's ranked as the No. 1 dual-threat quarterback prospect in the country and just became the first gunslinger invited to this year's Elite 11 Finals, as well as this summer's Who's Who recruiting event The Opening, held annually in Beaverton, Oregon.
Feleipe Franks was one of the first commitments into LSU's 2016 class
With Franks turning plenty of heads over the weekend, and grabbing plenty of praise from not just recruiting analysts in attendance, but also former NFL quarterbacks and camp instructors Trent Dilfer and Mark Brunell, the Tigers appear to have one of the hottest names of the spring already on board - and working on recruiting other top targets to Baton Rouge.
On Monday morning, Franks joined ESPN104.5's Morning Drive with Culotta and The Prince, hosted by Jordy Culotta and Derek Ponamsky, to talk about a handful of topics, including his pledge to the Tigers, his relationship with Cameron and Les Miles and his plan to continue to recruit other talent into the 2016 class, which already sits at seven commitments and the No. 4 overall ranking.
Here's what Franks had to say...
On his experience at this past weekend's Orlando camp...
Franks: "It was great. There was a bunch of NFL experience over there in Central Florida this weekend. I learned a lot, and every quarterback did. That’s what my attitude was when I went out there, to get better every day. That’s my mindset when I step onto the field. There was a lot of great coaching and good people to meet, so it was a good experience.
"They all know what they are talking about. I am going to get all the coaching I can from each and every one of them. It will be a great experience going to the Elite 11 finals and soaking up all the coaching I can get. Then all the coaching I will receive from Coach Cameron, it’s going to be great for me across the board."
On competing in the Elite 11 Finals...
Franks: "It’s going to be a great experience because I love competition. Being able to go out there with five-star and four-star great quarterbacks and compete against them and learn their lifestyle will be a great experience."
On his relationship with Cameron and Miles...
Franks: "A great relationship, family-wise and coaching-wise. They are two of the best coaches in college, and I think could be in the NFL, also. Both have NFL experience. Anything you could ask for, they have it. They know every inch about the game. There is nothing more you can ask for."
On the strength of his verbal pledge to LSU...
Franks: "Every time that I am on campus, I get more and more impressed by what they have to offer. With LSU, there is no changing my decision or anything like that. I get more impressed every time I go to LSU. Fanbase-wise and all they have to offer academically, it’s a great place to be."
On recruiting other 2016 prospects to LSU...
Franks: "We have a bunch of great athletes in the class of 2016. Every time I go to LSU, whether it be at a camp or junior day, I am trying to get some players to hop on board and join Tiger Nation. There is a lot that they have to see in what LSU has to offer. I talk to them player-to-player and human-to-human and let them know how great it can be under the lights in Tiger Stadium.
"At The Opening, I will try to get everybody, honestly. Everyone I meet when I go out there. There will be a group of people that I will let know how good a place is LSU is. It’s going to be fun spreading the word on how great of a place LSU is."
On his relationship with the committed names already on board...
Franks: "It’s a great feeling just having all these guys to throw to and all these guys around me. Stephen Sullivan, Dee Anderson and Jamal Pettigrew are a bunch of great players and great people. That’s one thing I love about LSU. There is great people wherever you go. It’s going to be wonderful, and it’s going to be great in the long run."
On what Cameron expects from him at LSU...
Franks: "I would say I can open up the passing game a little more, but whatever they have to do with me when I get there, I am going to do. I am going to adjust my game to what they need. I am going there for them. And I will do the best at it. It will be a great experience once I get there doing whatever they need me to do in my role."
On what he hopes to improve on his senior season...
Franks: "There is always something to improve on at the quarterback position. For my senior year, I have improved a lot on leadership roles. But there is little things to work on like footwork, reading the defenses and accuracy. Those are the little things I am trying to improve on."
On playing football and baseball at LSU...
Franks: "It’s real important to me. I love the game of baseball. Having the opportunity to play baseball and football when I get to LSU is going to be a great opportunity for me doing both sports I love at a great place. It’s going to be a great opportunity.
"I play pitcher and outfield in baseball. (LSU baseball coach Paul Mainieri) has told me when I come to Baton Rouge that football will always come first, but when I am not on the football field, I can be over there on the baseball field practicing and trying to get a job. Both sports will be challenging, but it will also be fun."
On family in Louisiana...
Franks: "A lot of my dad’s family is from the Louisiana area, like Lake Charles and into Orange, Texas, right on the border. He has family in Baton Rouge, and all across Louisiana and Texas."
On committing to play in the U.S. Army All-American Game...
Franks: "It was an easy decision with my dad being in the military for 28 years to represent him in the Army All-American Game. It’s a great honor for me to represent my dad and the U.S. Army All-American Game. So, it’s all great."
Click here for the full audio interviewHere at ag-Grid, we are very excited to be able to offer support for Aurelia! Aurelia is a powerful and flexible framework that makes developing applications a breeze.
In this post, I won't be documenting how to use Aurelia in ag-Grid but rather on how we added support for Aurelia within the grid itself. For details on how to use Aurelia in ag-Grid, take a look at the ag-Grid Aurelia documentation.
AgGridAurelia
Following the model used by our Angular offering, we created a new Custom Component that wraps ag-Grid, passing events & properties back and forth between the Custom Component and the grid. Doing this keeps ag-Grid framework agnostic, a core design principle here at ag-Grid.
AgGridAurelia is the main Custom Component for Aurelia - it handles all core grid events and properties, as well as initial instantiation and removal.
@customElement('ag-grid-aurelia') // <slot> is required for @children to work. // https://github.com/aurelia/templating/issues/451#issuecomment-254206622 @inlineView(`<template><slot></slot></template>`) @autoinject() export class AgGridAurelia implements ComponentAttached, ComponentDetached {...
The grid definition (which we'll get to in a minute) consists of the parent selector ( ag-grid-aurelia ) and a number of child ag-grid-column's.
@children('ag-grid-column') public columns: AgGridColumn[] = [];
During the creation and initialisation phases, we dynamically create all available grid events, set all provided gridOptions, map supplied column definitions to colDefs and finally instantiate ag-Grid itself:
// create all available grid events // create all the events generically. this is done generically so that // if the list of grid events change, we don't need to change this code. ComponentUtil.EVENTS.forEach((eventName) => { //create an empty event (<any>this)[eventName] = () => { }; }); // copy supplied properties to gridOptions this.gridOptions = ComponentUtil.copyAttributesToGridOptions(this.gridOptions, this); this.gridParams = { globalEventListener: this.globalEventListener.bind(this), frameworkFactory: this.auFrameworkFactory }; // map supplied column definitions to expected colDefs if (this.columns && this.columns.length > 0) { this.gridOptions.columnDefs = this.columns.map((column: AgGridColumn) => { return column.toColDef(); }); } // instantiate ag-Grid with the supplied configuration new Grid(this._nativeElement, this.gridOptions, this.gridParams);
Note: this is an abridged version of what actually happens for brevity's sake.
Mapping Columns to Template Types
Each type of column is defined by a selector and then converted to a colDef that the grid understands. This is done in AgGridColumn :
@autoinject() export class AgGridColumn { @children('ag-grid-column') public childColumns:AgGridColumn[] = []; @child('ag-cell-template') public cellTemplate:AgCellTemplate; @child('ag-editor-template') public editorTemplate:AgEditorTemplate;... public toColDef():ColDef { let colDef:ColDef = this.createColDefFromGridColumn(); if (this.hasChildColumns()) { (<any>colDef)["children"] = this.getChildColDefs(this.childColumns); } if (this.cellTemplate) { colDef.cellRendererFramework = {template: this.cellTemplate.template}; delete (<any>colDef).cellTemplate; } if (this.editorTemplate) { colDef.editable = true; colDef.cellEditorFramework = {template: this.editorTemplate.template}; delete (<any>colDef).editorTemplate; }...
So for example, if we defined a column as follows:
<ag-grid-column header-name="Mood" field="mood" width.bind="250" editable.bind="true"> <ag-cell-template> <img width="20px" if.bind="params.value === 'Happy'" src="images/smiley.png"/> <img width="20px" if.bind="params.value!== 'Happy'" src="images/smiley-sad.png"/> </ag-cell-template> <ag-editor-template> <ag-mood-editor></ag-mood-editor> </ag-editor-template> </ag-grid-column>
This in turn woud be mapped to a column with a defined cell renderer and cell editor.
That's pretty much it! In time - and if there's sufficient interest - we'll look at being able to create Renderers, Editors and Filters from Components, in the same way that we do with Angular. Based on feedback we've received this declarative/markup driven definition works well for now.
Give it a go - Aurelia is a fun framework and now you can use it with the best Enterprise Data Grid around! Take a look at our live examples site. Feedback is always welcome!First thing’s first, Buddhism and Hinduism are VERY different religions. However the are grouped together here because three of the five flags that feature Buddhist symbols jointly feature Hinduism.
Since there are only five, I’ll comment on each one.
Nepal
Oh Nepal, you vexilogical wonder! It is the only non-quadrilateral national flag on Earth. Its two points represent the Himlayas or the two dominant religions, Hinduism and Buddhism. No one can decide. They also say that if you mirror it over the flag pole, you get the shape of a stupa! Kudos for being unique and doing your own thing. Though you make it difficult to fit you in a flag grid…
India
By law, the flag must be made of khadi, a type of silk made famous by Ghandi himself. In the one month I spent in India, I couldn’t find ONE Indian flag to buy for my collection. In my research for this article, I learned that it was only in 2002 where the flag was permitted for use by private citizens! The extremely specific flag code could be the reason I couldn’t find one. That, and most Indians have very little disposable income and probably wouldn’t waste it on a piece of cloth they couldn’t use anyway.
Cambodia
It’s like your national flag is a big marketing pitch. “Come to Cambodia and see our one tourist attraction!” No offense to Cambodia. (Actually, yes offense to Prime Minister Hun Sen. You are a very bad man. Shame on you.) The Angkor Wat is a very important historic site for all of humanity, no matter what religion you are. Go see it.
Me hanging out at the Angkor Wat
Bhutan
This is probably up there with the top most bad-ass flags on Earth. Sporting their national symbol, Druk the Thunder Dragon, and the colors of Tibetan Buddhism, this is a flag no collection should be without! Bhutan is also the world’s happiest nation! And it’s obvious why…their national symbol is a Thunder Dragon named Druk!
But the winner of the most Buddhist flag goes to…
Sri Lanka
The gold throughout represents Buddhism as well as the four Bo leaves representing the four main concepts of Buddhism: Mettā, Karuna, Mudita and Upekkha. Also, you can’t lose when you have an angry(?) lion-y-thing wielding a dagger.
Unless maybe you are DRUK THE THUNDER DRAGON!One of the great achievements of the last century was the effective elimination of many deadly communicable diseases by the widespread deployment of vaccines. I can still remember the fear that struck the hearts of every family in the early 1950s at the onset of another summer watch against polio, a disease whose spread has since been all but eliminated globally by the innovations of first the Salk (dead virus) and then the Sabin (live virus) vaccines.
A similar triumph occurred with the development of reliable vaccines for measles, a childhood disease that poses a serious threat to the health and life of those who become infected. Before the measles vaccine in 1963, the death rate from measles was close to twice that from polio. Fortunately, the new vaccine turned the situation around. In 1963 and 1964, there were over 800,000 cases of measles in the United States. By 1982, vaccination had largely eliminated the disease. Measles made a modest comeback around 1990, and then fell quiescent—until the recent outbreak of measles cases at Disneyland in California, which, as it spreads, puts the issue of vaccines back on the table.
The resurgence of measles is largely attributable to the confluence of two separate factors. On the one side there is a strong, if unacknowledged, effort on the part of some people to free ride off the vaccination of others. The self-interested calculations of many conscientious parents can run as follow: Of course, measles is a contagious disease, but it only spreads if there is a sufficiently large population of unvaccinated people in any given community. Taking any vaccine, including the measles vaccine, necessarily carries with it some risk of adverse outcomes. Vaccines could be impure or improperly administered, and even in the best of times, there is always a residual risk that the vaccine itself will transmit the very disease that it is supposed to prevent. So long as other individuals are vaccinated, the rational free rider decides that it pays not to vaccinate his or her own children. They receive the protection afforded by herd immunity, without subjecting their loved ones to the risks, however small, that vaccinations always present.
The second factor that reduces vaccination levels is the spread, sometimes deliberate, of misinformation that overstates vaccination risks. This sentiment is often fueled by powerful suspicions that drug companies are greedy and governments corrupt. This entire episode was fueled by fraudulent studies published by Dr. Andrew Wakefield in 1998 in Lancet magazine, which twelve years later the journal eventually retracted, but only after much of the damage was done. Those studies, which had been funded in part by plaintiffs’ lawyers suing vaccine manufacturers, purported to find a (nonexistent) link between vaccines that were manufactured using a mercury-based compound, Thimerosal, and autism. Unfortunately, Lancet’s forthright retraction of the article did not quell the uneasiness about vaccines in either Britain or the United States. Indeed, it may well have fueled populist concerns of an ever-wider conspiracy among establishment figures.
This combination of free-riding and misinformation may now be exacting a high toll, as the increased spread of measles puts a large population of unvaccinated persons at risk for the disease, no matter what their overall health. It is not surprising, therefore, that the anti-vaccine groups have now been put on the defensive in part by a recent lawsuit brought in California by Carl Krawitt on behalf of his six-year old son Rhett, who suffers from leukemia and therefore cannot safely take the vaccine.
Krawitt’s suit demands that his local school board require all students who can, but have not, been vaccinated to stay at home, so that Rhett can more safely attend the school. Legally, his suit is likely to founder on the shoals of modern administrative law, which vests a large and virtually unreviewable discretion in local health officials to decide whether this action is required. Yet by the same token, if the school board should deem the risk sufficient to call for those suspensions, it is equally unlikely that any parent who refuses to vaccinate their children for either religious or medical reasons could have any success in keeping them in school. Discretion is always a double-edged sword, so that the high level of official discretion that lets health officials allow unvaccinated students attend school also gives them authority to force those students to stay home.
The current struggles over sound vaccine policy raise a tension between public health on the one hand and competing versions of individual liberty on the other. This conflict was, if anything, more acute a century ago when infectious diseases cut a wide path for which vaccines and other treatments provided only a limited response. The main constitutional lens through which these issues were viewed at the time was one of police power. This all-pervasive notion has no explicit textual authorization in the Constitution. But a moment’s reflection makes it clear that the Constitution’s various provisions protecting individual liberty must at times give way to government control in response to health hazards.
From the earliest times, therefore, the police power has always been construed to allow public officials to take strong action against individuals who posed threats to the health of others by the spread of communicable diseases. In perhaps the most famous statement of this sort, Justice John Marshall Harlan, himself a champion of limited government, wrote in the 1905 case of Jacobson v. Massachusetts that while the Supreme Court had refrained from defining the limits of police power, it had “distinctly recognized the authority of a State to enact quarantine laws and ‘health laws of every description,’” and then proceeded to sustain a Cambridge Massachusetts compulsory vaccination statute against smallpox, a disease for which Edward Jenner had developed an effective vaccine as early as 1796.
The basic soundness of the constitutional recognition of a police power to deal with communicable diseases is beyond dispute. Even in a free state, quarantines are the only reliable remedy to protect the health of the public at large from the spread of disease. It is sheer fantasy to think that individuals made ill could bring private lawsuits for damages against the parties that infected them, or that persons exposed to imminent risk could obtain injunctive relief against the scores of persons who threaten to transmit disease. The transmission of disease involves hidden and complex interconnections between persons that could not be detected in litigation, even assuming that it could be brought in time, which it cannot. Public oversight should be able to achieve the desired end at a far lower cost.
In making his broad defense of the police power, Justice Harlan did not mean to eradicate the substantive protections otherwise afforded by the Constitution. Thus, only three years later in Adair v. United States, he struck down a mandatory collective bargaining statute on the ground that its interference with the contractual liberties of the employer and individual employees could not be justified on grounds of either health or safety.
That said, the categorical defense of compulsory vaccination statutes raises serious questions of its own. In Jacobson, the plaintiff had objected to taking the vaccine on the ground that his own prior medical history exposed him to serious risks, including death, if he was given the vaccination. It would be a mistake to assume that Jacobson resolved this case in favor of the state’s power to force vulnerable individuals to expose themselves to deadly risk, because the legal sanction under the Cambridge law was not vaccination itself, but only a five dollar fine for Jacobson’s refusal to be vaccinated—a trivial expense, which if sustained might reduce the number of individuals who will claim spurious health |
Left Party did best among the unemployed and pensioners.
Here’s a worrying data point: for both the SPD and the Left Party, in both Brandenburg and Thüringen, the best age group was those over 60+. The fact that it’s true for both parties makes it all the more worrying about their long-term future in these East-German states. Meanwhile, the best age group for the AfD in both states was those between 25 and 34.
History:After three hours, guards ended the riot by injecting pepper spray into the housing unit.
For three hours, the prisoners were in control. Inside the state’s maximum-security prison, 47 inmates broke apart tables, smashed computers, destroyed security cameras, and ripped out fire extinguishers in what would become one of the largest prison riots in recent state history.
Department of Correction officers at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley watched the rampage unfold on security cameras after retreating from the unit following a fistfight between inmates. With no authorities in control, the prisoners — many of them wearing masks made of white T-shirts — wrecked their cellblock as they armed themselves with makeshift knives and metal bars, officials said.
“They were getting ready for war,” Daniel J. Bennett, the state’s secretary of public safety and security, said Tuesday.
Advertisement
Finally, guards injected pepper spray into the unit, allowing them to reenter the cellblock and lock up the prisoners. Remarkably, no one was hurt. But Monday’s melee raised questions about why officers allowed the prisoners to destroy the cellblock for three hours.
Massachusetts Department of Correction
Get Metro Headlines in your inbox: The 10 top local news stories from metro Boston and around New England delivered daily. Sign Up Thank you for signing up! Sign up for more newsletters here
“I’m very happy that no one was injured but I cannot understand why our clients were left for three hours when, in fact, Souza-Baranowski is a heavily staffed facility and there are two other prisons nearby,” said Leslie Walker, executive director of Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts. “It’s a miracle nobody was injured or killed and I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why it took three hours to throw some pepper spray.”
State officials explained the three-hour period by saying that officers first attempted to defuse the standoff with line staff and crisis negotiators. Then, when the situation escalated, they needed to secure the prison, escort visitors and volunteers out of the building, count all 1,138 prisoners in the facility, mobilize special operations units from across the state, gather intelligence about what weapons the prisoners had, and prepare a team to enter in case violence broke out.
“No inmates or staff were seriously injured while restoring order to the institution,” said Christopher Fallon, a spokesman for the Department of Correction. “This is a validation of our approach to the situation and a testament to the professionalism of the responding officers.”
Bennett did not say if an underlying grievance might have sparked the riot. Walker said she has been unable to get answers because the prison was on lockdown and lawyers were unable to enter. The president of the correctional officers union did not respond to messages.
Advertisement
The melee began about 3:50 p.m. with a fistfight between two prisoners who are both high-ranking gang members, officials said.
Officers restrained one prisoner and ordered others on the hall back into their cells, following a protocol designed to ensure that small fights do not erupt into larger brawls between warring gangs, Bennett said. But the other prisoners refused to reenter their cells, he said, and the officers decided to leave the unit.
“They didn’t want to engage in violence,” Bennett said. “They tried to negotiate to get the prisoners to go back in the cells. When it was apparent the prisoners were not going back into the cells, the COs backed out of the unit to make sure no one got hurt.”
Having seized control of the unit, the prisoners trashed the hall with clothes and food, ripped out shower heads and ceiling tiles, and stormed the guards’ station, officials said. Video released by state officials Tuesday shows prisoners spraying a fire extinguisher, smashing computers on the floor, and bashing cellblock doors with a metal pipe. The white T-shirts wrapped around their faces were apparently intended to protect them from pepper spray, officials said.
Massachusetts Department of Correction
After summoning State Police, correctional officers “waited and they waited until they were ready,” Bennett said. Around 7 p.m., he said, the officers used pepper spray to bring the riot to an end. State officials would not disclose how the spray was deployed.
Advertisement
Officials said some of the prisoners may face criminal charges or disciplinary sanctions. Bennett declined to say if Aaron Hernandez, the former New England Patriots star serving a life sentence for murder at Souza-Baranowski, was involved in the melee.
Governor Charlie Baker expressed relief Tuesday that the rampage had ended without bloodshed.
“You can always replace damaged furniture and stuff like that,” he said. “It’s much harder to deal with situations and circumstances where someone gets hurt.”
He commended the guards for “maintaining their cool, following their protocol, and doing the things they did to make sure nobody got hurt.”
Walker said fistfights break out almost every day at Souza-Baranowski, but uprisings like this are rare. And when they do erupt, she said, officers do not usually let them continue for three hours.
“This is an aberration, and it smacks of concern about management,” she said. “The officers leaving might have been protocol, but leaving prisoners in there for three hours?”
In 2009, guards at Souza-Baranowski used tear gas to quickly quell a riot involving seven prisoners who tore off sprinkler heads and smashed the computer terminal that controls the prison doors, the Boston Herald reported at the time.
In 2001, another riot broke out when an inmate threw a food tray at an officer at the prison.
Inmates responded by biting, hitting, and kicking officers, injuring seven. Fifteen prisoners were transferred to other prisons, and eight were later charged with attacking the superintendent and 10 officers.
In past decades, larger and more violent revolts were more commonplace in Massachusetts’ prisons.
In 1955, four convicts at the state prison in Charlestown held five guards and six prisoners hostage for 85 hours. The captors surrendered only after a citizens’ committee promised to improve conditions in the state penal system.
In 1965, 320 inmates rampaged through the corridors of the state prison in Walpole after a power failure plunged the facility into darkness. Guards eventually drove the prisoners back into their cells with tear gas. The following year, four guards at the prison were stabbed in a riot involving 100 inmates.
Monday’s uprising came as state legislators mull a variety of proposals to overhaul the criminal justice system in Massachusetts. The solitary confinement system used to punish inmates at Souza-Baranowski and other prisons is one area potentially targeted for reform. Lawmakers say they may also adjust laws on bail, mandatory minimum sentences, parole eligibility, and community supervision. But there is also reluctance among some lawmakers who worry about being seen as soft on crime.
Massachusetts Department of Correction
Joshua Miller of the Globe staff contributed to this report. Michael Levenson can be reached at michael.levenson@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @mlevensonTwitter has made it clear they want to expand their live video offerings, and they showed just how dedicated they are to doing that this morning, announcing live streaming deals with 14 partners, including huge names like MLB, NFL, Live Nation, PGA, Bloomberg, WNBA, Viacom, Ben Silverman’s Propagate, and IMG Fashion.
The deals will add hundreds of hours of exclusive live content to the Twitter platform, and will cover things like concerts, sports, news, and general entertainment. And with the number of live shows planned for each week, the lineup is starting to rival standard television.
Company executives announced the news at the company’s inaugural Digital Content NewFronts presentation in New York. And it seems like Twitter may have been a little too excited, because they let it slip that they’re planning to launch a 24 hour news channel with Bloomberg. On that front, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey noted “We want to be the first place that anyone hears of anything going on that matters to them.”
The social media site touted the importance of live video, and talked about its ability to generate real time conversation with audiences in one place at one time, fostering a sense of community. Twitter streamed over 800 hours of live video from partners in the first quarter of 2017, a number that is set to rise with these new arrangements.
Thursday Night Football has been the site’s biggest live streaming endeavor to date, but they were recently outbid by Amazon for the rights to next season’s games.
Here’s a look at some of what Twitter has in the works for live video:
Entertainment
Propagate: A live daily show covering pop culture, music, TV, celebrity tweets, and top trending discussions
A live daily show covering pop culture, music, TV, celebrity tweets, and top trending discussions Live Nation: Concerts and original content from big names like the Zac Brown Band, Train, The Man, August Alsina, Portugal, and Marian Hill
Concerts and original content from big names like the Zac Brown Band, Train, The Man, August Alsina, Portugal, and Marian Hill Viacom: The MTV Video Music Awards, movie awards, and TV awards
The MTV Video Music Awards, movie awards, and TV awards IMG Fashion: Exclusive runway shows and behind the scenes Fashion Week content
Sports
MLB: A weekly live MLB game plus a new three hour once per week show with look ins and highlights, analyzing top moments as happen
A weekly live MLB game plus a new three hour once per week show with look ins and highlights, analyzing top moments as happen Stadium: A new 24 hour video network with exclusive live college sporting events mixed with highlights, classic games, and a daily studio show
A new 24 hour video network with exclusive live college sporting events mixed with highlights, classic games, and a daily studio show NFL: Live pregame video and on-demand highlights
Live pregame video and on-demand highlights WNBA: A live weekly regular season game
A live weekly regular season game The Players’ Tribune: A live show that will connect athletes directly with fans by letting them ask questions about topics on and off the field
A live show that will connect athletes directly with fans by letting them ask questions about topics on and off the field PGA: More than 70 hours of live competition coverage across 31 tournaments plus 360 degree video of the island hole at TPC Sawgrass during The Players Championship
NewsOutgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said he is confident that he has laid the groundwork for Democrats to nuke the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees if they win back the Senate in November.
Envisioning Hillary Clinton in the White House and Democrats controlling the Senate, Reid warned that if a Senate Republican minority block her Supreme Court nominee, he is confident the party won’t hesitate to change the filibuster rules again.
Such a move would be an extension of what Reid did in 2013 when he was still majority leader, eliminating filibusters (with a simple majority vote) on the President’s nominees. There was only one exception: the Supreme Court. As it stands now, Democrats still need 60 votes to move forward with a Supreme Court nominee.
Reid said, however, that could change.
“I really do believe that I have set the Senate so when I leave, we’re going to be able to get judges done with a majority. It takes only a simple majority anymore. And, it’s clear to me that if the Republicans try to filibuster another circuit court judge, but especially a Supreme Court justice, I’ve told ’em how and I’ve done it, not just talking about it. I did it in changing the rules of the Senate. It’ll have to be done again,” Reid told TPM in a wide-ranging interview about his time in the Senate and his legacy.
“They mess with the Supreme Court, it’ll be changed just like that in my opinion,” Reid said, snapping his fingers together. “So I’ve set that up. I feel very comfortable with that.”
Reid has previously warned that a rules change could be coming down the pike if Dems win back the Senate. In an August interview with the New York Times, Reid said that rules changes were possible in 2017 if Republicans continued to use the filibuster to widely block a Democratic agenda in the Senate. But Reid’s comments have renewed resonance now that it looks increasingly likely that Clinton will win the presidency and Democrats have a growing chance of taking control back of the Senate.
Reid won’t be the one in charge, however. He’s retiring. The decision to make rules changes would have to be led by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who will assume the role of majority leader if Democrats won in November.
Schumer’s office declined to comment on the future of rules changes in the Senate.
Questions surrounding what will happen to the Supreme Court have been central to the 2016 campaign after Republicans refused to move forward with President Barack Obama’s nominee to replace Justice Antonin Scalia. It’s been more than six months since Obama announced he was nominating Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court and Senate Republicans haven’t even held a hearing for him. Some GOP senators refused to meet with him.
Republicans had argued that it wasn’t fair Obama was trying to push forward a Supreme Court nominee in the final year of his presidency, but there are now signs that Republicans may continue to block a Democratic nominee for years to come.
In the wake of Republican nominee Donald Trump’s downward spiral, many down ballot Republicans have made the case that maintaining the Senate majority is vital to blocking Democrats from confirming liberal justices.
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) landed in hot water last week after he vowed on a radio program that the Senate would “be united against any Supreme Court nominee that Hillary Clinton, if she were president, would put up.”
The comment raised questions about whether Republicans might continue to block a SCOTUS nominee indefinitely under a Democratic president, even after President Barack Obama leaves office.
McCain, under pressure, backed off of his position slightly, but it reopened the question: What do Democrats do if Republicans continue to block any Democrat-appointed justice to the Supreme Court?
Reid’s answer is clear: You change the rules.An arrest warrant for well-known Melbourne comedian Greg Fleet has been issued after he failed to show up in court on charges of stealing from a friend to fund his heroin addiction - but he claims it was just a misunderstanding.
Mr Fleet was due to appear in court on Tuesday after his legal team applied for a diversion order after he was charged with stealing from Fairfax journalist and former housemate Wendy Squires.
Actor, comedian and writer Greg Fleet. Credit:Tony McDonough
Just months before he stole from Ms Squires he was the subject of a lengthy piece she wrote about his battle with heroin addiction, during which he claimed he was clean.
Had he shown up, he had a chance to have the magistrate accept his legal team's request for entry into a diversion program, which would have meant he avoided a criminal record."Barack Obama has elected more Republicans than any human being in the history of mankind," Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) asserted on Fox News on Wednesday night. And despite the hyperbole built into that, he might be right.
Cruz was reacting to a litany of numbers offered by host Sean Hannity detailing the change in Democratic fortunes since 2009. More Republican governors, more senators — and hundreds more state legislators.
We looked at that last figure in September, using data compiled by Carl Klarner, formerly of Indiana State University.
The change since 2009 can be seen below — that blue slide downward starting right around the time Obama came into office.
That's nearly 900 fewer Democrats — even before this week's elections.
So has Obama "elected more Republicans than any human being in the history of mankind?" Since the history of Republicans only goes back about 160 years, it makes the question a bit more manageable. And if we're talking raw counts, it's probably safe to say that more Republicans were elected during Obama's presidency than during any past presidency.
Using Klarner's data, we can see the change in state legislatures between the year of a president's inauguration and the year he left office.
It's not at all uncommon for a president's party to lose state legislative seats during his administration. Only Presidents Ford, Reagan and George H. W. Bush saw more of their own party elected than the opposition. And, at least through last year's elections, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was the biggest loser, having seen more than 1,000 Democrats gain power at the state level during his two terms.
Eisenhower's record is even worse if you consider the total number of legislators. There weren't as many people serving during Eisenhower's administrations, meaning that the losses during his eight years were a bigger net loss in Republican party density at the state level.
Since the number of states was even smaller in years past, it's safe to assume that Obama's administration has seen the biggest net gain of Republicans at the state level — and since it's in the hundreds, that means he's probably overseen the biggest gain in the number of Republicans overall. (Compiling data on the local level, of course, is prohibitive.)
But that doesn't answer the question of who elected them. It serves Cruz's political purposes to imply that those Republicans won because of Obama. On that first graph above, you'll notice that the Democratic decline followed a Democratic surge. Under President George W. Bush, Democrats picked up hundreds of seats — only to lose them again in the less favorable 2010 election. Democrats essentially overextended themselves after big wins in 2006 and 2008, winning close seats that were then lost during Obama's first term. Is that because of Obama? It's hard to say.
Cruz would have been safer if he'd said, "Barack Obama has overseen the election of more Republicans than any human being in the history of mankind." But that's admittedly not quite as punchy.Chip manufacturer giant Intel, achieved a big breakthrough in AI research and introduced first-of-its-kind self-learning chip named “Loihi” which is called neuromorphic chip. Announcement was made by Dr. Michael Mayberry (corporate vice president and managing director of Intel Labs) from Intel Corporation in an editorial yesterday.
Basically, Neuromorphic Engineering was founded by Carver Mead, a professor from California Institute Of Technology(CalTech) who was known for his foundational work in semiconductor design. The combination of chip expertise, physics and biology yielded an environment for new ideas. Then the idea was very simple but revolutionary.
Intel Introduced new test learning chip “Loihi”, that is capable to mimic the functions of brain by learning to operate from various mode of feedback from the environment. The best part is — chip doesn’t need to be trained in traditional way. Also, its very power efficient, uses the data to learn and make inferences. It also get smarter as time passes using data from various sources.
Dr. Michael Mayberry wrote in editorial —
The potential benefits from self-learning chips are limitless. One example provides a person’s heartbeat reading under various conditions – after jogging, following a meal or before going to bed – to a neuromorphic-based system that parses the data to determine a “normal” heartbeat. The system can then continuously monitor incoming heart data in order to flag patterns that do not match the “normal” pattern. The system could be personalized for any user.
This is a big breakthrough in AI chip designing which is just a first step in chip designing with 130,000 neurons and 130 million synapses using 14nm process technology.
Some of the major highlights are as follows (as given in editorial):
Fully asynchronous neuromorphic many core mesh that supports a wide range of sparse, hierarchical and recurrent neural network topologies with each neuron capable of communicating with thousands of other neurons.
Each neuromorphic core includes a learning engine that can be programmed to adapt network parameters during operation, supporting supervised, unsupervised, reinforcement and other learning paradigms.
Fabrication on Intel’s 14 nm process technology.
A total of 130,000 neurons and 130 million synapses.
Development and testing of several algorithms with high algorithmic efficiency for problems including path planning, constraint satisfaction, sparse coding, dictionary learning, and dynamic pattern learning and adaptation.KETCHUM, Idaho – Ketchum last week was awarded a still-rare designation by the International Dark Sky Association. The question is whether that designation, as a dark sky community, can be monetized through what is called astro-tourism.
The premise of astro-tourism is that people really do want to see Aquarius, Orion and other constellations that were readily visible to Biblical shepherds.
Before Ketchum, the International Dark Sky Association has made 15 other such community designations in the world, 11 of them in North America. They include Sedona and Flagstaff in Arizona and Westcliffe and Silver Cliff in Colorado.
The organization has also designated several dozen dark sky parks around the world, including Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho, Canyonlands National Park in Utah and Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico.
To be eligible for the designation, communities must adopt regulations that strongly discourage light pollution. Ketchum did that in 1999 with an ordinance that requires shielding of outdoor lighting fixtures and minimizes light output.
The city council in the last year adopted further regulations. Micah Austin, the director of community planning, says the new ordinance establishes a maximum of 2700 Kelvin or less in color temperature for all outdoor lighting. The new law also establishes a light-trespass matrix of light infiltrating across property lines. He says the new law also requires downlit and fully shielded lighting, removing some flexibility in the older law.
For the city to maintain its status, it must continue to protect the night sky through public outreach, including dark sky events.
Nearly 80 percent of people in North America are unable to see the Milky Way galaxy from where they live, the result of light pollution, most of it created in the latter half of the 20th century, according to the “New World Atlas of Artificial Sky Brightness,” by Fabio Falchi and others.
In Ketchum, the push toward slowing the encroachment of artificial lights was driven by Dr. Stephen Pauley. Now 77, he was an eye, nose and throat specialist who moved to Ketchum and Sun Valley in 1991. Friends call him Dr. Dark.
Speaking with a New York Times reporter in 2003, he described dark sky preservation as a matter primarily of education. “It does not mean living in darkness,” said Pauley. “It means shining light where it belongs, on the ground or pavement, not in someone’s eyes, window or up into a space where it is wasted.”
This year, talking with the Idaho Mountain Express, he compared the loss of the night sky to that of coral reefs in the ocean or ice in the Arctic.
He said he hopes Ketchum becomes a model for other cities in the West. “There has to be an understanding of the dark.”
Ketchum Mayor Nina Jonas said Pauley “has reminded us all about the wonders of the cosmos for more than two decades.”
An even more important designation may be forthcoming, possibly before the end of 2017. The town is at the core of a proposed International Dark Sky Reserve for central Idaho. It would be a first in the United States.
In Colorado, Westcliffe and Silver Cliff also hope to achieve that distinction, but the effort to adopt regulations was slowed by an effort to recall Custer County commissioners. The proposed restrictions are part of the disagreement.
John Barentine, program manager for the International Dark Sky Association, says that Ketchum’s application was more explicitly about driving tourism than other community applications.
“Like the others, it was partly about quality of life and preserving community character, but I think pretty clearly they hope to capitalize on people who will be coming to see the night sky from the to-be-established Reserve,” he tells Mountain Town News.
“‘Astrotourism’ is a bona fide motivator, particularly in the American West, driving establishment of not only protected areas like International Dark Sky Parks, but also so-called ‘Amenity West’ communities like Ketchum,” says Barentine.
Banff gives no shelter to elk from cougars, wolves
BANFF, Alberta – Four bull elk have taken the bullet within the townsite of Banff, in Banff National Park. Two had been aggressive around people, but two others had become what is known in Banff as “townies.”
Townies are those elk that stay in the town, because it’s safer than being out in the national park, where they’re more vulnerable to attacks by wolves and cougars. The problem, explained Bill Hunt, resource conservation manager for Banff National Park, is that bulls and then cows lingering in town result in harems, then even more elk. They then draw wolves and cougars, too.
Parks Canada is authorized to kill up to 20 elk in the town a year. In practice, it sometimes kills none and has never killed more than 14. The need for culling was much larger in the 1990s, when there were up to five elk attacks a year on people, including one on a toddler.
Whistler continues to ponder whether it’s just too successful
WHISTLER, B.C. – As Whistler continues to wonder whether it has been having too much success, Pique Newsmagazine reached out to an individual with impeccable qualifications: Al Raine.
Raine, who might be called British Columbia’s “godfather of skiing,” was among the first elected officials in Whistler. That was in the 1970s. He also was involved in the development of Blackcomb Mountain and Whistler Village.
Now mayor of Sun Peaks, the resort elsewhere in British Columbia, Raine thinks Whistler has become much larger even than the international ski destination that he envisioned. Even so, he is surprised by the province’s popularity.
“I sometimes look at the numbers from Whistler and some of the other resorts, and I have to pinch myself. It is beyond even my expectations.”
He thinks Whistler has outgrown its capacity. It was designed to need 36,000 bed units and an on-mountain capacity of 24,000 to 25,000 people.
“The resort has gone way beyond that now. They changed the formula used to count beds, If you used the formula that we used, Whistler would probably be over 70,000 pillows.
Raine says Whistler will face increased pressure as the Lower Mainland — Vancouver and adjoining areas — continues to grow. The population there is predicted to reach 3 million people by 2020. Tourism in British Columbia has increased by 5 percent a year.
“Ideally, had the world been perfect for British Columbia, we would have had one or two more resorts developed close to the Vancouver market so that Whistler wasn’t carrying the full load,” Raine told Pique.
But how do you decide what’s too much? In this, Raine answered as did several others contacted by Pique: “If a resort is not looking after its employees, the guest is going to feel that eventually and it’ll drive your business down,” he said. “You will never be a world-class destination if you are not a world-class community.”
In worrying about what constitutes too much, Whistler is far from alone. A phrase has been invented of late that captures the anxiety: overtourism.
Europe had many examples of backlashes against too many tourists this year: Tour buses were attacked and vandalized by groups of irate Barcelonans. Thousands of angry protestors lined the usually peaceful, romantic canals of Venice. And the Croatian seaside city of Dubrovnik started limiting the number of visitors entering its historic Old Town.
Utah examining whether to bid for 2026 Olympics
PARK CITY, Utah – Utah has started talking about whether it wants to host the Winter Olympics in 2026. The International Olympic Committee won’t make a decision until 2019, but an Olympic Exploratory Committee was seated in Utah recently, and it has a representative from the Park City Council. Salt Lake City hosted the Olympics in 2002, when about half the events were at Park City and its ski areas.
Can you get traffic to slow down for deer and moose?
JACKSON, Wyo. – The last year was the second worst on the record books for roadkill on roads in Teton County, an area also called Jackson Hole.
Dead in the 12-month period ending in April were at least 248 mule deer, 48 elk and 18 moose. Inside Teton National Park, there was more carnage, including 15 pronghorn and three grizzly bears.
If people drove slower, would there be fewer collisions with wildlife? Quite possibly, but getting traffic to slow down is not a matter as easy as posting new signs.
“The only thing I could say at this point is that when you post a new speed limit there’s no guarantee that you’ll change speeds, said Keith Compton, district engineer for the Wyoming Department of Transportation.
He told the Jackson Hole News& Guide that changing a speed limit can create other problems. “There’s some folks that will comply, and there’s some that will not, so you end up with speed disparities at times that can cause issues. And then enforcement in general is always a concern.”
One speed reduction from 45 to 35 mph beginning in 2012, resulted in no difference in the speeds that people drove. However, another speed reduction on the approach to Teton Village, at the base of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, coincided with and perhaps caused a significant reduction in collisions with moose.
The discussion was sparked by proposals by the Wildlife Foundation. The group sees a need for other solutions, such as overpasses and underpasses. However, the lowered speed limits may be the easiest to achieve.
Lots of suicides, but is social media to blame?
VAIL, Colo. – Eagle County has had 12 suicides so far this year, five times the national average. The majority have been women.
The county of 53,600 people includes Vail and the Eagle Valley but also a portion of the outlying communities from Aspen.
The suicide rate is 23 per 100,000, which compares to Colorado’s average rate of 23.3 in 2016 and the national rate of 13.3 in 2015, the Vail Daily reports.
The story did not describe whether suicide rates in Eagle County and elsewhere are increasing, but the comments of Chris Lindley, the Eagle County public health director, suggests that social media may be a factor, by isolating people instead of connecting them.
“As technology improves, it’s actually hurting us,” Lindley said. “It’s not helping us. Talking to someone via text message, there’s no real social connectiveness between two people. You can’t read their body language or anything like that.”
As temperatures rise, new attention to snowmaking
VAIL, Colo. – Another federal climate change study was released last week, and the news on the East Coast was that it was released at all, given the hostility of the Trump administration to climate science.
The New York Times says the report by 13 federal agencies broke little new ground but did find that more and more of the predicted impacts of global warming are now becoming a reality. Flooding in coastal cities is becoming more common, and wildfire seasons in the West continue to lengthen.
“The smoke from fires affects not only health,” the report says, “but visibility.”
In Colorado, climate scientist David Yates from the National Center for Atmospheric Research spoke recently at the Western Power Summit, an energy conference, about the difficulty of predicting climate change in rugged topography. Despite more powerful computers in Wyoming and elsewhere used to run computer models, the best models still only coarsely reflect the rugged, mountainous topography where ski resorts are located. As such, they cannot capture well mountain microclimates.
But, if summers get much hotter, winter days will still be short and without the energy that melts snow, he said. Yates predicted continued skiing in Colorado’s high, colder mountains, provided precipitation continues.
“I’d invest in Vail Resorts,” he joked, a nod to Colorado’s dominant skiing company. He also happened to be speaking in a hotel located adjacent to the corporate headquarters of Vail Resorts.
In Vail itself, 15-year-old Josephine Trueblood wrote to the Vail Daily to confide that as a sophomore at Vail Ski and Snowboard Academy, she skis a lot. She’s also concerned about the snowmaking operations on the Golden Peak race course on Vail Mountain
“With global warming happening, we will need to make more and more snow to keep up with the hotter temperature and (higher) snow levels,” she wrote. She said her research had found that Vail Resorts needed to invest in more energy-efficient snowmaking technology or switch to a renewable energy source.
Brian Rodine, environmental sustainability and compliance manager for Vail Resorts at Vail Mountain, responded that a “very efficient automated snowmaking system” has been put into place at Gold Peak. “The fan guns can measure the air temperature and only turn on when it is cold enough to make snow,” he wrote. This is coupled with a $500,000 high-efficiency air compressor.
Vail Resorts, as part of its Epic Promise program, he said, will invest $25 million in innovative energy-saving projects, such as low-energy snowmaking equipment.
The company also vowed to seek out 100 percent renewable energy by working with local electrical suppliers at its resorts.In a new television commercial for Nando's, a popular fast food chain, Evita Bezuidenhout, a kind of South African Dame Edna – but with more political bite – riffed on the changes in the country's politics. Bezuidenhout was "disappointed" to find only two similar sounding meal options for the same price, then deadpanned: "Why just A and C. What about option B? You know we all know you can't just have A and C."
Bezuidenhout's wish is coming true today as the Congress of the People, an opposition party born out of the upheavals in the ruling African National Congress in the last year or so, is officially launched in Bloemfontein, one of the country's nine provincial capitals.
The leaders of Cope, as the new party is already known, are high-level ANC dissidents unhappy with the forced resignation of Thabo Mbeki as the country's president in August and the ascendance of the ANC's trade union and Communist party allies. They are especially riled by the leadership of Jacob Zuma, the current ANC president (he unseated Mbeki for that post in December 2007) who is widely expected to become South Africa's next president when elections roll around in April or May 2009. Zuma is associated with corruption and ethic and moral lapses.
There is no reliable poll data yet on Cope's strength, but what most observers of post-apartheid South African politics note is that dissatisfaction with the ANC among the majority of South Africans (largely black and poor) is at an all-time high. Whether that will translate into substantial support for a new opposition party (with a not-so-new cast of characters), a drop in voter participation or something else is anyone's guess. That South African politics won't look the same after 2009 is for sure.
The results of last week's special byelections to fill vacant seats left empty by resignations or expulsions of councillors in the wake of the split in the ANC may provide some clues about voter choices. Though turnout was down (ranging between a high of 23% and a low of 8%), the results were interesting. Though a few byelections were held elsewhere in the country, the contest was largely confined to the Western Cape province, where 27 local government seats were up for grabs. Here Cope took 10 seats in its first run at electoral offices. The Democratic Alliance (DA), a party associated with white "liberalism", which controls the city of Cape Town (in coalition with smaller parties), took nine seats. The balance of seats were shared among the Independent Democrats – a party led by Patricia de Lille, a former Pan-Africanist Congress leader – and a number of other smaller parties.
It is true that the results should be approached with caution. Outside the Western Cape, the ANC comfortably held onto seats in KwaZulu-Natal (three seats, where in one instance the Inkatha Freedom party of Chief Gatsha Buthelezi narrowly beaten), Gauteng (two seats), Free State (two) and Northern Cape (one seat). But the byelections represent significant victories for Cope, a party with little campaign machinery in place that was formally launched only after those byelections.
The ANC may point out that it has historically been weak in the Western Cape (in the short history of democratic elections) due to the province's ethnic make up and the history of white and coloured racism. So the results may not be a surprise. The results may also be skewed since 12 of its candidates were barred from running because of late registrations with the electoral commission.
But a closer look at the Western Cape results, as a local newspaper reports, indicates interesting voter swings. The DA, a party usually associated with the white suburbs and growing voter support among the province's coloured majority, took four wards from the ANC in head-to-head contests with the ruling party and another five seats in traditional ANC strongholds. (The DA, incidentally, may still be swallowed by Cope's emergence as a viable opposition party to the ANC's dominance, especially among the white minority.)
As the events of the last two years in South Africa have proven, five months is a long time in South African politics. But my sense today is that the ANC will probably emerge victorious in 2009's general elections, though with a substantially reduced majority. Many of the ANC's problems are self-inflicted, but Cope will be the main reason for that decline. The ANC's reputation as custodians of democracy and freedom has been tarnished by the events of the last four years or so.
Cope has problems of its own. Most significantly, it is hamstrung by its perceived link to Mbeki, the perception that it is the party of the black "middle class" as opposed to representing the interests of South Africa's poor. Most observers still complain that Cope does not have any clear policies and that its main difference with the ANC is its demand that the country's president be elected directly (currently, the majority party gets to do that). Its support also has an ethnic edge to it.
Cope may triumph in a few provinces (two for sure; some predict that if the Eastern Cape goes to Cope they would probably govern through a coalition with the DA in the Western Cape, currently controlled by the ANC). The ANC is expected to hold onto KwaZulu-Natal (Zuma's home base) and will probably secure the |
Puerto Rico has been a US territory for more than 100 years and has been defined as a commonwealth since 1952. Puerto Ricans cannot vote for the US President or Congress but they have to obey federal laws. A Resident Commissioner represents Puerto Ricans in Congress but he cannot vote on legislation. This affects Puerto Ricans every day. An example of this is the Cabotage laws implanted in 1920 by the Jones Act. This law says that Puerto Ricans must use the U.S. Merchant Marine for the oceanic transportation of any goods bought by Puerto Rico. This is a problem because Puerto Rico, being an island, does not produce everything it consumes and is obliged in the use of the U.S. Merchant Marine. The U.S. Merchant Marine is one of the most expensive merchant marines in the world. It is estimated that if Puerto Ricans were not forced to use the U.S. Merchant Marine prices in all imported products would drop 40% and it would save Puerto Ricans $150 million in product export, this would lower the prices of the exported products and make Puerto Rico a more competitive country in the world market.
You could think that Puerto Rico has the Cabotage laws applied because it hasn’t defined their political status but this in not true because other US territories like the US Virgin Islands don’t have to comply with these laws. Another fact is that the Puerto Rican trade produces 25% of The U.S. Merchant Marine’s income.A new analysis issued on Thursday by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) shows that 2015 – the hottest year on record – confirmed that weather and climate-related disasters now dominate disaster trends linked to natural hazards.
The analysis found that 98.6 million people were affected by disasters in 2015, and that climate – often aided by a strong El Niño phenomenon – was a factor in 92 per cent of those events. The disasters having the greatest impact were the 32 major droughts recorded throughout the year, which amounted to more than double the 10-year annual average and affected 50.5 million people.
“The main message from this trends analysis is that reducing greenhouse gases and adapting to climate change is vital for countries seeking to reduce disaster risk now and in the future, said Robert Glasser, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction and head of UNISDR, in a press statement.
The analysis also found that the five countries hit by the highest number of disasters in 2015 are China, with 26 disasters; USA, with 22; India, with 19; Philippines, with 15; and Indonesia, with 11.
UNISDR noted that following droughts, floods had the second-greatest impact in 2015, with 152 floods affecting 27.5 million people and claiming 3,310 lives. This compares with the 10-year average of 5,938 deaths and 85.1 million people affected.
In addition, Asia and the Pacific in particular bore the brunt of the 90 storms reported this past year, which included 48 cyclone-strength storms, attributable to rising sea levels and sea surface temperatures. Globally, storms resulted in 996 deaths and affected 10.6 million people in 2015, compared with a 10-year average of 17,778 deaths and 34.9 million people affected.
“National disaster management agencies in Asia are doing good work in reducing death tolls from storms through early warnings and timely evacuations, especially in the Philippines, China, Japan and the small island states of the Pacific,” Mr. Glasser noted.
According to preliminary data from the Belgian-based Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), which also compiled the analysis, the death toll from 346 major reported disasters this past year was 22,773 – including 8,831 deaths from the Nepal earthquake.
Noting that the overall disaster mortality for 2015 was down on the 10-year average of 76,424 deaths, CRED Director Debarati Guha-Sapir emphasised that early warnings are having an impact in the case of storms.
“Further investment in this area is warranted by these numbers,” she said.
Ms. Guha-Sapir also noted that extreme temperatures – mostly heatwaves – were severe in 2015, leading to the hottest year on record and contributing to a combined total of 7,346 deaths that affected 1.2 million people, particularly in France, India and Pakistan. This compares with the 10-year average of 7,232 deaths and 8.7 million affected.
“Mortality from extreme temperatures are very under-estimated and need better evaluation of their impact,” she stressed.
Other statistics from the analysis for 2015 include: earthquakes and tsunamis killed 9,525 people (including Nepal) and affected 7.2 million; landslides, triggered by heavy rains, killed 1,369 people and affected 50,332; and wildfires took 66 lives and affected almost 495,000 people.Even as the Indonesian province considers moving the public floggings indoors, a highly conservative state in neighboring Malaysia, Kelantan, passed a law allowing it to become the first state in the country to hold public canings. Currently, caning in Malaysia is conducted in private, often in prison yards and away from crowds.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
On caning days in Aceh, huge crowds gather to watch as convicts are publicly beaten, an event resembling a medieval spectacle. Longtime critics of public caning said they were glad to hear that the punishment might be phased out.
“It will mean nobody will be publicly humiliated anymore,” said Ratna Sari, the head of Women’s Solidarity, Aceh, a progressive group. Still, she said, it was only a “small step forward” since canings will still be conducted, only out of sight.
Two men accused of having sex with each other were each sentenced in May to 85 lashes in public, the first case of people being punished for homosexuality in the province under a strict version of Shariah law
The sentences alarmed rights activists, who called the punishment a dangerous development in Aceh, a semiautonomous province on the northern tip of the island of Sumatra. One of Indonesia’s poorest provinces, a legacy of the three-decade civil war with Jakarta, it has received comparatively little investment from Jakarta-based conglomerates.
Mr. Irwandi, the pragmatic new governor, won office with a pledge to develop energy and infrastructure, and to ensure that Aceh’s residents benefited from their province’s natural resources, which include some of Indonesia’s largest oil reserves. Some Acehnese politicians worry that investors from Jakarta and abroad are unnerved by news media portrayals of Aceh as an austere land where moral infractions are strictly punished.
Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story The Interpreter Newsletter Understand the world with sharp insight and commentary on the major news stories of the week. 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 agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Recaptcha requires verification I'm not a robot reCAPTCHA Privacy - Terms Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. You are already subscribed to this email. View all New York Times newsletters. See Sample
Privacy Policy
Opt out or contact us anytime
The province, which was granted the right to establish Shariah after ending the brutal civil war with the government in 2005, has imposed a strict version of the legal code of Islam. Efforts to change how Shariah law is enforced are very controversial in Aceh. Hard-line Islamist groups have called on Mr. Joko not to interfere in the province’s affairs, and the new governor is under fire at home for consulting with Jakarta on local Shariah ordinances.
Still, this is not the first time that Mr. Irwandi has stood up to hard-line Islamists. In a previous stint as governor, from 2007 to 2012, he refused to sign into law a version of Shariah that mandated adulterers be stoned to death. Ultimately, Aceh’s Department of Shariah revised the criminal code and sent Parliament a new version without the provision on stoning.
In Malaysia on Wednesday, Kelantan’s legislature, which is controlled by the conservative Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, amended the state’s Shariah legal code to allow public punishment. Caning is a standard penalty in the country, meted out by both secular and Shariah courts.
Alia Affendy, the communications officer for Sisters in Islam, a group that advocates for a progressive version of Islam, denounced the new law. A news release from the organization referred to public caning as “a deplorable form of humiliation and shaming” that would build an “increasingly repressive environment.”
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
Ms. Alia said in an interview that the new law was part of a broader national effort by conservative groups to alter Malaysia’s legal code. “There is a big fundamentalist movement changing the law, not just at the state legislative level, but also at the federal level,” she said.
Ultraconservative Muslims often back public forms of punishment, which they believe have greater deterrent value. “Shariah punishments must be executed in public,” Kelantan’s deputy chief minister, Mohd Amar Nik Abdullah, told Bernama, a state news agency.
Malaysia, a multiethnic nation of 30 million people, has a population that is 60 percent Muslim, though the country has large Chinese and Indian minorities who tend not to be Muslim. Politicians have been debating how public whippings would affect the country’s image abroad, with Mohamed Nazri bin Abdul Aziz, the nation’s tourism and culture minister, telling the news media that the whippings would not have an effect on tourism because tourists rarely visit Kelantan anyway.Always respected VaTech program.
But I'm a longtime Metallica fan.
Use of "Enter Sandman" should stop until home dominance is restored.— Chris Fowler (@cbfowler) October 24, 2014
This is a joke. A joke the normally witty ESPN personality and broadcaster faulted on. My response: no. Home dominance does need to be restored. 6-5 in Lane and 2-4 against Power 5 teams at home since 2012 isn't good enough.
I asked Mark to record Enter Sandman from the field, and Bill to grab the ESPN feed. I had no intention of publishing them after the whoopin' Miami put on Tech. I normally nix GIFTORY and victory-like posts after losses. However, these are awesome and made me have a feel about this football team. I was numb until tonight. Beamer Co. and the entire athletic department asked Hokie Nation to show up Thursday, and you did.Old Cummer GO Station is a train and bus station in the GO Transit network located in the North York district of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is a stop on the Richmond Hill line train service and offers service to Union Station in downtown Toronto.[1]
In September 2004 construction began on a rehabilitated station building, providing improved lighting and providing accessible features into the station building.
Connecting transit [ edit ]
Finch Avenue bridges and the set of stairs to enter the railway station
Local transit services are provided by the Toronto Transit Commission, although the station is situated quite far from Finch Avenue or Leslie Street. Stairs and a footbridge across Finch Avenue provide pedestrian access to the south end of the station platform.
Passengers boarding TTC first, then again at the end of their GO Transit journey may use a TTC transfer for their second ride. At Old Cummer GO Station this applies to bus routes 39 Finch East, 42 Cummer, 51 Leslie and 939 Finch Express.[2]
The Canadian, VIA Rail's train between Vancouver and Toronto Union Station, passes through Old Cummer station but does not stop.
References [ edit ]
Media related to Old Cummer GO Station at Wikimedia CommonsRed Hot Chili Peppers bring 4 decades of hits to Oakland
Bass player Flea of Red Hot Chili Peppers performs at Madison Square Garden. Bass player Flea of Red Hot Chili Peppers performs at Madison Square Garden. Photo: Mike Coppola, Getty Images Photo: Mike Coppola, Getty Images Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close Red Hot Chili Peppers bring 4 decades of hits to Oakland 1 / 5 Back to Gallery
If you went by radio play alone, the Red Hot Chili Peppers would be the biggest band in the world. For some four decades, the shirtless Los Angeles quartet has been knocking out slap-bass heavy hits like “Give It Away,” “Californication” and “Can’t Stop” that have all got plenty of play on the airwaves over the years.
On its latest album, the group teamed up with producer Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton (Beck, Black Keys), who gives its West Coast brand of funk a psychedelic wash on “The Getaway.” The band will perform it alongside songs from its extensive catalog at Oracle Arena in Oakland on Sunday, March 12, with support from Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue.
— Aidin Vaziri
Red Hot Chili Peppers: 7:30 p.m. Sunday, March 12. $51.50-$104. Oracle Arena, 7000 Coliseum Way, Oakland. www.ticketmaster.comLatest News Arizona Sunshine PSVR Getting Free DLC Later This Summer By
Vertigo Games has announced today that Arizona Sunshine for PSVR will be getting some free downloadable content later on this summer. Another reason to stay indoor and avoid sunlight? We’ll take it.
The free DLC will include two additional Horde mode maps. The first will be set in the dark and dangerous Old Mine, while the second takes place in Undead Valley which is an old warehouse-turned-underground casino close to Las Vegas, Nevada. Any chance we’ll see The Killers make a cameo? Probably not…
There’s no specified release date as of yet, but we’ll keep you updated when we know more. In the mean time, have a gander at the patch notes for the recently released 1.02 update, and then check out what we make of the improvements to the PSVR Aim gunplay through here.
Source : Vertigo Games Press Release
Chris has been writing about gaming news for far too long, and now he’s doing it even more. A true PlayStation know-it-all, Chris has owned just about every Sony console that ever existed. Trophies are like crack to this fella. (Bronze trophies, that is – he only has one Platinum.) http://wwww.pureplaystation.com
Share this:
Tweet
WhatsAppNo, I haven’t suddenly turned into Martyn, I’m not going to perceive any bad news for the left as actually good news for the left. Just bear with me.
Over at Metro, Simon Wilson wrote a wonderful analysis of the election as a whole. In fact Simon Wilson has regularly been delivering the best analysis and commentary over this horrible election cycle, I recommend you go give him a read.
Anyway, he makes one point that I want to explore a little bit further:
The reason National is doing so well in the polls is that none of its potential coalition partners has any popular support at all. National hoovers up all the centre-right votes — largely because of the personal popularity of Key and partly because the public long stopped listening to anything Act or Peter Dunne says.
In today’s printed NBR column, Matthew Hooton opines that if you want a good proper right-wing Government then you should be double ticking ACT, not just picking David Seymour if you’re in Epsom, but picking ACT as your party vote too. And he’s right. And also if you want a representative Government then you should double tick ACT (unless you know, you’re not crazy right wing).
National party insiders have told me that after the 2008 election the inner sanctum of the National leadership (Key, Brownlee, English, Joyce) got together and decided that the perfect scenario for them would be a three-party parliament. National, Greens, Labour. That way they only needed to get one more vote than the other two combined. The Nats would forever be able to paint the Greens as the crazy fringe party and probably scare enough people into giving the Nats their vote. This is what I would call subverting representative democracy.
Whether or not you support the current model, it’s the best one we’ve tried so far (with apologies to Winston)(Churchill, not the awful one)(awfuller). Having just one party on the right means that anyone on the right will instinctively vote for that party, this will give us a less representative Parliament. And it means when National inevitably win an election with +50% they have free rein to commit us to any policies they want. There will be no checks and balances from coalition partners. No compromise needed. It will be pure and straight ideology. This is precisely what MMP was set up to avoid.
National didn’t get what they wanted. Instead they’re facing more parties. ACT and United Future are one-man-bands and that’s a shame, but they’re still there, the Greens have maintained their support, the Maori Party look like they’ll sneak back in and it seems Internet Mana will get one – if not more – MPs in the house. That still leaves us with two overwhelmingly larger parties.
A more mature MMP Government would be more – not fewer – parties of smaller size. That way we’d get away from this FPP mindset that seems pervasive – “Who will win? National or Labour? CUNLIFFE OR KEY?” – it would also get us away from Winston’s tired old bullshit about giving the largest party “first dibs” on going into coalition with him. That’s not how this is supposed to work. You’re supposed to team up with those parties that you are ideologically similar to. Not just buddy up with whomever is most likely to give you stuff.
If it isn’t in power, I think Labour should have a serious and frank period of reflection after the election. As far as I can see there are three factions to Labour. There’s the trendy urban libs who love teh gayz, the poor and being all progressive. There’s the Union faction who are very much preoccupied with workers’ rights and then there’s the “Waitakere Man” (sorry for using that term, but it really is appropriate). That’s the person who refers to a collective of gay people as a “gaggle” (forever missing out on coining a “giggle of gays”). They’re the sort of person who Labour was formed by, but now they’d probably vote National, or the Conservatives if they had a bit more money.
Are these three groups compatible under one banner? Do they really rally behind one idea? One vision? Since Helen left it would seem that they are unable to. So why not just give it up, stop pretending you’re one party. Split! That way each of your target demographics can vote for the party they really want to, and then there’d be an expectation that you’d naturally coalesce after an election and the biggest of the three of you could get the PM’s chair (or if the Greens get the biggest…). This is what I think a mature MMP parliament should look like.
Over on the right, National is pretending that they’re one tribe also. But again they are filled with factions, and they should split to ensure we get the most representative democracy possible. People wouldn’t be able to accuse politicians of being disengenuous. “Oh that John Key, he’s secretly a right wing extremist just enacting populist policies so he can get in.” No, I think Key would be in the more moderate section of the National Party if it split. But the far right ones would be able to stand up tall and proud and say “yes we are extreme right, but that’s who we are and we’re not ashamed.”
If you did this, I suspect you’d improve voter turn-out because everyone would have a party they could get behind – both left and right.
This can only improve things.
Anyway, I’m just one bloke, and frankly the world doesn’t really need another bloke telling the world how it should be run. Just having some ideas.Get the latest news and videos for this game daily, no spam, no fuss.
Today during a PAX West panel, 2K Games announced the first details on Mafia III's post-launch DLC. There will be free content as well as paid story expansions.
In terms of the free DLC, players can look forward to new outfits for main character Lincoln Clay. There will also be new weapons through the Judge, Jury, and Executioner pack, which comes out 30 days after the game launches. Additionally, Mafia III's post-launch DLC will include vehicle customization options like new wheels, personalized license plates, and paint jobs. There will be performance-boosters, too.
Also along the lines of cars, Mafia III will add free races that yield bonuses such as money and additional customization options for players who come out on top. There will be even more free DLC outside of all of this, 2K said in a blog post.
As for the story expansions, there will be multiple add-ons that are "wholly separate experiences that reveal more about Lincoln Clay's time in New Bordeaux."
2K teased, "As these stories will reveal, the Italian Mafia isn't the only threat Lincoln faces…"
Here is a rundown of Mafia III's three paid expansions, with descriptions written by 2K:
"Faster, Baby!"
Fast cars, dramatic chases, and stunt driving take center stage as Lincoln joins forces with his former flame, Roxy Laveau, to take down a corrupt Sheriff terrorizing Civil Rights activists on the outskirts of New Bordeaux.
"Sign of the Times"
A string of ritualistic killings has New Bordeaux on the edge of terror. At Father James' request, Lincoln agrees to hunt down the cult responsible, a quest that will take him from the dark heart of the old bayou to the drug-ridden counterculture of the inner city.
"Stones Unturned"
When a merciless rival resurfaces in New Bordeaux, Lincoln must join forces with CIA agent John Donovan to settle a blood feud that began in the war-torn jungles of Vietnam.
These story expansions will include "new activities" and more vehicles, weapons, outfits, and races based on their respective themes. To get a closer look at Mafia III's DLC, click through the images in the gallery above.
Teaser art for Sign of the Times
The three Mafia III expansions are included with the game's $30 DLC pass. You can buy them individually, but if you're sure you want all three, the season pass is the way to go. 2K says it will cost $40 to buy them individually.
A new trailer was also shown during the panel; it was captured by DualShockers and can be seen below.
Mafia III launches on October 7 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.CLOSE Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Thomas Homan said ICE will have "no choice" but to conduct arrests at neighborhoods and worksites. Chelcey Adami/The Californian/Wochit
Buy Photo San Juan Bautista resident Cristal Gonzalez defends DACA during a demonstration in Salinas on Tuesday. (Photo: Chelcey Adami)Buy Photo
With a 6-0 vote, the city council Tuesday evening declared Salinas a "Dreamers City" in support of the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program and called on Congress to enshrine the program in law.
All council members present voted for the non-binding proposal after hearing three people in the audience voice support for it and only one in opposition.
The resolution said the "Dreamers" are people in the country illegally whom the executive office shielded from deportation as long as they weren't criminals and had been brought here as children, according to the staff report.
More:
Monterey County officials denounce ICE's response to'sanctuary state' legislation
California becomes'sanctuary state' as governor signs bill
In Salinas, a protest over Trump’s decision to kill DACA
Many of them serve in the military or have college degrees, according to the resolution.
"California, including the city of Salinas, needs college-educated young men and women to fuel our economy and cannot afford to lose our dreamers to deportation," the resolution read.
In mid-September, the Monterey County Board of Supervisors also voted unanimously to pass a resolution that declares the county a “Dreamers County."
In early September, President Trump announced that he would end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program, spurring protests nationally and in Salinas.
CLOSE The program, better known as DACA, has helped nearly 800,000 young people remain in this country and receive work permits. Aaron Bedoya / USA Today Network
Read or Share this story: http://www.thecalifornian.com/story/news/2017/10/10/city-council-declares-salinas-dreamers-city/752736001/In South Korea, “Gangnam Style” isn’t just a Korean music video that’s gone viral; it’s a way of life.
Gangnam is a district south of the Han River that’s associated with moving up the social ladder. Some families start their ascent by putting their kids into expensive schools there.
Cheon Sun-kyoung, 48, moved with her family to Gangnam so that her teenage daughter could attend one of Seoul’s best private tutoring schools, also known as cram schools, to prepare for the national university entrance exam.
“To Korean mothers, living here in Gangnam means that you are sending your kids to the best schools and giving them more opportunities in life,” Cheon said. “It’s one of the most important things we can do for our children.”
But it comes at a price. Cheon and her husband had to take out a nearly $100,000 loan to pay the deposit for a new apartment. She does her grocery shopping in other, less pricey neighborhoods. She says the family can no longer save money.
Korea emerged from the financial crisis of 2008 largely unscathed, but some observers say this Gangnam style is prompting fears of an American-style debt crisis in South Korea.
Baek Seong-jin, a financial advisor who deals with personal bankruptcy, says the situation in Korea is similar to what’s happened in the United States. He says he has seen two to three times as many people declaring bankruptcy than he did a year ago.
Baek says inflation, a slumping real estate market, and high interest loans are all taking their toll. He points to figures showing that the average family in Korea spends one and a half times their disposable income. That’s a little more than what Americans were spending just before the start of the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008.
Tom Coyner, president of Soft Landing Consulting in Seoul, says South Koreans are racking up debt in similar ways.
“(They) take out six or more credit cards and once they’re maxed out, realizing they couldn’t pay off the balance, they started taking out loans,” Coyner said. “It’s constantly moving the debt around from credit card to credit card.”
It wasn’t that long ago that Korea was a nation of savers. But stagnant wages, a higher cost of living and a desire to spend in order to achieve a better social position are leaving families in the red.
Jeong Young-sik, an analyst at the Samsung Economic Research Institute in Seoul, says Korea’s overspending is the result of modern myths, for instance, that property values always goes up.
“Another myth is that education will increase their social position,” he said.
Jeong says real estate loans and private education are the main expenditures driving Korean households into debt. He says the best prescription now is some austerity to deal with the problem.
“The Korean government doesn’t want to increase government debt sharply,” he said. “The most important thing to solve household debt in South Korea is belt tightening.”
Cheon says her family has done some belt tightening since moving to Gangnam, but the sacrifice was worth it. She says her daughter is getting a better education and may be able to enroll in a top university.
Still, she is concerned that Korea’s over-spending will get the nation into trouble.
“The Korean economy seems to follow America’s, and when I speak to my friends in the U.S. and they tell me about how bad the situation is there, I get worried that we will face the same problems," she said.
Cheon says once her daughter gets out of high school, she plans to move the family out of Gangnam.CLEVELAND, Ohio - In some ways, it was a typical day for Phil Dawson at FirstEnergy Stadium.
The kicker did his job to perfection and his team left the building a loser.
He knew that feeling all too well during 14 seasons with the Browns. But Sunday was no ordinary afternoon on the blustery lakefront for Dawson, who returned for the first time since leaving via free agency following the 2012 season.
The Niners' specialist earned a standing ovation from the crowd after his former team honored him with a first-quarter video tribute. The 40-year-old fan favorite, who brought his wife and three kids with him, was clearly moved by the unexpected gesture.
As a camera beamed his sideline image onto the giant video boards above both end zones, Dawson tapped his heart in gratitude.
"I wanted the people to know how special it was to me and that all the love that was coming my way was mutual," Dawson said following the Browns' 24-10 win.
"I told people, 'When I'm an old man and my memory's starting to fade I hope the good Lord lets me remember today because it's about as good as it gets,'"
Dawson contributed a 44-yard field goal and an extra point.
The kicker arrived early to the stadium as he always did with the Browns and visited with old friends. It was an emotional homecoming for Dawson, who holds the franchise record for most field goals (305), and is second in scoring (1,271 points).
One of the NFL's most meticulous players admits he was caught off guard by the Browns' decision to honor him on the scoreboard.
"I figured after the little deal they did in pregame that was going to be it,' he said. "So I kind of exhaled and was trying to find my rhythm. Then, all of a sudden, boom. I'm trying not to break down on the sideline and zero in on kicking and paying attention to the wind. It was just hard to find that balance today.
"I don't think I have words to do it justice. I want to thank the Browns organization for doing that and the fans for making it so special."
Dawson offered kind words for young Browns kicker Travis Coons, who's 20-of-23 on field-goal attempts, but has had one blocked in each of his last three games.
"Missing kicks is never fun, but he's having a great year," Dawson said. "Way better than my first year here. Everybody just needs to remember that."
Dawson, a pending free agent, was asked if he'd consider returning to Cleveland. The Browns allowed him to walk despite a Pro Bowl season in 2012.
"I can't answer that right now," he said. "But it's a special, special place and I love it."They want a policy demanding professors call on female students first.
It used to be that women couldn’t speak until they were spoken to. But now, apparently, women often can’t speak even when they’re spoken to because they’ve been conditioned to believe they shouldn’t unless a man has spoken first.
At least that’s the opinion of the Canadian professors who want to make it official school policy that you have to call on female students first in class:
Advertisement
Advertisement
“I do think, in general, there are a lot of studies that indicate women, girls are socialized not to speak first.... And so to make a conscious rule, a deliberate rule that is explicit, that ‘no, men are not allowed to speak first,’ is certainly a strong way of addressing that issue,” said Jacqueline Warwick, a professor of musicology and former coordinator of the Gender and Women’s Studies Programs at Dalhousie University.
We have to say, okay, quiet down men! Let the little ladies have a turn before you start talking in your big scary man-voices! Will somebody please tell me how something this demeaning could be considered feminism?
Also — what if you didn’t study before that class because you, like every student sometimes does, had other things to do? First, you’re going to be specifically and publicly called out first based on your gender alone. And then, if you don’t answer, you’re not just letting down your teacher — you’re letting down your entire sex. Otherwise, it’s: “No one in the women’s group knows the answer, huh? Okay... mennnnnnn?!”
Advertisement
Believe it or not, it’s not so terrifying for me to speak that I need someone to cajole me into doing it. The only problem I ever had speaking up in class was that I would sometimes blurt things out before raising my hand. And yes — even before a dude had spoken first! I wish I could go back in time and tell my teachers that I deserved a badge of courage and not a detention.
Advertisement
Are there sexist professors out there with preconceived notions about women? Duh. I’m sure there are professors out there with preconceived notions about students with a variety of characteristics. Some don’t like weird haircuts, some don’t like piercings, some don’t like people who remind them of that girl who dumped them in the ’90s.
I’m sure some of my professors might have initially perceived me as a slacker because I wore pajama pants to class, just like another professor might have perceived all the dudes who wore suits as pricks.
Advertisement
Any situation that you walk into, people will look at you through the lens of their preconceived notions. That’s life. Everyone has been dealing with this every single day for all of history. Why does our “feminist” society seem to think for some reason that women can’t? That we need to go to these kinds of lengths so that women can actually be normal human beings capable of doing normal stuff like, you know, talking?
Advertisement
And it’s not just Canada. Remember that press conference when President Obama took questions from only women? How does consistently, publicly setting apart our sex as needing special treatment and prodding in any way signify that we are equal to men?
Had Obama called on me during that conference, I would have been offended. I’m not a “female reporter;” I’m a reporter. Saying that women need special accommodations to achieve the same things as men — and yes, “achieve” is a pretty strong word, seeing as what we are talking about here is speaking — is sexist, not feminist.
— Katherine Timpf is a reporter at National Review Online.Via concept art and sketches, we look at how developer Arkane envisaged one of the most visually spectacular games of the year
Think of the most impressive, memorable video games of the last 40 years and they tend to have one thing in common: unity of vision. From the sludgy corridors of Doom to the vast art deco chambers of Bioshock, great games take place in intricately realised worlds where every aspect – from armour to architecture – reflects a consistent visual theme.
As in the movie industry, the creation of detailed virtual worlds often involves the production of concept art – reams of sketches and paintings, based on early script drafts and discussions, fashioned to provide a target look for designers, artists and coders.
“The idea is to establish the big picture of the game, like a visual pitch, not only for artists and designers, but pretty much everyone on the team,” says Emmanuel Petit, lead visual designer at Arkane Studios. “I believe this helps in keeping us energised, and gives us something concrete and exciting to work towards.”
Creator of acclaimed first-person adventures Dishonored and Prey, Arkane produces some of the most fascinating, atmospheric and idiosyncratic worlds in the modern games industry. To find out how they are envisioned, we took a tour through a series of Prey concept sketches with Petit. The game, set aboard a space station beset by shape-shifting alien invaders, is filled with fascinating artefacts and architectural flourishes. This is how they came about.
The Lobby
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The reception of the Talos 1 space station. Photograph: Bethesda
This is the entrance lobby of the Talos 1 space station where the game takes place. According to the backstory, the Moon-orbiting craft was originally built in the 1960s but has been refitted many times since, most recently by the evil Transtar corporation.
It’s now 2032, and the grand hall reflects the station’s long history. “This is was one of the first places we started designing, which makes sense because the lobby concentrates and encompasses a lot of the station personality and acts a bit like an interior facade,” explains Petit.
Arkane’s Sébastien Mitton came up with the term Neo Deco to describe the look and feel, combining mid-20th century design and futuristic elements. “The space station building is inspired by Hugh Ferris’s concepts, art deco or neo art deco skyscrapers such as the South Ferry Plaza project, John Berkey paintings and early NASA spacecrafts,” says Petit.
At Arkane, concept art is produced throughout the whole development process, because the team continually comes up with new ideas, says Petit. Often new levels are documented and prototyped before concept art is produced to explore richer visual ideas.
“Before (artist) Fred Augis started painting it, most architecture, colours and some materials were already present, but lacked a bit of personality,” continues Petit. “He refined a lot of things like the lighting, materials and wear of textures and made the atmosphere smoky. We also have a team of level architects, who work together directly with the level designers to do a lot of the conceptual architecture work. This has a tremendous value to us, as it allows us to combine the beauty of a space and make sure it’s fun to play in it.”
As for specific influences behind the furnishings and interior styling, Petit cites a range of real-world influences. “The Lobby was inspired by a Spanish bank called Caja Granada,” he says. “Its monumental interior conveyed the feeling of power we were looking for. Over time it completely changed aesthetically, as we drew inspiration from Art Deco interiors such as the Viceroy hotel in New York, especially for the materials.
“Most of the furnishings are inspired by 60s interior design. For instance, the railings include some patterns inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s work; those spherical lights are inspired by a very famous Bauhaus lamp design by Wilhelm Wagenfeld. The sofas are a mix between a Chesterfield design and ‘traditional’ deco club chair. The idea was to reflect the personality of the individuals |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.